Quiet Desperation

Somewhere in the dark, there is a sound.

Open the eyes. In the stagnant dark there is a sound other than the one that startled me awake. It is the hum of the fan. Funny how I turn the heat up in my room so that I can have the fan on to cool it down. But there’s another reason: so there is something for me to listen to…..something other than the sound that woke me. But it won’t be quiet. It won’t be quiet so that I can go to sleep so I need something louder…..a paradox.

That evil sound that woke me is not something falling…it is not the TV in the other room blaring, or an alarm clock, or dripping water, or chatting roommates, or cars, or a party in a neighbor’s apartment. It is the sound of quiet desperation creeping through my very soul.

As days where on I begin to feel it more and more growing inside me. When I wake in the morning, half exhausted from too little sleep and the thought of going to classes where we drone on and on about this and that and other boring things dealing with rather good stories and making them duller with every word shot form incoherent and stupid mouthes, I do not feel it then.

I shower, I drive, and I attend classes and as they wear on me, so does it. For it is my enthusiasm and my drive that make the bars that cage in the evil thing that so often tries to escape from me and make me bitter and cruel….like my father. And I am a lot more like him now than I ever wanted to be. How tragic that I set out not to be and life has made me like him….and I fought so so so so hard. And yet I lost.

Quiet desperation is the most awful feeling in the world. It eats at the very base of your soul, right in your gut so that you can only try to vomit out its evil as you feel it itching at your core, trying to undermine you so you collapse in on yourself and bury any evidence that there was an outside force that made you this way. But those who look closely enough can see it. Most don’t look…most don’t care…..but around my eyes I see it. The pinpoint of light that used to be there is so much more fake and looks like a reflection rather than a nova generated from inside. The darkness under my eyes is turning yellow…I breathe differently now….I am a zombie. An ugly wretched zombie sleep-walking through life.

I love fiction. I love those characters who so often go out and get what they love. They don’t really exist. Not the way they are in books and movies….because they deserve what they get. I also hate fiction. I hate those characters who are masters over their desires and beliefs and emotions so that they don’t care about love and lust and need and passion……I hate them so terribly I cannot describe it truly enough. All fiction. In the real world, there is nothing just and nothing more than you get what you least deserve……except when you do not get it at all.

This girl that I am after now….this girl that I am after seems hot and cold. She doesn’t know whether she wants to be with me and I just want this whole time to pass quickly by so that I can get to the joy and the vindication of everything. I WANT TO FEEL AGAIN! I want to write again…..but I don’t think I can…..because I don’t feel inside like I’m worth it. I feel like I’m a waste of life. Why did God even bother with me? I try and I try and if ‘Rats’ is my one big accomplishment when I dreamed of so much, then I shall go to Hell whether I deserve to or not and weep there for eternity as a marker as to what it is in God that destroyed so much of his creations.

But I love. And I am open. I do not change with time or with the way I treat people. I am sincere and good and true and funny and wierd and not a challenge in any way, shape, or form except in that my intensity is hard to match and I am hard to understand at times. I am a great being. And to balance out, I am also worthless to myself. I hate it. I cannot stand it. This quiet desperation has hold of me so tight now. I feel it in my throat and body and neck and gut and you have no idea what it feels like…..I don’t other than that I can feel it there.

Someone who knows a good prayer, whisper it to God for me. Because I can’t feel any longer and the words I use are all hollow because my passion has abandoned me…..my passion is gone. It has faded to nothing more than a ghost…..because the truth of all things is this: when one is beaten long enough, they will throw away what padding they have just so they can feel the beating again. They need that. They need it. I need it.

I have lost my concentration. My mind has blurred. That last paragraph I don’t even think I thought about. It all just came out from somewhere deep within me….maybe not even my voice. I just need my life to change to something really wonderful again….like it has been a few times before….because I don’t think I could stand being alone much longer. I have begun to cry a lot when I am alone……sometimes without realizing it. And I really do breathe differently. Quiet. So so quiet.