Theoretically Nihilistic

Chloe Pingeon

I

The guy who works the night shift at the 7/11 down the street knows my friends and me by name because when we get tipsy we walk there and ask to see the neon box of disposable puff bars tucked behind the register. When I ask him his favorite flavor, he says he doesn’t smoke, he’s only fourteen. Instead, he works the night shift alone at 7/11, sorting through piles of fake ID’s and marketing overpriced nicotine to Boston College freshmen. I settle on strawberry ice cream and cotton candy. I also don’t smoke, I tell him. Only when I’m drunk. Also, it’s cheaper if you buy in bulk.

When I was ten years old, I would only eat sugar once a week because I was determined to live long enough for science to invent immortality. When I was sixteen, I didn’t eat all, although I’m not sure if the two are interconnected. I justify the puff bars because although they give you wrinkles and cancer, the idea of planning for longevity in a world that is almost inevitably set to burn up seems not only a little unrealistic but also bleak. My worst fear is existing in a state where I know I used to be extremely happy and now I’m not.

The environmental activism accounts I follow on Instagram like to talk about how we’ll all probably be dead by 2050. This is obviously depressing and awful but also slightly a relief in that it means the adverse health effects of puff bars and existential dread that I imagine would accompany the slow decline of my body might just not be applicable. The amount of time I usually keep a puff bar before my nihilism is overpowered by anxiety is approximately twelve hours and then I run it under the sink and it blinks and flickers out and seems suddenly horrific and repulsive and I bury what’s left of it in the trash.

II

Nihilism makes a lot of sense in theory. In theory, I am unequivocally nihilistic. The concept is calming. When I was ten years old I would go skiing for two hours every morning and I would go to gymnastics practice for three hours every night and my nickname at school was toothpick because I was skinny and I was unequivocally confident that I was better than everyone else. I remember a night in July at an ice cream shop near the Cape and my dad made an off-handed comment about how my vanilla milkshake had a lot of sugar in it and I got back in the car before my family and watched the sky over the parking lot fade into blue hour dusk and the ice cream tasted thick and I felt suddenly nauseated and I bolted from the car and poured the rest of the milkshake into the trash. Someone had told me that sugar caused diabetes and diabetes caused your body to break down and I was the opposite of a nihilist. The most important thing in the world was to have blue hour dusk in the parking lot forever and ever and I was never eating sugar again except for once a week when I would let myself eat whatever I wanted.

My desire for immortality faded quickly into a realization that when I made comments about my diet, people made comments about how skinny I was. This was appealing in a vague way in that I liked the attention, but it proved to be far less pressing motivation than my reckoning with mortality. I saw a movie in which someone was cryogenically frozen and brought back to life and I told my parents I would like to investigate this option. My dad told me a theory that reality is a simulation and another theory that we are all going to become robots someday. Both those concepts scared me more than the idea of simply dying and I started eating sugar again.

III

My mom is someone who thinks it’s morbid to think about how you’d want to die. In theory, I would like to die in a plane crash on the best day of my life because by that point the best day of your life has come and gone and in the time the plane crashed, you would have a reasonable but not excessive amount of time for reflection. One time I was on a plane from Albania to Berlin and it was maybe the best day of my life and they announced that the engine was overheating and I got drunk. Death is my mom’s least favorite topic of conversation. When asked anything pertaining to me as a teenager, my mom loves to tell an anecdote about how I lay on the floor doing situps after a cocktail party at our neighbor’s house and then called the host to confirm that my cocktail had been made with Splenda instead of real sugar and everyone thought I was insane. This is my least favorite topic of conversation.

The summer I was seventeen the doctor told me I was so skinny I might die and they might have to put me in a hospital and I might not have a say in the matter except that would only happen if I lost two more pounds. I decided not to go back to the doctor for a while and I put the news out of my head. I drove back to school after the doctor’s and it was lunch time and I actually had been hungry but now I was nauseous and so I went for a run and I was annoyed because all I wanted to do was run and I liked my routine and I didn’t like being told that it was killing me. I started eating again because a few weeks later I went to a party at my friend’s lake house and on the drive there it was muggy and we stopped for lunch and I got a diet coke and later I was sitting by the bonfire typing the calories of my drinks into my phone and some boy asked what I was doing and I realized that this was weird. To other people this would seem weird. And the next morning the hosts mom told me I was a twig and she could just snap me in half and she grabbed my waist and said look you can’t even wear pants without them falling off and I felt dizzy and I broke into the master bedroom to see if they had a scale and they did and I’d lost two pounds. The next time I went to the doctor I wore jeans and a sweater and a winter coat and I drank diet coke until I was about to throw up in the parking lot and the doctor asked me if I ate and I said yes and we left it at that.

IIII

At my high school graduation, I was disturbed because all my friends were crying and I was not. The stage was sticky and hot and claustrophobic and when they called my name, the head of school read some quote about my eye for beauty and vivacity for life that my English teacher had written and the air was suffocating and heavy and still and I had to close my eyes to stave off waves of nausea as I walked across the stage. Starving yourself is an extremely anti-nihilistic form of self destruction. It takes immense trust in the value of a moment to attempt to control it that tightly.

After my highschool graduation I went to college and after I hated college I moved to Eastern Europe and alone during a layover in the Heathrow airport I realized that time feels different when no one is expecting your arrival. Later, I I took a taxi past rows of brutalist buildings into the Jewish quarter of Budapest and I got a job at a hostel and they told time in military here and those numbers meant nothing to me and that night I was surprised when I was sitting under moonlight by the Danube River and the sky started to fade pink with sunrise because I hadn’t realized it could possibly be morning yet. After sunrise I walked along the river towards the hostel and the waters surface was glowing in hues of read and purple and I fell asleep in the staff room and when I woke up it was dark again and after that I lost track of time entirely. The clubs in Budapest spring out of abandoned buildings and winter gardens and if you stay till morning they set up farmers markets on the dance floors and if you wake up and it’s dark again then days start to become a blur and that blur starts to become all that matters. It’s a nice type of nihilism to be absorbed like that.

On my plane back from Europe, the engine was overheating and a row of fire trucks was waiting on the runway when we landed and I don’t believe in fate but first I thought ok maybe if I crash it’s because I’m not supposed to go home and next all I could do to control my panic was to get drunk. I don’t buy puff bars anymore because if I buy them then I smoke them and if I smoke them then I’m shaky and nauseous and the world feels foggy and the guilt I feel becomes debilitating, even if the world is probably ending. When I’m drunk I’ll use my friend’s nicotine and they ask why I don’t just buy my own and I say because I can’t. In the morning my throat feels thick with chemicals and I take deep breaths all day to make sure my lungs don’t hurt.

Chloe Pingeon is a student and writer based in Boston. Her work has been published in The Arts Fuse and Lithium Magazine among other publications. You can find her on Twitter @chloepingeon