Scribe of Sorrow

1
My highs are the highest of all highs, but my lows are lower than the depths of hell. Some days my joy is so great it is euphoric, and in it I'm consumed. Other days my sadness is torturous, and it is on those days that I wish to die. But I push on, because I know that all things are transient, and that nothing lasts forever, and that all things, in the end, consume themselves, destroy themselves.

Now that night has fallen, I face the prospect of a new day. Am I strong enough to endure what tomorrow brings? Or will I succumb under the weight of my passion, the weight of my desire? Will I ride the river of my transient ego, my unique, or will I find myself stranded upon its shores with my boat full of holes?Will I, having conquered them, stand upon a mountain of my dead, old selves, or will I be crushed beneath their weight? Will I forever destroy myself and be reborn new, or will I forever be haunted by what I could have been? Will I live my life worrying over what could be, or will I bask in the joy of what is, of what lives now?

Tonight, I lay my melancholy head down to rest, and hope that when I wake up in the morning it will be filled with pride and rebellious joy.

Tonight, I lay my melancholy head down to rest, in the hope that when I wake up in the morning I will find that I have died in my sleep and been reborn as a beautiful and flaming Phoenix.

2
There is a certain emptiness that can be felt in modern day society; an emptiness that permeates throughout every aspect of civilized life. An emptiness that robs all once beautiful things of their shining splendor.

It is an emptiness that slowly eats away at the heart, until there is nothing left but rotting flesh and dead matter. It is an emptiness that turns the mind into a broken sieve through which all large and important things fall swiftly without facing any resistance.

This emptiness can be felt everywhere, from the Central Business Districts of the largest cities, to the schools of the smallest country towns. It is everywhere. It is in the tents where the homeless lay their heads at night, it is in the mansions of billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. It is in offices where white collar workers type away frivolously at their keyboards, telling themselves that if they just work a little harder they might get that raise.

It is the emptiness of the middle class family sitting around the dinner table in awkward silence, unsure of how to properly express affection. It is the emptiness of the petty bourgeois who buys into the myth of the "American Dream," who thinks that one day he too can become a Steve Jobs or a George Soros.

It is the emptiness that lives in the soul of the depressed man, the man who has nowhere to go, nowhere to run, the man who can only keep working in an attempt to distract himself from the spiritual wasteland that surrounds him. This man, the depressed man, is the archetype of modern society; he is the proletarian who never gets a break, the proletarian who has been alienated from his humanity. He is the disgruntled one, the one who knows that he is being exploited, but is too tired and sore to do anything about it.

The depressed man is the man who is haunted by what could have been. He is haunted by his past, and every night he makes a temporary escape from the present. But it never lasts long, for in the morning his alarm clock will ring at 9 o'clock sharp, the alarm clock that signals another day of fruitless and alienated toil.

3
Now that the sun has sunk to sleep beneath the horizon, a horde of demons has begun its pursuit. They pursue me wildly and viciously; like a pack of ravenous wolves they bite and they claw and they tear through the protective layers of my mind. They dig up deeply buried and forgotten fears, fears that were born in my early childhood; fears of failure and disappointment, fears of loss and loneliness.

I tell myself that these fears are silly and wholly unjustified, but are they? Have I not been abandoned before? Have I not been a failure before? Of course I have. Everyone has. But this fact doesn't make my fears any less intense.