Despair represents a melancholy hopelessness.  It hides within its unrelenting grasp the overwhelming loss of expectant optimism.  When one finds reason to despair, life itself becomes a source of never-ending tyranny.  To look at common occurrences is to find reasons galore for discovering oppressive doom and unpromising fervor in an outlook already tainted by depression, anguished desolation, and misery.  It is an aloneness one cannot fathom lest one is presently or has been in the same place.

And I bellow my agony into empty spaces, standing alone in need and finding myself aware of greedy depths heretofore unknown to me, chasms grasping and taking what bountiful wonder I possess.  They feel like abyssal planes of existence with the spirits of black holes hungry for but one more life… one more bit of the cosmos to swallow.  Into the darkness I am drawn helplessly.

Once, perhaps not too long ago, unfettered promise suffocated me, filled both home and heart, and offered penetrating light in the deepest of shadows.  But no more.  It is lost to me now.

The breath of sorrow and sadness reeks all about me.  No matter which direction I turn, its pungent odor castigates whatever fleeting joy I might feel.  Even smiles cost more than they once did; simple flexes of facial muscles are now too burdensome and heavy to be carried longer than a blink or two.  If not for that smell…

So I travel down a path winding through cataclysm as though it were concrete.  On all sides it presses in, lunges when the trail becomes confined, and constant eyes of specters peer out at me from every turn.  Yet I walk for there rests within my grasp no other journey to take.  I gloomed the days with my own ignorant folly.  What more can I do save to put each step in front of the last?

But for the spirit now relegated to times almost forgotten there would be no light in mind, no taste of what could have been.  Of what almost was.

Friendly herds thin in times of need, yes?  Such has been my experience.  Empty voids of make-believe capable of justifying the most abhorrent betrayal rob me of that which had been so precious in hours past.  Lost between the pillars of familiars and pains stand many who, upon realizing the competition with their own needs, discovered newfound reasons to douse the bond’s flames with spittle wrought of selfish desires.  Or perhaps it’s something else.  I cannot possibly know.

Many deny such things.  Fewer revel in declaring to others a fear of what might be, of what request could be sent to their doors writ upon gossamer hints of penury to come.  I want no such thing.  I offer no such thing.  I watch the fleeing nonetheless.

“I fear the question he may ask, therefore I turn my back,” they say.

Or one commiserates, “My anger stems from his privation.  How dare he!  We suffer and he offers nothing, instead looking upon looming loss as though it holds some importance to us with our toiling, and our wants, and our pride, and our busying ourselves with other matters.  Again, how dare he!”

Unbeknownst to all but a few, soon it ends.  There exists no further cries for assistance.  My chest heaves in great sobs incapable of reaching the limits of what must be.  I am betrayed by my own honesty, my own naiveté at what twenty years of experience should have lighted upon my brow.

Growing deprivation holds me hostage.  Chained to walls cold and barren, I rock in steady rhythms unable to sooth pains both shallow and deep.  What else can I do?

Reclaiming the losses soon to be felt will be impossible, and it rends my heart asunder.  Cleaved in twain, and twain again, and twain yet again until the pieces are unrecognizable, it seems I wear this despair like a warm coat too comfortable to remove in spite of the constant chills racking my body.

And so it has come.