It's 2 AM on a weekend and I can't sleep. Supposed to be time to rest, but I can't stop thinking. No one's here to hear me. Still feels weird, recording myself. Makes me self-conscious and hyper-aware of any mistakes I make. I half-expect Cleary to pop out and stop me whenever I stutter, and tell me to start again.

Anyway, I'm awake because I'm overthinking, as usual. I feel like it's a necessity to be paranoid given everything I'm responsible for, and I don't know if I could turn it off even if I tried.

There are a lot of people out there with much less than I have, who came out of the cyborg years with their homes destroyed, their families dead, their livelihoods shattered, and still found contentment and healing. I've met hundreds of them over the past ten years. I've read some of their biographies. I think a common theme among them is that they don't overthink. Or when they do think about the worst times or have to confront hard questions, they do it with optimism. They see that the worst is behind them. They feel they have an active hand in how their future is going to turn out, yet they don't blame themselves if things go wrong. And they simply do their best to live good lives. They don't have very high expectations of how life should be.

I've tried to be more like that. I suspect Dr. Hayden is trying to push me in that direction too. I need to see myself as an active driver of my own destiny. God, I hate that word. "Destiny." So full of bullshit.

I'd use the word "future" instead, but that also has a ton of baggage. In the other timeline, sometimes Yamucha or Tenshinhan or even Bulma would get confused about which Trunks someone was referring to. To clarify, they'd call me either "Older Trunks" or "Future Trunks."

"Future Trunks." Yeah.

I never realized how significant names were until they started calling me that. Like, "Hey, this is Future Trunks. You know, from the future. That future. Not the one for this timeline. Technically he doesn't exist here. He's just temporary."

I know they didn't mean it like that. It was just my overthinking again. But it made me conscious of what Mom knew all along, that I'd feel like an alien there and wouldn't ever fully belong, no matter how much I wanted to. And now in my own timeline, when I think of that moniker, I think of incompletion. Like there's some future version of me always out of my reach, who has all the answers and feels like a full human being. Saiyan-human hybrid. Whatever.

I'm tired of philosophizing like this and yet I can't stop. This is who I am, and it's gotten worse in the last year. This is utterly useless and I know it.

Trying to reel it in. Not supposed to dwell on negatives or condemn myself for things that aren't even wrong. What's wrong with thinking? Or talking into a recorder when I could be sleeping? I don't have a fucking curfew. I'm not under Vegeta's training regimen. I don't have to answer to anyone.

The only person I answer to is myself, and I hate myself. Or at least the person I've become. Sometimes I feel like I'm not even me, that this person I hate is this other entity I can fight and kill the way I would a real enemy. I dream about it sometimes. It always starts off as a cyborg dream. Usually 18, maybe because she was always pretending. I'll be fighting her and losing, and then she'll turn into me. And I'll fight him to a standstill, until I'm missing an arm like Gohan, and I'm face down in the mud barely able to move. He'll be down too, sometimes unconscious, sometimes staring at me and saying something I can't hear. Once he was laughing.

Probably laughing at the fact I can't finish the job. I come dangerously close to burning out over the ocean, but I still force myself to make it to land. Some nights I go over the time machine's security codes in my head, but I never make a move toward that room. In the morning I look at myself in the mirror and think: I should smash this fucker's face in. And I don't.

This is really not healthy. I know. One of the first questions Dr. Hayden asked me was whether I had any thoughts about harming myself. I think I told her I had a list. She wanted to go through it with me. We've gone through maybe three scenarios so far, the tamest ones, and she manages to talk me out of each one. She has enough experience with suicidal nutcases to know that I'm not in immediate danger. But even if I were, what could she do? What could anyone on this planet do to stop me from doing anything I felt like?

Technically, nothing. If I wanted, I could finish the job the cyborgs started. They weren't really serious about destroying humanity. They were bored, sadistic teenagers using the Earth as their playground. I could shoot straight through the Earth's core the way Frieza did to Namek, and take the planet out along with myself. But of course I wouldn't do that.

Doing violence to myself, on the other hand, is completely possible. There aren't any restraints that could hold me. No drugs that could keep me down. It's hard enough to keep a human from committing suicide when they've made up their mind, never mind a Saiyan.

But this is all just bluster. Our bodies trick our minds into thinking that death is the end of existence. So we treat it with terror and resist it at the molecular level. Every cell in my body strains so hard to survive whenever I take those cross-continental flights, my lungs struggling to take in another breath of air, my brain rechanneling my ki to the muscles that can most effectively make the last push to shore.

My mind knows better what would actually happen if I crash and burn one of these days. When Cell killed me, I found myself on an endless field of fluffy clouds, waiting on the longest line I had ever seen. I didn't make it to King Yemma's desk before I was wished back. Some of his underlings pulled me out of the line and started arguing about which afterlife I was supposed to be in, since I wasn't part of their timeline. I think they genuinely didn't know what to do, and my resurrection saved them from a bureaucratic nightmare.

When I die in this timeline, I'll get to the desk. I'll get a stamp of approval for heaven. And I'll essentially keep living, but in a different plane.

As I said before, I can't imagine what it'd be like to live free of this depression. I'm drawing a blank. All I see is this miserable existence continuing.

I know this is a symptom. This shortsightedness about life, this feeling of hopelessness that my reality is always going to be like this. I know I had a life before this set in. And I can eventually get past it and be normal again. But it's all abstract right now.

Hope is supposed to be an expectation that things will be better in the future. The catch is that hope itself exists in the present. The thing we hope for is in the future.

My problem is that I can't feel any hope in the present. What do you do when hope itself is a far-off thing?