Some Questions Do Not Need Answers

Click, click, click.

Click, click, click.

The sound of my fingers clacking feverishly against a keyboard.

A sharp ache in the tendons as they rise and fall erratically beneath the skin.

Seated awkwardly on a swivel chair I bought off Amazon, my discounted throne from which I rail against my fellow humans, the world, God, and the pain they have caused me.

A throne I would be all too happy to trade for an old, splintered rocking chair somewhere deep in the countryside, where I’d sip steaming, honeyed tea and watch the sun drag itself into a bleeding sky.

But alas,

I am condemned to swivel and grovel before a screen—my master, my altar, my God.

Squinting at its harsh blue light, seeing reflected in its sickly artificial glow a life so beautiful it leaves me breathless and disturbed. 

A life worth sacrificing the best years of my twenties for. 

A life worth losing my mind for.

Maybe if I type fast enough, I can catch it.

Is that why I do it?

Why I type until my fingers cramp and my vision blurs?

Is that why I subject myself to other people’s confusion and poorly hidden disapproval whenever I tell them what I plan to do with my life?

When the answer is not, “I want to use my degree to become a police officer or a state trooper,” but rather, “I’m using college to buy time until I make it as a writer.”

They nod and smile in admiration when I tell them what they want to hear: 

that I plan to spend the next forty years of my fleeting life sitting in a patrol car on the side of the road, ticketing speeders and drunks, until I’ve whittled away enough of my soul to earn a pension and retire.

Ample time to brood over a life wasted in pursuit of anything other than the one thing I can’t live without.

But of all the things I could have done, everything I could still be, what on God’s green Earth made me want to become, of all things,

a writer?

I could have slithered my way into politics, standing before podiums like a well-dressed shark, promising to spare the minnows who vote for me, growing fat off the working class’s tax dollars.

I could have saved lives as a fireman, kicking down front doors, prying open crumpled, smoldering cars, beating back blazes like a knight fending off fire-breathing dragons, all while sporting a mean handlebar mustache.

Or I could have signed my life away as a deep-sea diver, descending into a pitch-black ocean trench with nothing but an oxygen tank strapped to my back and a prayer bubbling from my lips.

Of all the jobs in the world—

baker, barber, farmhand,

commercial fisherman, traveling salesman, glassblower,

war journalist, high school history teacher, astronaut, 

con artist, bank robber, land developer,

tree hugger, palm reader, President— 

I’ve chosen to bank my future on words in a Google Doc.

And I couldn’t even tell you why.

Why do I suck air into my lungs?

Why does my heart insist on pumping blood?

It was never a choice.

I choked on experience until life smacked me on the back, forcing me to cough it all up onto paper.

It was either write, or live as if I were already dead.

And I will continue to write in lecture halls and breakrooms, through bleak stretches of unemployment, before and after exchanging vows, while cradling my firstborn in one arm, a notebook tucked under the other, as I wait for Death in a nursing home with the other doomed geezers, and from my deathbed—dictating, spiraling, screaming, singing—writing about what I see and think and hear and taste and dream, what it all means, even if it amounts to absolutely nothing.

I don’t know why I write.

Only that some questions

do not need answers.