I feel myself becoming enveloped by a type of loneliness that even I have not come across before. A life that seemed so promising just days ago has suddenly disappeared into the abyss, replaced by the cruelly familiar sense of emptiness and longing. What one longs for has never really been apparent, but for the first time it feels as though even that, whatever it is, could not banish the darkness from within me. Goals that seemed perfectly within reach now feel hopelessly distant, the happiness that was just around the corner now exiled to a location unknown to myself. Oh, what it must feel like to know that everything is going to be ok, to not worry about being consumed by the black hole that seems to grow ever stronger in your mind despite your constant, exhausting efforts to defeat it, to satisfy it, to understand it, to conquer it, how it must feel to defeat your demons and revel in the victory for longer than a few hours before they launch their inevitable counter-attack, somehow stronger than they were before. I’ve run out of ways to explain it to people, to justify my actions, to adequately describe the pain inside oneself without revealing too much, the effort of having to hide my obvious insanity becoming as difficult a task as living with it has been for such a long, torturous time. My memories escape me as my mind attempts to protect itself from whatever trauma it is that haunts me so, yet this merely isolates me further, completely unable to understand how I’ve become this man, this shell, this person who knows nothing except how getting to the end of each day is becoming burdensome in a way it never quite has been before. One wonders how happy one would be if the caricature one has created of oneself were really true, if one really did have an extensive list of hobbies one enjoyed, if one really was surrounded by friends and family that showered one with love and affection, if one really was an avid reader, a talented writer, a wit to be remembered and a thinker to be forgotten, yet the reality is that one cannot find joy or happiness in anything one does because one has no idea who one really is. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind if there was some advantage to this relentless barrage of misery, if there was a promise of love and recognition at the end of the journey, but as more time passes the hopelessness seems to become ever more embedded and the idea I could be loved by someone seems ever more laughable. My actions defy logic and my thoughts are bereft of rationalité but up until now this has been fine, because I knew the fog would eventually lift and the euphoria would return and I would laugh at how stupid I had been to ever doubt myself, to entertain such drivel, to ever think that I might be anything less than spectacular, but this time I don’t think the fog is going to lift, the hole has grown too big, the darkness too black, the happiness irrevocably out of reach, and now I find myself laughing at the part of me that thought he might one day escape.