Strewn amongst the reasons

October 22nd, 2024

“Everything happens for a reason.”

I believed that. I had a trajectory. The child of Chinese immigrants who fought and sacrificed everything to hurl their son headlong into the stars. My job was to complete the launch, streamlining my dregs and drags so I might reach my, no our, rightful place. Dramatic, I know, but I believed in the drama. In the daytime, I squeezed loved out of my mother’s ambitious schedules for me, programmed to a 5 minute granularity. In the night, I dodged my father’s rage by wolfing down dinner and scurrying back to do homework, where it was safe. I blamed them for my misfortunes.

God, I was a prick back then. When girls didn’t like me back, I was baffled. “Can’t they see I’m a good investment?” I thought, 15 years old and 95% certain I was the Chosen One. I’m pretty sure I yanked my sister by the ears two grades ahead in math. So I don’t blame my parents. They were products of their environment and I was a product of them.

I spent so long ascribing to reason. I wouldn’t sleep at night because of reasons. Because I have not finished what I started, because I am not who was supposed to be, because I was owed more than I was given. Reading Wolfram’s On the Nature of Time today, I let myself drift into unreason. I stop trying to piece together the reasons and let the bricks remain strewn across the years. All the sacrifices and promises and plans…they’ve come to nothing. All that time has come to nothing and the driving purpose of causality has come undone.

“Everything happens.” The reasons were always mine alone.