text: A rubber ball bounced against the wall. Its sound scraped against my eardrums, worming its way into my soul. “Mm. You want me to stop?” My sister responded, her voice equal parts weary and tense. We both felt it, after all. The looming *feeling* of something that was just missing. “Mhm. Yeah. Hey...” Ah. That was what was missing. “Our names, huh?” My twin glanced back at me before her gaze returned to the red rubber ball. There was no surprise, no panic--just lethargy. “We should do something about that.” My sister stared at me, her body slumped against the couch. Her eyes were clouded over with an uncharacteristic haze, still in her pajamas. Not that I was any better. We’d both been hit hard by that noxious stimulant known as aimless anxiety. I leaned against the back of a simple metal dining chair as if to prepare myself. And yet I--and she--stayed still, either unwilling or unable to move. The clock ticked by, the relentless march of time a continuous and sharp reminder of our fretful inaction. To recover our names was something theoretically simple. A clap of the hands, a snap of the fingers, and the world would right itself. But we couldn’t. Not because of a lack of ability or even a lack of motivation. This was something we needed, after all. Our names were essential to our existence. Even still, to strain against the will of the world, even for something as pathetically easy as this, was somehow out of our reach. *Thunk, thunk. Thunk, thunk.* My sister returned to her mindless distraction. I watched the ball trace its path over and over and over again. Floor, wall, hand. Floor, wall, hand. *Thunk, thunk, smack--!* The ball whacked into my sister’s forehead. Grumbling, she snapped her fingers, warping the ball to her hands. “You could have restored our names right then and there.” It wasn’t an accusation; simply an observation. “I know.” An acknowledgment, with the underlying meaning coming through clear as day. *But I didn’t. And I won’t.* And what right did I have to reproach her? I could’ve done the task just as easily. Yet, I was faced with that same obfuscating inability to do so. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” A strained grin tugged at my sister’s face. “We could do anything. Anything! Yet here we are, idling in our apartment. Wasting our lives away.” What could I say to that? It was true, after all. A world of infinite possibilities lay before us, but we simply couldn’t grasp it with our own hands. At this moment, all we could do was idle our lives away. To play with a simple red rubber ball; to distract ourselves from the things that we needed to do. *** We got over it, eventually. We returned to our ordinary lives, writing and acting our little hearts out. But sometimes, we’d lose our names. Sometimes for a few hours. Sometimes for years at a time. But we always got over it. Not because it was easy or because we wanted to. Because the alternative would simply be unacceptable. *** WC: 523 Thank you for reading! All comments and feedback would be much appreciated. Inanitas Infinitatis: The futility/emptiness of infinity.