What do we live for? Not the salvation found in a girl? Not the solace of another person?

I have lived for no reason at all. There was no worldly thing important to me, so I spent my waking hours idly in pursuit of happiness. My pleasures are pure and unadulterated and solitary: the comfort of my bed, a glass of ice water, the wind through my window, a song that knows what it means to live, words that make us more real than any picture. Everything else is just being distracted from the fact that I am alive.

I want someone who is as real to me as I am to myself. Everyone else disappears off the face of the earth at the end of the day. All the people I see and meet and work with during the day are allocated no care nor love when they are elsewhere. I mean that there is a fundamental difference between acquaintanceship and friendship.

I keep looking for someone who isn't absorbed by anything. Someone whose identity isn't defined by an activity or belief or interest or preference. Someone whose sense of self is independent of the things we fill our lives with. But I don't know how rare that kind of self-consciousness is. It is hard to find someone who can live life and then let go of it.

I never knew what to make of life. People run around, doing things, convinced of the value of their experiences. I never really understood how people motivate themselves. Everything that we want and do comes from somewhere deep in our person, supplanting logic, so deep that when an impulse arrives, we are hardly aware of its arrival. We seem to want things with nothing better than arbitrary reasons why, nothing more than the fact that we're human and alive.

I live this way, arbitrarily, conscious that I do things without care or attention to my actions. The only thing I have really ever paid attention to was this deep mystery of our subconscious. I contented myself with being amused, and eventually everything amused me.

Happiness is when people allow themselves to enjoy their state of being in a recursive pattern of indulgence in our lives. I suppose that for me, I have been happiest while singing a song. A song of the redemption found in another person. Or just something fun like particles and triangles and suns and experimental films. To me, the new Shins album sounds like night and Iron and Wine is like devotion and The Decemberists are wise and yearning and Andrew Bird is catharsis. The White Stripes are the essence of tired, desirous life, and I listen to other stuff too. I mean, what better place is there to be than in a song?

I'm looking for someone who wants someone who does every action with fundamental truth and beauty and who appreciates the bare immensities of life, not only mere physical pleasures but the instances of sublime found in a song and in a girl and life.

Yes, I'd like to meet someone. I am reminded of this by the ice rattling in my empty glass. I like to stay hydrated. One time, at four in the morning, I woke to the rain and went outside while it was still dark and stayed out under the streetlight with my umbrella, watching the puddles ripple in the orange light and breathing in the smell of rain. And you know that it's those moments that you want someone with you.

It's not like I absolutely need anyone. I can be happy alone. But everything is less satisfying alone. As humans, we have this instinctual need to express ourselves to other people. What else would make our hopes and worries and desires real? Anyways, what I want is someone I can tell everything to. I want to benefit someone with all the words I come up with. I want to find someone who can say things that make me feel all the great things about life when I need it most.

The only thing I can really offer is my life, myself in the broken hours between responsibilities. That's the essence of hanging out, right? To enjoy another's company. To make dinner together and talk about the same television shows. To enjoy a song together.

I have this opinion that in life, that nothing really matters. That ultimately, there are no objective reasons for why we do things. That's why people are so hard to understand. Our desires and emotions just come from within us, somewhere we can't see or examine or plead with. Ultimately, the best reason for anything we do is just that we want things. And I want someone to spend time with. Someone who is capable of seeing the assumptions that everyone else builds their entire lives upon, so that when I talk about things, it makes sense to her in the profound way and I feel like I'm validated. I also want someone to go see two dollar movies with at the theater.

I never really understood people. What do people do for fun? Why do people want other people? Sometimes it just seems like we're amusing ourselves to death, biding our time until we die. But that's really sad. It hinders the practical method of living life.

I don't know what other people look for. I don't expect life to become better merely by the addition of another human being. I don't need someone for emotional comfort. I'm used to both the harsh and pleasant experiences of life.

I've said before that talent is what you've spent your life doing. I've spent my life writing down the things that I've felt. I keep writing, hoping to say something worthwhile, something that someone else can care about, because for some reason, this is important to me. Maybe what I'm looking for is someone who can relate to me, who I can relate to. I'm not saying this very well.

Let me try one more time to explain. Have you ever listened to a song over and over again for hours and still felt as strongly about it as the first time you listened to it? As you invest time into something like that, a song, a book, it becomes important to you. It becomes part of your identity, really. In sort of the same way, I want to meet someone who I can spend time with and things won't get old. Not because we don't do the same things, but because we continue to feel something each time we see each other.

Because we want to be happy. For whatever reason, this is what we want.

But I think that I just want to spend time with someone, without expectations of greatness or emotion. Just as a balm for loneliness.

I dislike people who believe that we're all different. I've always found more verisimilitude in the presumption that we're all the same, that we all want the same things, because otherwise how could we care about others?

I live life without concern for what I do. I do homework, I walk to class, I follow directions just for something to do. And then while I'm driving home, I wonder what it's all about. Sometimes, at night, I look for the perfect thing to say so that I can let someone know that I exist too and that life is, at the very least, a delusion that we share. I want someone to sink all my words into. I want to fulfill the intrinsic human need to express things, all the inane and important things that bother me until they're said. Both the things I will and won't care about in a month or a year.

What I care about is the things that people care about. Our defining characteristic is not what look like, but what we feel, what we want and love. I want to talk about my favorite things until they become bored and intolerable. I want to show someone my favorite movies and make them listen to my favorite songs and validate myself in this way.

I want reassurance about life. I don't want to be told everything will be better. I want to be told that life sucks balls but we persevere. I want someone who understands the absurd condition inherent in existence. I have hope but I want someone who doesn't need it.

The reason I listen to music is in order to feel something. The mere act of living becomes boring, common, habitual. I want to feel something, to be reminded of all the vagaries of life and everything that I think is important. It's the things that move and jar us. It replaces your lungs with unfamiliar air. It hides in the great, tired, straining songs which only ask life to be gentle because we know it too well to hope for anything else. These are the sublime, the notions that crush us more than any beauty is capable of. I want someone who cares about the sublime. And I want the rarest thing, that when I lose all feeling, when I lose sight of the sublime notions that make real the immense realms of existence demarcated by nothing more than our capricious hearts, when that happens, I want to find it again with your help.