Rut
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Things are not going very well—just a clockwork of rusted ruts.
In the attempt to feel different, I let myself get lured into one project or another, until the meaninglessness of it all pulls me into the depths of despair. A pathological unhappiness—anhedonia—where joys once reveled in become distant memories And it's calibrated by how few words I speak in a week—sometimes none at all. But nestled in this muteness is the pervasive and painful feeling of disconnectedness that I can't share with anyone who would want to understand without judging. And if spoken words are a way to communicate, anything I say is moot; there's nothing I fear I can add to the act on the stage in this tragic comedy I am featured in, possibly as a shadow or a ghost. Yes, I'm just a ghost, and very importantly, a meaningless one.
This spiraling downward into a pitiless dark void, more like my sophomore dreams of falling from a cliff with a receding lover's face, is rife with internal critique at the circumference of each narrowing spiral. Each fractal curve digs further into the blights of trapped memories, revealing deeper malaise and forgotten hurts buried so many decades ago.
A postponed rivalry with my own essence, packaged deep in my subconscious, is a constant subversion of what I sought to be, but linked to it, it ended up as this united grotesque mind-pair, vainly inimical for its own good—an unrivaled belligerent fatigue that kicks the weak and tired fallen internal figure, starkly honest and too anachronistic, into disrepair.
And in this hellscape, where hope feels oppressed and emotions turn heartless, the opium of the moment is nothing but a shut door—shut everything, shut eyelids at least. I hang there precariously until I can burden my nerves with sleep, and then more of it, until I forget who I am. When I am absent—a nobody, abandoned by tired neurons too starved to care anymore—I start over again, floundering for reasons to exist.
It's true, my aspirations were plucked too early, like flower buds never allowed to bloom and the resplendent flourish put on unremarkable clinical hold. Very few people would see the side of life that I did, and if they did, they'd be equally cynical and deranged. And now it feels like a harbinger of my own destruction with these walks back the memory lane, yet within this turmoil repeating, there are lessons found and lost for people like me, who are not me, if only they could read.
