It seems as though it never ends. Just as you feel you might finally have made it through, the light at the end of the tunnel blossoming in front of you into a beautiful flower which you can almost reach out and grab, all of a sudden the clouds form again, the flower disappears behind them and you feel yourself stumble, falling back into the terrifying familiarity of the darkened abyss, defenceless, despondent, defeated. There’s almost a comfort to be found in it, a reluctant realisation that you were foolish to ever think you could escape, a feeling of inevitable capitulation as you wonder if you ever really had a chance of making it out. You wonder what more you could possibly do to convince yourself, force yourself even, to believe that it’s a fight worth having, to persuade yourself to just keep going, to reassure yourself that it is possible to liberate yourself from the suffering you’ve become so used to. You are genuinely taken aback when people become upset upon hearing how you feel, forgetting that most people, somehow, using powers you’ll never understand, genuinely enjoy their existence. You almost feel guilty when the occasional bursts of happiness come, when your favourite song comes on as you’re driving with your window down in the sun, but there’s no point feeling guilty and you don’t even try to enjoy that fleeting moment of joy because you know it won’t last, and as such it vanishes as quickly as it appeared. The things that usually make you happy no longer do, you have no desire to go out and see people and you feel false talking to your friends as if nothing is wrong, chatting to them about things that seem so meaningless when you can’t stop thinking about how you’d rather not be chatting to them at all, not because you don’t like them, but because you’d rather just bury yourself in a hole 6ft deep and not come out until it’s all over. It annoys you that, after battling so hard for so long and working through so many deep rooted issues, you appear to be right back where you started, no better off and no happier than you were five years ago when you were at your absolute lowest, despite all of the progress that you know that you’ve made. The complete lack of logic or rationality behind the way you feel is probably what angers you the most because you know that you are in the best place you have been in a very long time, yet it seems to make not one bit of difference to how utterly wretched and tragic you feel. For the first time in forever you don’t really have anything to blame it on, which arguably makes you feel even worse because you suddenly realise that, maybe, you just aren’t meant to be happy. You’re sick of feeling like you have to survive, like you just have to keep going no matter how shit you feel, and you long to go back to that brief moment not so long ago where you actually felt as though you weren’t just surviving, you were thriving, regardless of whether or not it was real because, in that moment, you actually felt like you had a chance to find contentment and even felt a glimmer of hope for a future that had always seemed, as it does now, so pointless and bleak. 

I almost had the flower. Almost.