Gamesugar

I feel terminally exhausted lately.

In fact, the days seem to go by in a blur now, as if one morning I’m walking to school only catching half a conversation with friends and then suddenly waking to a mid-afternoon lecture on literature – and then before I really know what the context is, school is over for the day and I’m back at the dorm questioning whether I should try to study or crawl back into bed.

I’ve missed tennis practice three times in a row now. I joined the club as soon as the opportunity presented itself, and even though they meet three times a week I constantly seem to get derailed. I always mean to go, but someone or something always seems to need me those days. Just last week I got asked to join Student Council, and like usual I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I was already too busy.

For some reason I can never say no.

There’s a long weekend ahead and everyone wants to go to Tartarus tonight, but once again left the decision up to me. I know it’s important to go, to find out more about what is happening and help stop whatever is causing the strange events here. But then why is it so hard to keep that as my priority?

With everything else in my life, Tartarus seems like a surreal dream I’ve invented, one that exhausts me even further and makes the day to day even more difficult to navigate.

Tartarus, with its endlessly spiraling staircases and winding hallways filled with dark creations, sometimes feels more real than the real world, as strange as it sounds – as if I actually go through the motions of the everyday just to get to Tartarus, that I do things, meet new people, just to empower myself in that dark alternate dimension.

In some ways it feels like the only place where I have a real measure of control, where others listen to me and I can make some small difference. But surely my life couldn’t depend entirely on some randomly spiraling tower that has no end in sight, like climbing some mountain with no real peak just to say I’d done so? I want to believe Tartarus exists to help me appreciate the real world, to savor the time I’ve been given to learn, make friends, and touch the world around me.

Everyone relies on me to make decisions that seem so much larger than me and my problems.

Sometimes I want to let myself think that I’m special, but other times it feels like anyone could step into my life – that of all the decisions I make throughout the day, changing any of them wouldn’t make a radical difference, as if any stranger could successfully step in and navigate my life.

It’s like my life is some animated novel with a pre-determined beginning and end, though I know that sounds crazy.

Lately I think life can keep you so busy that you don’t have time to really question any of these things, or even how or why we go through life the way we do. Maybe I just feel a strange sense of déjà-vu lately, as if I’ve done most of this before, slightly different, but essentially the same.

Is it a question of whether it’s worth doing? Or would I want to do it again and again given the choice? For the moment, I don’t know if that’s a real choice we stand back and make, or something we simply get caught up in without realizing it.