'Festering Holes that Ennui Tore'

Sooner or later, morning or night, you're going to feel a twinge of emptiness.

Maybe just a tickle at first; maybe a tiny itch. Or maybe it'll overcome your senses with such voracity that you'll find yourself reeling on the ground, retching from the horrible clamminess. You'll feel like shit.

(If you're reading this, you probably already have.)

Childhood grows into adolescence grows into uncertainty; maybe you're wondering if your arms are too thin; maybe you're wondering, conversely, if you're too fat. Maybe you're not wondering anymore, because you can't.

Don't lie. You don't know what you're doing with your life. You don't know what you want. You don't know where you're going, why you're going there, and what the point of everything is.

You have hope, yes. But that's about it.

Maybe you're in high school, and the twinge strikes you when you're walking down a hall and passing dozens of faces you don't know.

Maybe you're in junior high, and the uneasiness sets in during the middle of gym class, when you realize dodgeball is virtually useless in real life.

Maybe you feel that emptiness when you're walking back from class, walking back to your dorm, alone. You see other people around you, and wonder if they're lonely, too.

Maybe you finally realize you're hollow when your heart breaks for the first time, only to reveal there wasn't anything there. Just flesh and blood and muscle tissue, nothing more.

Maybe you've stopped thinking about it all together.

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Guess what--that emptiness isn't going away; it may disappear for brief moments, but it won't fade with Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa, Luvox; it won't fade with time. It won't vanish with new friends, old loves, rekindled flames. You can get high and smashed and wasted, but it will return. You can pick up hobbies and literature and writing and sports and painting; you can drive fast and smoke cigars and muse about life; it still won't leave for good. And it will last until you die.

You can do your best to counteract that feeling, that sense of hollowness, but it's just your subconscious telling you--something's not right.

Hope--hope is good. Hope gives you power. Hope supplants faith.

But.

Abandon all hope, and then you will be free.