Vent Book

Melancholy

It's weird when you feel your soul start to cry. This deep, aching sadness that makes the air itself seem like it's crying with you. It's never during the day though. Too many things to do, too many distractions. Yet at night, in the cold and quiet. That's the perfect time. Staring out your apartment window at the snow clogged street below. Watching the pale light from the street lamps illuminating the street below.

The few, haggard souls wandering up and down the street at this absurd hour. Most of them drunk, some of them high. Maybe one of them lost. Each their own stories slipping quietly into the night, as you feel your heart twist painfully in your chest. Another bittersweet memory clamoring to your attention. The specific smell of incense and an open to-go box mixing together in an oddly familiar way that brings back gold plated memories of childhood.

Of long summers spent under the sun, when the world still held its magic. Maybe even the sound of clanking silverware and dishes that for a moment teleports you back to your original house. The look and feel of the kitchen that seemed to be your whole world for a period of time while growing up.

Memories of better days seem to be tinted in gold, and even though to you back then they should've seemed average. You knew it was something special. Your mind decided to hold onto these memories, made better by time and the natural inclination of the mind to rewrite memories.

Now faces rush by. Old friends, old enemies. People you liked and hated for the most juvenile of reasons. Now, with the walls closing in, and the weeping of your soul in the background, all you want is to go back to those days. When everything was planned out, every day was just more of the same. Sometimes better, and sometimes worse. But never as painful as what you're dealing with now.

Watching your friends and family now handle their problems with counseling and therapy. While you get drunk and high from the moment you wake up til you fall asleep because having your mind be elsewhere during the week is the only way you can get to your therapy appointments each week without falling apart.

Now you're embarrassed because you remember that time you reached for a shot and your friend gave you a cautionary look from across the table. You both think the same word. "Alcoholic." Yet you smile and laugh it off and they seem to understand that even though you know you've been in dangerous territory all week, another shot of whiskey is the only way you can feel warm in the moment.

Looking at the $50 of bud you have sitting around, knowing that for the next two months you're not going to spend a day sober at home, and that's just the way you like it. Watching as the money slips down the drain as you cave to munchies every so often. Sometimes you resist, and then stop eating for a day or three in order to feel better about spending less of your parents money.

And finally, the melancholic tired feeling you get when you're seated on the edge of your bed smoking a final bowl before your body calls it quits and allows you to finally have a dreamless sleep for once. An island of bliss in the hell-scape that is usually the parade of disjointed horrors your nightmares have become. And the bliss of knowing that you'll have to do it all over again tomorrow.