Masha

Every day you feel tired. A drowsy fog wraps itself around your body. In physical form you imagine it to be a deep grey, smelling of stale cigarettes and solidified tears and it coils around your neck, your ankles, seeping in and out of your body. You can’t move, you're wading through murky water and it’s inescapable and you're drowning.

Every day you feel sad. Not a sadness that comes with disappointment or bad news or any other emotional stab you know you can overcome. No this sadness is darker and it’s bottomless and it involves realizing you will never feel the way you used to, a devastating realization, like a coma patient waking up to learn that he will never be able to walk again. You will never smile again, or tell a joke or enjoy someone else’s company. It’s just you and the gaping hole where a different life used to be.

You stop taking care of yourself, you don’t shower because it won’t make you feel any different. You don’t eat because you still feel the same afterwards. Nothing will satisfy you; everything tastes like rubber. Basic human necessities become futile chores that take up too much effort. So you sit in your own filth waiting and wading from sleep to sleeplessness, eventually forgetting the difference between the two.

You drift in and out of dusty rooms like a distant relative at a funeral, lurking behind the trees, staring at an unrecognizable corpse, trying to remember who it is you are mourning but not being close enough to see.