Dying Lights

Every light in me is slowly dying. I still appreciate warm lights and cobblestone streets, and would love to wander once more in the streets of Porto. There is still a cozy warmth to be felt from the sun on my skin on a cold day. I can still sometimes feel shivers from listening to music. But all joy has become dulled against relentless waves of stress and fear, like rocks rounded by the sea. There was so much in me that was wonderful. Such a bright light, an easy laughter, a seemingly endless capacity for joy and love. So much interest in life, in the mysteries of the world, in weaving my own story. It would be so sad to think that it is now mostly gone. But I can’t even feel sadness in the same way I once did. Even that has dulled. I remember how happiness would come as easily as a gentle breeze on a summer day. I remember the quiet joy in cloud gazing, or feeling grass underfoot. I vaguely recall the wondrous lust I had for life and adventure. I don’t think I can remember the exact feeling of happiness as much as its concept, the general notion that it was good. Happiness nowadays is little more than short breaks from the constant torment of waking life, brief silences in a world of excruciating noise. It’s really all about money in the end. If I could have afforded to take a break, maybe I would’ve felt better. Maybe this could have been stopped; I could have kept myself away from some point of no return that by now has long passed. But my life is conditional on my immediate productivity, and I’ve gone too far, burnt out too much. All the light I once held in me had a price, after all, and all that is wonderful was allowed to die in exchange for the permission to exist. I feel that I have failed that young boy I once was, so full of life, so eager to experience everything. I have grown tired, and with exhaustion came bitterness, and little by little I wasted away everything good I have ever had. I am now left little more than a pool of wasted potential, a shell empty of everything but dull anger and sadness, where once inhabited an incredible brightness. As the last lights begin to fade, so does the fear of death, and the end starts to become alluring. Not in the dramatic and tempestuous way I imagined it happened, but in the quiet, misunderstood, gradual resigning of hope. The dying lights.