thermodynamic slavery

I used to take comfort in tangible things, stuffed animals, my pets, and the dozens of assorted games I had for my Xbox 360. All of those are gone now. Stuffed animals, all of them, were accidentally tossed away. That negligence makes it worse, somehow, it's as if they were never important enough to warrant a second thought. I don’t even remember what most of them looked like to be honest, my mind just fills in the blank with a vague sense of weight in my arms soaking up anxiety and extolling joy upon a younger me. The fact that I can’t recall their faces feels like a betrayal on my part.


My cat Duma died, and then my rabbit Bunnicula died shortly after. Those actually hurt in a way that surprised me. I’d always assumed I was more detached than that, more rational. Hell, I hadn't cried in a decade until Duma died, not even at my own grandfather's funeral. Sometimes I still catch myself thinking that they were bound together somehow, that there was a tragic romantic sort of logic to the timing. They were inseparable in that way animals can be, orbiting each other constantly, loving and antagonistic in equal measure. I like to imagine they were a married couple in a previous life, the Hal and Lois kind.


The games went next. My mom threw out a chunk of them, and my oldest brother threw out the rest two years ago under the guise of “cleaning.” That word still irritates me. Cleaning implies improvement, order, a benefit of some kind. But this was just subtraction. To me, those games represented hours, years, entire eras of my life compressed into plastic cases. They were worlds I escaped into when reality was overwhelming. Losing them hit me in a different way. It eroded me, hollowed out something quietly.


Losing the objects I loved and relied upon made me realize that nothing in life is absolute. Nothing except entropy and time. Everything else is conditional. Nothing leaves for a reason, it just does.


Everything is up to rng. It is chance that I won the race, got born, and survived up until now to write this. It's chance that I didn’t get sick at the wrong time, didn’t step into traffic on the wrong day, didn’t make one decision slightly differently and end up somewhere else entirely. Time builds, and time takes.


Eight billion people, including me and whoever’s reading this, exist on this spinning blue globe right now, and all eight billion are slaves to thermodynamics. Every body decays. Every system breaks down. It's the only thing I have left to take comfort in.


It's an empty comfort, but a comfort nonetheless. I think it's better in a way, knowing that nothing matters except the end. Freeing almost, being able to blame something truly existential. The world is my oyster, as equally as it is yours, and the only absolute is the end.