Alpha

It starts with a downward glance.

A failure to acknowledge or an attempt to hide one's soul from someone's direct eyesight. You hurt. You know you hurt but feel that you can bear that weight just *that* much longer without asking for help.

After all, to show such emotions to other people makes one weaker, right?

You spend the first few days trying to figure things out for yourself. The task ahead is daunting and you meditate way longer on these issues then you intended to.

Days turn into weeks turn into months and sooner or later you are at war with yourself. You withdraw behind mental bars of titanium steel, locked safely away from the world in your reinforced bunker. Occasionally, you stick your head outside to sniff the air and survey the damage outside your lair. The air smells fresh, but you can hear perceived danger approaching from outside your battlements.

Years pass and you have fortified yourself behind thicker walls. You fake emotions now. After the years pass, you've learned how to fake being happy just for the comfort of those around you. Inwardly, you writhe in agony.

You want to shout against the injustices of the world, about bad relationships, lack of true job security, wars fought in distant lands that are actually closer now than ever before, thanks to technological advances that as little as 100 years ago were just some poor sucker's pipe dream that would never work. Such ideas.

You struggle through the daily grind, hoping to find some validation for your very existence. You surround yourself with those you can tolerate, promising friendship on the outside yet listening to the ever-present ticking of the internal chronometer.

Ten years have now passed since this began and you are now even more lost than before. You struggle to find inner meaning but find nothing. The kid who dreamed of being an astronaut is now an automaton, lost in a career that was chosen out of college as a stepping stone but ended up as a thick patch of swampland instead.

Now you can't even remember how this even started, let alone explain it to someone else. Your life, once filled with promise and hope, has been replaced by a mortgage, a wife who you married so that you just wouldn't be alone anymore and a lot of sleepless nights because you feel guilty about it.

You contemplated suicide for 2.6 seconds a few years ago, but quickly decided against it. You put the kibosh on those thoughts because then your life really was a total waste and you realize also that the pain you'd leave behind is infinitely worse than any trivial pains that you are going through now.

Besides, you know in your heart that you can turn your life around; if you weren't having such a enjoyable time being miserable that is. You just wish that the solution would present itself because you are just too full of excuses and bullshit to take charge of it yourself.

And then one day, it does...

---+To Be Continued+---