I wake up every day with the same feeling, the same day repeating itself, but nothing is the same.

I wake up every day with anguish in my heart over where I am and where I am not. My eyes see a different reality than the one within. I look at myself in the mirror and I cannot recognize myself. Of course, I still look the same—the same essential traits. However, everything has changed. I’ve become a stranger to myself, not in a dramatic, poetic way, but in a lifeless, stagnant, empty manner. I look at myself and I see nothing inside my flesh, nothing beyond my eyes. No future, no past, not even presence.

I wake up with anguish in my heart because I don’t know how to enter my body. I don’t know how to embody myself—whatever that was. I am but a mere carcass that does not harmonize with the essence given to me. But I shouldn’t blame the corpse, for it is I who am out of alignment. As though there were several I’s, and I had forgotten which one was truly me.

My body is confused. It does not know what to do with itself. It does not know what to be. It does not know whom it belongs to.

I wake up with anguish in my heart because I have travelled somewhere far away from the reflection I see. I no longer belong to the I that I perceive in the mirror, or rather, the I in the mirror does not reflect me any longer. It reflects something else, someone else.

I suffer, yes. Anguish and dread are no easy things to live with, let alone when they become a whole state of existence. But I cannot help but feel as though dread were merely a symptom of misalignment. Misalignment with what I truly am, with the things that call my soul.

The calling gets so loud that I cannot help but fall asleep in the hopes that my anguish will go away.

What are you trying to control?

Nothing. I don’t know. I don’t wish to give it more meaning than it possesses.

You can control it. You are allowing it to be, you know you are. You can allow it to pass. You can forsake yourself, you know you can.

Well, how do I do that?

How do I do that? How do I allow it to pass through me without becoming it, without becoming angst itself? To simply stop becoming it.

I am not dread. I am not anguish. I am not despair. I am not incomplete. I am not fear.

What are you trying to say? What is it that eats your heart the more you postpone it?

I don’t know. I just know that there is something eating my heart with anguish.

Someone I refuse to become. Someone I am not. Someone I desire to be. Someone I wish to give up, yet refuse to do so.

Is that what eats me? My own refusal to become, to unbecome?

Is stagnancy a choice I have made, or merely a consequence of a decision I keep escaping?

Is stagnancy an illusion of my impatience, or a state I must endure?

I write and write, and all I ever come down with is an identification of matters I wish not to identify, but to endure.

I escape in intensity. I pretend I feel so much. It’s true, I do feel so much, but it isn’t for outer matters that I ache. It is for my own self.

And so I escape in the intensity of another, of the world. But it is myself I wish to escape. The weight of what I cannot become, of all that I do not choose, of all that I cannot give up.

Is it truly what you suffer from, or is it merely another loop you enter to avoid leaping outside the cyclone of your so-called absurdity?

To question it, to write of it, to attempt to understand the inexplicable?