the vegan muffin

The muffin worked at NASA. Her ingredients included spelt, agave syrup, vanilla. She was a vegan technically because she never ate. About ten hours a day her main feeling was one of mild insanity and low-level distress, with occasional fluctuations to "giant sarcastic suicidal despair," because of certain patterns of negative thinking she had acquired by focusing too much on literature, on herself, on ideals, or maybe she was just born depressed, but because the muffin experienced the world almost exclusively through emotions…over time her brain, or something, had become confused and now the bad feelings manifested mostly as a physical pain that she could feel, inside her body, as a more-concrete sort of nausea, like her organs were being hit by bean bags tossed from five feet away that were also her organs. It was loneliness, probably, the muffin thought. Or else it had to do with how whenever the muffin talked to someone, if she wasn't bored or nervous, her main focus would almost always be on suppressing the nearly uncontrollable urge (sometimes it was more controllable, depending on coffee and other factors based on a 4-hour cycle) to repeatedly ask—to plead, really (but plead sarcastically, as the muffin knew that other muffins could not help her; and the sarcasm in these situations did not neutralize the emotion, but made it more desperate), for the other muffin to tell her exactly how she should behave, in the world, what she should say out loud, when she should say it, what food she should eat and when she should eat it, should she write a story-collection or a novel or buy a guitar and write songs or just listen to music and lay in bed a lot and read only graphic novels and focus on her work at NASA, should she move to Jersey City or apply to Yaddo or move to Japan to teach English or become an astronaut and try to go to mars, should she display her confusion and insecurity more accurately and maybe honestly on the Internet and on her face and in her sentences or should she suppress it to be more considerate and selfless and also more appealing to certain other muffins, how she should proceed with the various muffins in her life, out of the muffins she liked should she focus on the ones she liked more but liked her less or the ones she liked less but liked her more, and (within a context and goal the muffin could understand) why?

At NASA one night on gmail chat the muffin said she was moving to Alaska. She usually went back to NASA at night because she didn't have a computer at home. "Everyone lives in Alaska now," said the muffin's friend. "It's like Williamsburg but for the United States." The 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 got off the Internet and went to work. She had two jobs. She lived in Massachusetts. The muffin lived in Florida. She stared at the computer screen. She went to YouTube. She hit play for a ten minute song by Jawbreaker. She stared at the computer screen for a long time and then 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 very straight posture typing quickly on keyboards, probably calculating the two-hundred-thousand year trajectories of the moons of Saturn, "or more likely also hating their lives while watching videos on YouTube of people expressing their despair in a controlled manner using harmony, rhythm, words, and melody," the muffin thought with enough energy for her to know she'd thought something but not enough to know what she'd thought. "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. The muffin fell off the chair. She stared at the ground. She didn't feel like anything was happening in her brain. There weren't any thoughts. 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 also a briefly scary then calming feeling of non-sequitur—that it was time for her to concentrate on her physical sensation of nausea. She did it. She felt her nausea and, gradually, as she began to realize that she was trying to suppress it into nonexistence, the muffin began to sympathize with her nausea, and this feeling of sympathy made her feel less alone. But "nausea" had no feelings or consciousness with which to sympathize with, so actually the muffin was trying to suppress herself, she realized, into nonexistence. The muffin felt completely alone. "Complete," she thought. She usually felt good after "completing" something.