Skeletons

You couldn’t have known it was coming. There are no warning signs, and sure as hell, there is no way to preempt it. You aren’t sad, lonely or frustrated. It’s a regular Tuesday, you walk into office with a coffee in your hand and a spring in your steps. Except out of nowhere, a void shows up in your stomach. An empty feeling that whispers slowly in your ear about everything that went wrong, is going wrong and is about to go wrong. You shake your head and hope the feeling shakes off. Instead, all you do is shake up that cupboard in which you had stuck this skeleton. It comes rambling out, ungraceful and pathetic in its escape. Dragging with it every painful memory you believe you had left behind. Your failures and regrets show you how you constantly get things wrong, and your loneliness drives the point home. So you sit there, shaking internally, wishing for this to pass. Heads down, eyes locked to your monitor, you try and push your mind to work through the words your brain isn’t even comprehending. To the world, you are just busy. Maybe slightly agitated, slightly bothered, just stressed, maybe? Only you know that somewhere in the corner of your mind, the neatly placed Lego structure you call life, is crumbling. Some people will tell you it’s just sadness or premenstrual syndrome making you crazy. But you’ve been here before. You’re not sad, you’re disinterested. You’re not feeling low, you’re feeling nothing. It isn’t any feeling at all. It’s the exact opposite. It’s the lack of, that consumes you and expels you into the sort of nothingness that you think you deserve.