february 2021
It’s often hard to put into words what complex cauldron of emotions lives within. Why on dark days it spills over at the tip of a hat, or why it churns with such tumultuous and indeterminate distress.
What I can identify are the effects – the clock stalls and stills. You work longer, play harder. You distract yourself, pick up hobbies, ping pong between this and that in the art of time-killing. You flow with the mood of the day, talking to the external world if you feel up to it, or mutter to yourself and your belongings. You lean heavily on crutches. You latch onto people and things you love with ferocious affection, and is as inhospitable as the barren arctic to those you don’t.
You become intimately familiar with each tick of your emotions. The obsidian despair of sorrow; the crimson violence of pain; the gray endurance of apathy.
You try to find solace from comfort, from admiration, from humor. Even if in every instant that you try, some incalculable exchange of joy and suffering takes place that changes the balance you sought to obtain.
Loneliness is, after all, not noble. In this long road ahead it is but an unwavering companion, appearing and disappearing out of view. There may be no such grand tale to be told, or a valiant duel to be won.
Perhaps as I walk along, the road walked past will seem like a romance. Or perhaps, all this will just have been a passing storm that is forgotten in the bright light of day.
I do not know what to wish for. Maybe it is just hope. That one day freedom should belong to me.
