I could want many things. Touch. Lust. Beauty. And while I do want all these things, they are secondary. As of late, all my human encounters have become emotionally severed, like an estranged limb or misplaced digit. Cold and lifeless. This whole time, while saying I am alive, I have been busy pretending as such. Smiling at the right spots, laughing when appropriate, knowing all the right looks to share and all the right times to tell a related anecdote of my own. I play along and act out my role in each scene as best as I can when what I really want, is to feel real feelings, and not a set of practised reactions and rehearsed expressions, just waiting to be pulled out of a hat and used with empty sentiment, if any sentiment at all.

I’ve fallen hard onto the patches of life I have been traveling numbly across- work, sleep, regular medication. But I simply act unscathed. The only times I am completely honest is when I am alone, thinking, or when I write. When I reflect upon my life, or relate to some fictional character, I wonder if I am the sole occupant on my plane of existence (even though most of those moments consist of tears, I prefer true sadness to lies of being happy and ‘stable’)

How I consciously or not, looked about for someone to love and give myself to, to make me feel better about myself. “Help me. Distract me. Help me get away from myself…” I try and fit all my emotional blockage into the flare between my thighs and ruin myself in the process. “You make me perfect.” In that moment, I completely disappear and let someone make use of this empty shell. I create all these relationships to somehow ensure that I’m worthy of someone’s love. But in all these false bonds, not a single person knows or loves me truly. How can they when they can see through the transparency of my lost self-love? How many know that the life they see me leading is a fabrication to keep them attracted and interested in me? I’ve become so lost in all those settings that, in most aspects, I’ve given up. I let myself get trapped in horrible limbo that makes me feel completely worthless. Undecided. More like uninspired. More like unconscious. Unreal. Unrelenting.

Somehow, while I made myself everyone to everybody else, I became nothing to myself. With all this happening below my pupils, I have grown suspicious of making eye contact with others. I am scared they look at me and see me as I have begun to look at myself. Hollow. I surround myself in noise, to somehow quiet the suffering. But it whispers at me in people’s frowns, dares me to speak in other’s jokes, rips scars into my flesh in everybody’s smiles. I play along, read my lines, and no one suspects a thing. I even convinced myself for a while. I suppressed my tears and walked away from everything remotely relevant but the longer I go on, the lonelier I get. In the darkness of who I’ve become, I am shivering. No one even knows how broken I have become.

In this desert, I’m the sole survivor, and this thirst comes close to killing me. I want happiness to infect more than just my smile. I want to air out my vacant insides. I want something that exists to resettle once the air is clear. I want more than this paper. I want more than one lonely, brainless affair after another. I want no more expectation. I want more than disappointment. I want more than me. It’s become so easy to work and sleep my life away. At least that gives me more to grip onto than fake “I-love-yous” and long distance promises. More to experience than all these acres of alone.

My memories haunt me. Both good and bad stand behind me on some battlefield and mislead me into the arms of the enemy. I wake up from their hypnosis just in time to break the opposition and leave them for dead, but I don’t grow. I’ve never learned. And all I want is humanity. I want blind faith. I want to jump.