Crater

Ideally, you should be panicking. You should be clutching on your chest, exhaling labored breathing, struggling to oppress your pulse from inching above wholesome progression

You should be inclined to keep your strides from wobbling.

Presence of mind should dictate that you steer all your willpower into not losing sight and collide into things.

However, your faculties are not in agreement with you. Nothing is discernible among the blurs of emotions except an abundance of emptiness, a bottomless gulf that fences you.

You want to feel a thing, something, anything. Even pain would have a lawful corner in your sleeplessness. Pain is a dreaded acquaintance but a much more welcomed guest than…this.

Suddenly words have rendered themselves inadequate. Metaphors have diminished its convenience and you fumble for vocabularies to withdraw and name your sentiment properly from the gaping cellar of intangibles.

Even time refused to oblige. Hours dissolved into days, days swelled into weeks, and weeks grew into another stem in the limbs of another year yet you still cannot seem to medicate this inexpressible feeling of nothingness. It’s almost a kind of translucence. A fogged dream you walked into, a keyhole where you become an onlooker to the aimless drifting of your unoccupied self.

You rummage through half-forgotten drawers of memory for crumbs of joy or grief, or whatever thing you will find there that will illuminate your displaced feelings into wakefulness.

Yet all you grab hold of is the same glutinous mist.

So you give up the wearisome gamble into phrasing suitable dialects with which to properly consign your emotion. You catch yourself ceasing from the folly of yet another version of What Could Have I Done Differently?

You keep your feelings to yourself.

Not because people will not understand your anguish.

Not because you are robbing compassionate people the generosity of well-intentioned empathies.

But because, with what little that you know, and no matter how flawed it might be, this is a modest way that you can muster to cope with the piercing throbs and ambiguous questions that elude answers.

So you choose to dwell in the hallway of sweet, melancholic silence.

Occasionally, on the way home, you negotiate the pavements, leaving a trail of whispered wishes. You inattentively dissolve into the evening crowds, and suddenly a face stares back at you, echoing all your unspoken love and sadness, a mirror floating among a sea of strangers.

You meet its familiar gaze.

Unapologetic, unblinking.