I can’t breathe.
And it’s not just the disgusting amount of cigarettes I’ve been smoking lately. The very air around me feels crippling. I feel surrounded by toxicity. Yet it’s exclusive. It seems to be the atmosphere I spew out unintentionally. I’m not unconscious to it. I know it’s there. I just don’t know how to purify it. I struggle but fail to fathom a remedy. Everything seems desolate and bleak. I’ve lost sight of the outcome I had hoped for. Not even figuratively, I literally cannot visualize it now. I close my eyes and all I see is a blur of darkness smudged together with fear. I didn’t think I had given it any power but I know in my hear that fear is at the forefront of my opposition. Fear of isolation, loneliness and despair. Fear of loss, of losing the things and people that I love. Fear of purposelessness, of insignificance and wandering lost, in a world that I feel no connection with. I feel as though I live on the outskirts of a collective my heart longs to join. I peer inwards through the looking glass but I cannot pass through it. I feel weary for having had travelled so far only to realize that the distance I dragged my broken body was miniscule. Then to gaze into the horizon and now feel farther away from my destination than I ever was before. I try to press on, to muster my courage and spark some sense of determination or will to move forward with intention and intensity yet alas, it seems wherever I had drawn my power from has become bare and exhausted. Like the emptiness I see around me, hope has fleeted into a laughable illusion that perhaps was never truly real.
To wander without direction, hope, purpose or love seems like a fitting punishment for the most cursed of life that exists. Is my misfortune bound to me until the end of time? That I shouldn’t even know the simple comforts of life and instead tread broken and weak while the weight of the world crushes me to dust? Experience has made me wonder if I live only in anticipation of the next catastrophe. What a pitiful thought process to entertain. Is the destination real? Are hope, peace, joy and abundance ideas so foreign to me that they can never be within reach? I grasp out longingly for such things but they vanish upon the touch of my trembling fingertips.
I call out to anything that might listen and ask with eager eyes: “what must I do?” The empty silence now more haunting than before answers perfectly.