The incoherent thought process of feeling lost.

A pipe burst on my campus today. It happened directly next to my apartment, and I was able to watch as custodians swarmed around it like ants. A section of the grass bloated and swelled, and burst, a flood of swift moving water spreading to the surrounding area. The street slowly filled, and before long, a foot of water made the pipe's resting place into an island. The first repairmen appeared, scratching their heads at the mess and calling in backup on their radio. As more and more appeared, carefully parking where the ocean wouldn't get their shoes wet, I stood in my window and watched. For no apparent reason, observing the seen from my dark apartment filled me with an ocean of... something. I watched the leaves in the road swirl in the dark pool of murky water, combining with the red dirt that is so common in this place to create a river the color of blood. A perfect ribbon of ichor meandered down, tracing a line across the pavement. For a moment, it almost seemed to spell out my name. I felt a chill ripple down my body, and shuddered despite the temperature and my self control. The sight felt almost supernaturally grotesque to me in that moment, although I am aware that nothing was particularly unusual or disturbing about it. In a moment of paranoid self-protection, I shut the window and retreated to my bedroom, where I could sit in solitude and darkness, far away from that river of red, and this is where I type from now, uncomfortable and terrifyingly unable to justify my reaction. 

Upon reflection of the mundane sight, I can feel a significant memory clawing from my chest and into my mind. I am thinking of my uncle, a rather intelligent and wonderful man that sadly passed away almost three years ago in a horrible medical accident that, in a horrible twist of the universes irony, happened on my birthday, only hours before we were meant to meet up for a celebratory dinner. My uncle had been diabetic for most of his adult life, and as such, had a dialysis port. For some reason, which no medical professional has every been able to explain, it failed, and he bled to death in the arms of my mother. I mentioned the universal sense of irony surrounding this event because only a few years prior to my birth, his mother (my maternal grandmother) had also died, at the same age, on the same day, of an almost perfectly inverse accident (blood clot to the brain). It almost feels inevitable that someone from my generation in my family will die on that day at the age of 53. I'm counting down the years. Maybe it will be me? I will keep you all appraised on my status 34 years from now, although I have some doubts on whether SpaceHey will last, or the internet in general. Nothing is certain.

Something that has haunted me since this event, other than my own mind's over imagination causing me to live out the final moments of another person repeatedly and my mothers almost immediate health decline following it, has been the conditions that my uncle lived in. Despite having a psychology degree, he had absolutely no money. He worked in a minimum wage job, lived in a trailer that was falling apart around him, and would give everything he owned to others. The man would give you the clothes off his back if you even so much as looked at him. He was the most selfless person I have ever met, and while no one deserves to die like that, he definitely didn't. 

It makes me wonder about my own future. I am working on a degree that seems to make people think better of me, but I feel completely lost. What is the point of any of it? The people in my family that have worked all their life to get where I am trying to go, and have loved in the way that I am trying to love others, have been met with nothing but pain and suffering. I can vividly imagine my last moments, huddled in a horrible living condition, dying of something painful and horrible while my sister watches. Despite my attempts to shake off the feeling that I'm headed towards some unavoidable tragedy, it keeps oozing into my mind and covering everything I try to do in a blood-red grime that stains and spreads. 

For now, I will keep working. I will try to catch up to my studies, and in doing so, hopefully I will be too preoccupied to imagine all of the horrible ways that my life could end or my degree could turn out to be completely useless. I need to trust in the Great Cosmic Constant; "Things will continue to happen, at all times, even when I do not want them to. My life continues after mistakes and tragedies, and there will always be a way to survive, even if it is difficult." May a wave of optimism flow forth from the broken world and wash all my troubles away, if I could be so lucky.