Filtering Through!

He had stopped feeling. He couldn't define a physical sensation if asked. He had become automated to a specific order, a repetition that swallowed his time ruthlessly every single day. When he found time, he didn't think. He smoked till his throat hurt. He woke up with a pain in the chest. He disliked everything about himself. On the road, he abused happy people. He looked at happiness in a sort of bored way; he thought it was an act put up with no objective. He felt happiness was a cover for embarrassment. Wasn't he embarrassed? To be of no consequence, to have limited one's powers, to have arrived at one's worst, and having to live, having to schedule a purposeless routine; having to find oneself at odds with one's desires; his desires were dying, he knew. His schedule, the everyday tasks he religiously did, were killing them; and he couldn't fly away. He felt tied. He felt powerless when he tried to think of a release. He tried to put on the mask of elongated lips, shining teeth, roaring laughter. But it evaporated because he found nothing funny; he found nothing to smile at. He saw forced limitations. Limitations imposed by mediocrity, limitations that had lived unchallenged and had now become immensely powerful; limitations that were swallowing him.

He sat and observed the people around him. He saw struggle. He saw the masks. He saw the abuse of "what should have been" by "what had become". He couldn't sleep; when he got drunk, it was harder to sleep. He lay motionless. He had become a motionless mass. When he saw himself he couldn't identify what he saw. His face had become heavy and lined. There was constant strain in his eyes. The skin had gotten dull and blotted. life was wrestling with him and knocking him out in every round; every single blow caught him unprepared. He accepted injury in meek disregard. He accepted everything in meek disregard. The world had closed in on him from all directions. There was no way out, there was never a way out, he thought. He looked down, almost always, and waited for the world, the masks, to crush him into in existence.