aNd tHat's wHere wE bEg to beGiN

Often, sadness, almost luminescent in its affected beauty, is a pain you feel for other people, real or unreal; it's those sharp pricks at the tips of your fingers, the blooming ache across, under, your chest and the way your eyes well up with tears at a harsh word, a senseless confrontation, a fleeting joy. And sadness, like true happiness, is something to be shared. Hording it and tucking it deeper inside you only creates another kind of ache, this one larger and more encompassing. Certainly more debilitating. And possibly even more beautiful.

Your fingers fall out, having lost all form and function. Hold your hand to your chest and you'll feel nothing but a hollow resonance, as though pressing your damp palms to a bell you know will never make a sound ever again. There are no tears in your eyes. You don't know where they've gone and you don't even know if you miss them or not. After some years, you'd look up from a letter you wrote to yourself when you were seventeen and something, a little tingle at the back of your head, tells you that you've forgotten something familiar. You search the tired room you're staying in for someone to share this with and you realize that still, the sadness you horded once had stayed on, metamorphosed.

That voice returns, again insistent. You think you hear the word loneliness.

And so, you whisper back a word that was once so profound, every story you wrote contained it, but now holds no meaning, like that bell for instance. Rotting away, heavy inside the moldy church towers.

Solitary, you whisper.

You fold up that letter and walk away.

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Hellooo anti-fucking-depressants.