Compilation of short bits

Untitled Short #1

People think hopelessness is the most devastating thing you can experience, but they're wrong. Hopelessness is so intrinsically linked to hope that experiencing one means that somewhere in your core, no matter how deeply buried it is, the other exists as well. Hopelessness means that you still found the strength to want something else for yourself. Something better. Something warmer.

To lose the ability to feel hopelessness is to lose the ability to hope. It's to lose sight of the future and the promise of light. It's to watch the train of life go by with a numbness settled so deeply in your bones that the desire to even try is an ephemeral flame extinguished by a soft breath.

Sometimes feeling nothing is the only way to survive. But the lethargy becomes too heavy and the weight in your limbs is impossible to carry when you're still walking uphill. Emotions become like a lightning strike in a storm, lighting your soul on fire before the crack of thunder can warn you it's coming. The burn is impossibly hot and impossible to bear, so much that you need to pretend it doesn't exist because otherwise it will consume you completely. You cling to anger and derision, alternating between too much sleep and not enough, staring at the walls and watching everyone from a distance, desperately wishing and desperately terrified that things will change. Wanting to live, wanting to disappear, wanting to feel, wanting to be numb, clinging to your pain and pushing it away. A walking contradiction.

You find a reason to keep going. Achieving success out of anger and spite, going through the motions because you don't want to be weak, not really dead but not really alive either. Sometimes it's enough to live for someone else. But the will isn't there and the resolve always wavers when the foundation is so cracked and brittle that the walls will collapse when it rains. It's not enough for long.

You cling to the small reliefs like an oasis in the desert, hiding from the pain that would surely be your end. If you must be angry, you will be angry; if you must suppress, you will suppress; if you must endure, it's all you've ever known anyway. You hold on so tightly to your reasons, hoping they will carry you above the dark while the wings you might have grown if you tried to fly on your own become weak and withered. Your hands ache with the strain and you know you cannot last but you persist. Your hands freeze into talons and the calluses turn to stone that spread to encase your heart. The cold seeps into your skin and your blood and you feel nothing, but at least this way it's easier to hold on. You turn away from the spiderwebbing cracks on your stone skin and pretend you don't hear the lamentation of your splintering resolve. Your reasons are weak and mortal, but so are you. You do not have the inner strength to build beneath your feet, and you don't care to find it anymore. You wait for it all to crumble, and you realize that in your desperation to live, you stopped knowing what it meant. Somewhere along the way you forgot that living and surviving are not the same thing. Only now can you see with detached amusement that it was your shovel that dug the grave.