Chloe Pingeon

Theoretically Nihilistic

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.