Some Days

Some days the words just don’t come to him. Some days they get stuck in the space between his frantically working mind and his stuttering lips. On those days his eyes refuse to acknowledge the sunrise, even as bright light filters into his room and illuminates the dust particles that drift lazily there. Instead the ever present threat of oncoming darkness grows steadily stronger until it holds the reins and directs his mind from sunrise to dusk and settles there. It settles there and sometimes, when its grip is especially firm, it stays, and even when his eyes watch a hundred more sunrises it refuses to see any of them. And so dusk remains.

The relentless and persistent gloom sometimes remains for so incredibly long that he can feel his mind trying to retreat, trying to fold into itself to get away. And it does fold into itself, sometimes managing to crawl so far back that the rest of him is barely there. On those days it’s as if he’s trapped within the confines of his ever darkening head and he spends days not entirely sure if he’s really there, if this isn’t just some dream. He is unsure of the truth of his existence – is it what he hears and sees and can touch that is real, or is it the foggy and colourless recesses of his mind the thing with which he should concern himself? It is becoming increasingly often that he decides the latter to be true.

He does not feels the kind of sadness that the poets describe – beautiful and romantic. Instead he experiences a haze in the front of his mind which lingers and obliterates anything else that comes into contact with him. It persists, that unwelcome feeling of emptiness and the dread which consumes him when he tries to look at the days ahead. It seems like such a burden to have to do anything, to live out his life until its miserable end. The routine and the monotony of it all is almost too much and he wonders when it really will be too much, because he knows that day will come. And what then? What will happen when that day comes?

He prays that it will be sleep that takes him, in the end. He imagines his soft blankets, the warm embrace of his bed, his eyes drifting slowly shut. He imagines the darkness surrounding him, the pitch black that is broken only by the streetlights lining the road outside his window. He imagines the silence breaking periodically when a car drives past or a group of late night drinkers start to laugh and whoop. Mostly, he imagines the relief of it.