Days pass me by as I chase pointless charades; some seem more worthless than others. There is a bizarre sense of emptiness and desolation lying somewhere underneath, always ready to burst out of me. I can invariably feel it right at the precipice of my mind. I feel as though I am always one thought away from shattering into a million pieces. In the dead of night, I often croon, mumble, and shed the busy façade that I wear like a fancy cloth throughout the day.

So many things happen to me daily, and I tackle them all like the studious child I had always been. One by one, I wrap Christmas presents and tuck them under my tree of responsibilities. All my chores meaningfully consist of me, making me who I am, or perhaps it is I who consist of them, carefully drafting each day as if giving meaning to an empty void. My day walks in like a person entering an office, punches time on my fingers, and then disappears into the mist. I feel as though I am getting closer to something, but I can’t quite place it. Let’s say I do achieve whatever I am after; will it still retain its meaning? Sometimes, I forget how it is supposed to feel.

I have forgotten that pointless feeling of being appreciated. Growing up as a student, I used to feel as though I was learning something very valuable, as though I was preparing myself for something amazing in life. My goal was to do something for someone. I was building this person to become something, earning praise and accolades, fulfilling duties, and checking all the boxes. There were people to impress, and it made me feel at ease, as though I had achieved something. It appeared to me that there was a purpose towards which I was chugging. Today, I feel different. It is as though, once you have achieved certain things, you no longer want to try because, somewhere within, you know you have been chasing that rabbit all your life, yet you don’t know what to do with it when you catch it. All the struggles I endured, all the praise I garnered, what did they amount to? Everything seems empty.

I writhe in my fate, remembering days when life made more sense—or perhaps I had somehow stopped peering into the abyss. Now, that clouded promise of a downpour hovers again, as though I had never gone anywhere, as though it had always been my fate and I had accepted it long ago.

This is the solitary saga of a polymath thinker who cannot escape his fate of peering into the darkness every night, who cannot stop weighing the pointlessness of it all on the bitter scales of his thoughts. The writer who cannot stop writing about his dismal thoughts; the depressionist who likes to wallow in his pain, as though it had always belonged to him. Good days came only to bring a smile to his unsmiling face, and then they left because he was fated to perish like a droplet in a sea of his own despondency.