by Austin Nickols.

An empty Word document fills my vision. My name is the only text on the page. For some reason I’m at a complete loss for words. The words I’m thinking flee from my tongue before I can force them onto the page. I’m afraid because at this moment my life seems futile. My hopes and dreams completely irrelevant and when I’m gone the only thing I’ll leave is a name.

That’s when I wonder: is that all I am? A name? Am I merely a social security number ready to be plucked out of high school and filed away into the monotony of cubicles and the white noise of keyboards?

I stand up and look out the window, my dog Toby lies on his side soaking up heat from the sun, completely content. All day he lies like that. other than to use the bathroom or to occasionally snap at a fly brave enough to fly by him. He wakes up, he eats and he sleeps and yet he is totally satisfied. He has no hunger to be remembered. No craving to make some monumental impact on the world. The only thing he’s concerned with is warmth his ebony fur absorbs.

I wish humanity was that simple, or at least that I could let it be. I wish that I could lay in the grass listening to cicada’s sing and watch the hummingbirds dance. I wish I could embrace the simplicity of life. But I know I can’t. There’s something forcing me to want more, to want to be something more.

I don’t know whether it’s pride, or fear. Pride because I’m too self-righteous to be anything less. Fear because I’m afraid of being nothing, of blending into the sidewalks and staplers and file cabinets and other people living repetitious lives. I’m afraid of being just another piece of machinery, a mechanism that society doesn’t need or even remember.

I sit back down still staring out the window and thinking about the ages old, cliché question. What is my purpose? Is my purpose to be a gear that simply meshes into place and isn’t remembered or is it to be a gear or even an entire mechanism that completely changes the schematic of the machine? I guess in the end it doesn’t really matters, all that really matters is what I do with the life I’m given not the things I have or the clothes I wear. It’s the things I do.

I look at the blank word document and start writing, because for the first time I know what I’m meant to do.