Nights Like These

There are nights like this, when I feel an insatiable, inconsolable need but know not what it is. All I know is there is a hollow that is in my chest, but I know not the shape of this hollow, and so I cannot fill it. When nothing, not gustatory pleasures, nor audible trinkets, nor ordinary distractions and pleasantries seem fulfilling - they seem like sugar and icing when all I really need is bread and water - filling and true. How do you cure something when you don't know the problem?

When people are around me but I feel so alone, when words surround me but have no meaning, when all that seems real is the softness of my pillow and the cool detached sound of cars passing outside the window - the world seems to have ballooned leaving me suspended in the middle of peaceful, lonely air.

There are moments when you feel you are so right, but the world makes you feel so wrong - one person yelling in slow motion in the middle of an impassive, self-absorbed crowd. And then doubt seeps like an unwanted guest through the doors of your heart until the hinges break down and you crumble into many pieces and dissapear, silently, into the thronging, throbbing mass. And beat as one mass of humanity, discordant in pockets, but generally flowing in the same common direction. Where are we going? Where are we all going?

Life is tolerable for the great majority of the time, pleasant and blessed for the most part. But there are nights like these of self-imposed terror, minds stricken by wayward thoughts that throw one out of sync, while the world rolls on rolypoly in its own gargantuan triumph. The discordance is in part sickening, in part illustrative - and I am torn between the two emotions, so that I can't feel either in full, but both in jagged snippets like interference on the television. I suffer in my own hands, at the mercy of my own relentless mind. I feel a stranger to the world, but a shadow slipping away into the night, with no body to chase after.