I wanted so much.
Some of it was good wanting. I wanted to build things. I wanted to understand how a mechanism moves before I was allowed to touch it. I wanted to be the person in the room who had actually read the thing.
And some of it was just volume.
I wanted the grade and the internship and the title and the attention and the girlfriend, and I wanted them roughly in that order and roughly all at once, and if you had asked me why I would have given you a very good answer that was not the real one.
The real one was: I thought there was an amount that would do it. I thought somewhere out there was a quantity of achieved things that would finally make the low hum stop.
am i full?
not completely.but fuller than i have ever been.
A page crowded with everything I wanted, which empties as you scroll until one question is left: am I full? Not completely. But fuller than I have ever been.
the dog
We have a dog. I want to be careful here because dogs are better than people is a lazy thing to say and I don't believe it.
But watching her did something to me.
She has food. She has us. She gets scratched behind the ear. That is the entire inventory. And she is not coping with that — she is not making do — she genuinely appears to be at capacity. Full. Nothing pending.
And when I come home, she reacts like my return is the single largest event to have occurred in the universe since the last time I came home, which was Tuesday.
Then she lies down and puts her head on my foot.
she doesnt ask where i went. she just puts her head on my foot. like a period. like shes ending the sentence of my day.
the question I could not get out of
I am not saying be a dog. I am saying I could not answer her.
I could not explain, to myself, in a way that held up, why my list was so long and hers was so short and she was so obviously fine.
Question
How much is enough? Not rhetorically. Numerically. What is the actual number of achieved things at which the hum stops?
Fact
Every time I got one of the things on the list, the list got longer.
What I thought it meant
At the time I read that as ambition, and I was proud of it.
What I learned later
A system where the target moves every time you reach it is not ambition. In engineering we call that an unstable loop, and we fix it, because it will tear itself apart.
more. more. more. am i full? not completely. but fuller than i have ever been.
I want to be honest about where this chapter ends, which is: not resolved. I still want too much. I still catch myself pricing my own week in outputs.
But I did, somewhere in here, stop believing the arithmetic. I stopped believing that the number existed.
Which meant I had to start asking what I was actually missing.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.