Order and chaos and order and chaos and order and chaos

would you guys hate me if i was one of those writers who put gifs in their essays

My triceps are sore from going to the gym at 9pm last night- the earliest I could go after a day that didn’t stop moving. I came home to a dark apartment around 10pm, past when my roommate had gone to sleep. I turned a light on in the kitchen and put two scoops of protein powder into a mug. There were no batteries in the plastic, shitty stirring machine I bought for $10 online. I spotted a gram scale, flipped it over, ripped the batteries out of its underside and inserted them into my stirring machine. As the machine buzzed and the vanilla almond milk got frothy, I took a long breath to reconcile the extreme sense of guilt: that in this exchange of batteries I had deeply violated these inanimate objects. 

I replaced the batteries and sat in bed, suddenly mourning the realization that it was too late to watch a movie if I wanted a solid night of sleep. I opted to read a book instead, sip from my mug, and embrace the discipline and coziness defining my, as the kids who are sometimes older than me would say, employed era. It’s giving snug. 

I started the chapter somewhere between 4-6 times, realizing over and over again that I wasn’t positive that I knew how to read. Pretty sure, but not positive. Two pages in, I saw that by putting the protein powder in the mug before the vanilla almond milk, there had formed a thick, moist sludge around the bottom of the protein shake. Call that protein cake. 

I finished one chapter before going back to the kitchen to fix my drink. I could not bring myself to traumatize the gram scale or the electric stirrer for a second time this evening, so I stirred the contents of the mug with a spoon and half drank, half chewed the remaining concoction. It tasted like defeat and vanilla, like a bad 10th birthday party. I did not pick the book back up again.

When I woke up this morning, for the first time in my life, I truly understood the difference between 7am and 8am. I hauled myself out of bed one limb at a time, and finally took a piece of early pandemic advice to put on real pants for my third day of WFH. These are the elements of structure to which I’ve assigned the task of improving my life. I can’t believe that in choosing this order, I feel such chaos. 

When I left college, I wanted so badly to divert from the expectations towards achievement that I felt I had been assigned by my academic and creative communities (in reality, I had chosen them for myself at every turn.) At this point, post-graduation, I deeply desired lethargy and indulgence and ease, whimsy and pleasure and a deconstructed existence moving in no particular direction. I’m grateful to have chosen that for a while, because I value being able to choose anything once, even my mistakes. 

Eventually, the indulgence turned to hedonism and the lethargy to existentialism, and I ferociously sought an escape from the freedom that began to feel like purgatory. But now I sit with stiff arms, a heart beating fast from the 8am coffee, frantically watching the incoming emails and text messages, the boxes on my to-do list multiplying like the couples I know who got married after high school. This is the order I desired, but right now I feel like sending it back. 

I fondly recall the aimless weeks of December, rolling out of bed at 11am with the sun nearly at its peak to watch world cup soccer alone in my living room. Leaving my apartment at 3pm to run in the field until sunset, because I didn’t have the money to fund a gym membership. I know the ways in which I felt trapped by the anxiety of my finances and the depression of my solitude, and I’ll never forget the freedom it came with.

The order that I romanticized gives way to some franticness, and the prior chaos presented me with the greatest sense of peace. The grass is always greener on the other side, a different ratio of blue to yellow. I’m wracking my brain to remember the rules of mixing paint: you can drop a dark color into a light one, and it drastically changes the hue. But if you drop a light color into a dark one, it often disappears entirely. I wonder now if the routine I’ve chosen is the dark color or the light one. To make my body grow, will I always need to chew some vanilla almond sludge?