who wants my complications, dreary Mondays too
Monday bleeds into the edges of everything like a watermark, impossible to ignore. I’ve been scrolling again, thumb numb and brain fizzing with the static of too many voices, none of them mine.
It’s all a bit like watching a car crash in slow motion — you want to look away, but somehow, you can’t. The world’s ugliness, its sheer pettiness and cruelty, seeps into you until you’re not sure if the darkness was always in you or if it’s a new shade you’ve taken on.
I read somewhere, or maybe I heard it in one of my Discover Weekly songs — those anthems to the broken but still hopeful — that keeping a journal was supposed to be this cathartic release. But what if the pages become just another screen, reflecting back all the things you wish you could unsee? What if all you’re doing is documenting your own descent into cynicism?
Work was the usual. The office is a vacuum. Time and personality seem to bend here, contorting into shapes that fit into small desk and digital calendar. We exchange pleasantries and passwords, our interactions as sterile as the keyboards we tap on. Outside, the city breathes and bleeds in equal measure.
There are people; packed together, yet so apart. Each lost in their own world, their own worries. It’s funny how loneliness can crowd you.
I picked up a book during lunch, some fiction piece promising escapism. But even there, between the lines, the real world crept in — its shadows too long to ignore even in the brightest scenes. At that time fiction feels thin, almost transparent, when the real world presses its face so insistently against the window.
It seems there’s no outrunning reality, not really.
And there it is, a kind of epiphany, not bright but blunt. This is it. This dissonance, this friction — it’s not just the background noise; it’s the music of our era. The epiphany doesn’t come with fanfare or the comfort of resolution — but merely a quiet acknowledgment, a nod to the endurance it takes to keep moving when the scenery barely changes.
Life, it seems, doesn’t pause for epiphanies. It demands to be lived, even when living feels like you’re wading through molasses, even when the stories you want to tell are buried under the weight of the ones you’re forced to live.
I keep pushing, not because I expect the path to clear, but because standing still isn’t an option. My stories, the ones I tell myself to keep the darkness at bay, they’re there, somewhere. They’re not tales of triumph or escape, but of persistence — of finding a way to write even when the words seem to stick in the throat, of learning to listen for the echo in the void.
That’s how it is, then. You push through, not because you’re certain of finding something better on the other side, but because the act of pushing, of moving, of living in spite of it all, is perhaps the most human story there is.
P.S.: This piece was written on a Monday that somehow managed to be both busy and tediously long. It’s funny how keeping a tab on your feelings and writing whenever you find a moment can really turn things around. Who knew? There’s still room to create something that feels right.
