The Vegan Muffin

The vegan muffin worked at NASA. Her ingredients included spelt, agave, vanilla. She was vegan technically because she never ate. Her main feeling, most days, was one of mild insanity and low-level distress (fluctuating sometimes to "vaguely sarcastic, passively suicidal despair") because she had, over the past 5 or 10 years, assimilated certain patterns of negative thinking into the basic, unconsciously, default functioning of her psyche: focusing on her flaws, constantly judging herself inferior to others, always maintaining the imaginary narratives implied by her unrealistic ideals. She felt constantly inadequate, rarely uninhibited. She sometimes wondered if she'd been born this way. Maybe her first thoughts already were patterned, negative. Maybe she was genetically encoded for anxiety, fear, sadness, etc.

Recently, at times when she expected the locationless discomfort of a reasonless depression, she'd sometimes instead felt physical pain, as if, she imagined, her nausea-like unease had consolidated into tiny tumors, lodging like pin-points inside her body. Loneliness, she'd read somewhere, could organize itself into a kind of prodding, an insistence that its subject find companionship. It was loneliness, probably. Or maybe what she felt had something to do with how in social situations, if she wasn't bored or nervous, her focus would almost always be on suppressing the nearly uncontrollable urge to repeatedly ask the other muffin, or muffins, to tell her exactly how she should behave, in the world, including what food she should eat when and what she should do between work and sleep; if she should write stories or a novel or maybe buy an electric guitar; apply to Yaddo or teach English in Japan or become an astronaut and try to go to Mars; convey more, by hiding less, of her insecurities, on the internet and on her face, or suppress them in consideration of other muffins, or strive for selflessness by ignoring them, or control them to attract a romantic partner; focus on the muffins that she liked most or that liked her most? And, she'd ask, why? Her questions would be endless and, she knew, sarcastic. She wouldn't do what other muffins suggested. She probably wouldn't ever ask even one question—and if she did, in utter desperation, the sarcasm of it, experienced alone, would be scary.

At NASA one night on Gmail chat the vegan muffin said she was moving to Alaska. She usually returned to NASA at night because she had no computer at home. "Everyone lives in Alaska now," responded the muffin's friend on Gmail chat. "It's like Williamsburg but for the United States." The vegan muffin was confused and a little excited. "I've never heard of a muffin that moved to Alaska," she said. "Will you think I'm just following trends if I move to Alaska?" "I mean people," said the muffin's friend, a human. "I forgot you're a muffin. Sorry." The muffin's friend, who had 2 jobs and lived in Massachusetts, got off the internet. The muffin, who lived in Florida, stared at the computer screen. She went to YouTube. She clicked a ~10-minute song by Jawbreaker. She stared at the computer screen for a long time and gradually began to feel herself, the space she occupied in the universe—her body that was made from all organic ingredients, with no natural flavors or refined sugars—inside NASA's research headquarters at Cape Canaveral sitting on an $800 chair with really bad posture and unfocused eyes. Astronauts and astrophysicists around her were staring also, but with concentrating eyeballs and straight postures, typing quickly on keyboards, calculating the 200,000-year trajectories of the moons of Saturn, "or probably also hating their lives while watching videos on YouTube of people expressing their despair in a controlled manner utilizing harmony, rhythm, words, melody," the muffin thought with enough energy for her to know she'd thought something but not enough to know what. "Try harder so you can realize what you are trying to think," she thought with a bit more energy but still not enough for her to know what she was thinking.

The muffin's posture was so bad that she was sliding off the chair. She fell to the floor, which she stared at, aware of her motionlessness and, after some time, thoughtlessness. She concentrated on her brain. She was thinking, she eventually noticed, but only a little. She was thinking that soon a real thought would be in her head, something specific, and it probably wouldn't be something she liked, and so, according to that, she should focus on exerting no effort toward anything concrete or conceptual or referential, which meant, she now thought with sudden clarity and purpose—and a briefly scary then calming feeling of nonsequitur—that it was time for her to concentrate on her physical sensation of nausea, and she did, and as she gradually realized she was trying to suppress it into nonexistence, she began to feel toward her nausea a kind of sympathy, which made her feel less alone. But "nausea" had no feelings or consciousness with which to sympathize, so actually the muffin was trying to suppress herself, she realized, into nonexistence. The vegan muffin felt completely alone. "Complete," she thought. She usually felt good after completing something.