My eyelids are heavier than the weight of all my responsibility, and yet, this day appears to be unlived. It is not for the lack of action, for there were things to do, and I did them with the best of my ability. Now, it is almost two in the night, and the dull light from the lamp falls on my face, and I have no plaque to show, no award to lift. There was not a single minute to rest, and the little ten-minute respite I decided to take in the cab ride to meet friends—who, for all their eagerness to convene over food, talked about nothing of significance—was thwarted by an early arrival and the driver asking me, over the sound of wonderful music, whether I wanted to get off here or on the opposite side of the road. Dinner was two hours down the drain, where the food was as okay as food can be, and there was no shortage of things to discuss, too, but every interesting, intriguing topic flew on and off the table with the haste of a mosquito in a crowded room.
Out of all my pet peeves with those around, this is the largest one: how a good prompt, a good topic, is shrugged out of a setting without realising how hard they are to come by, and not only shrugged, but replaced with drab, flavourless humour or the sheer incompetence and inability to have an opinion. It baffles me to see the weightlessness of those around me: they have no personal philosophy, no opinion of their own, no reason for them to stand their ground, and so, with shaky foundations, they slide about their days into yet another year. There is but no error in their ways, for error comes from the conviction to follow through with what you believe in, not in regurgitating beliefs—eliminate the latter, the former never occurs. I envy them. Of course, I do! I make mistakes—often. It is all I have ever done, but they are the well-adjusted. They tell people like me how the world works over and over while I, having failed a million times to merely sway it in a different rhythm, nod reluctantly like a child who has just flunked another test.
This is what makes me tired; this is what made me tired today: the attempt to live a real life with my feet planted in the ground for things that ring true to my ears. And yet, I am up at night, wasting these words, and all of them, I suppose, sleep peacefully. Who gains from this? Who wins? No one does. The world, in its intricate tapestry of how things connect to one another, loses. Those like me? Well, we simply lose a little sleep. Then, we wake up and try again.