A static labyrinth of grey casting its sullen shadow through the window beneath which I sit, and I can’t see the sky. A sad heap of dirty snow, I press my rib cage against the slant of the table in exhausted desperation. It was warm today for January, so warm that the earth was beginning to awaken in a thawed stupor, and the scent made me anxious, for I knew that winter hadn’t even truly set in.

The lines point into the distance but I can’t be tricked into thinking that there is any depth, it is only my eyes who betray me. Again all is still, I am immobile, but time ticks on mercilessly, tearing my past self away from me and projecting it into the future with a calculated evil. Grey blinds, cinderblock, stucco concrete, beige carpeting… these are the world’s expressions of the youthful despair that is taking over my life. My realities are cleaving and I don’t know how much longer the cleft will be traversable. I sit in a university library and I am a student. I hate my reliance on unimportant modernities and I hate how the dependence is fertilized by society’s values and how it has left the realm of my control. I am in a graveyard of my own creation and I yearn for the soft warmth of the grass beneath my hands. I yearn for clear air, endless skies, the smell of the red mud, the clear notes of the pines and the stalks laughing in the wind, flashing sunlight at me. My hands rest on a corpse and I preside in a lonely and ramshackle wasteland. Every moment I am surrounded by lost souls, colliding with me for fleeting moments and then rolling on in their tumultuous and difficult realities. In this place nothing can flourish, yet this place is the crest of civilization, the shrine of all innovation. Am I shedding my naivete or am I falling into a depression? Where is the aloneness that marks my life? Has it transformed into dark solitude?