ALAS!

Written by Walsh

Wasn't it cushy in our firefly catchin' days?

I have spent many years attempting to weave my thoughts down to a single strand. How could it be? I used to exist in this world completely indifferent. Indifferent to reality and indifferent to what fate really has in store for a wallflower like me.

Yet to this day, I'm not sure if it was a strange, mystical, fateful force of existential crisis or the sheer relentlessness of being a '20 something' deep within my soul that keeps me awake every until 4 am while people are already busy running in their dreams and chasing butterflies.

Each day is a reprise of self-repairing, circling round the clock —mending the pieces of what's been swept away by other people's storm. Yet again, I'm well aware that maybe this is all because of my own doing, for I melt like tainted letters. Unwritten. Unsaid. Unfathomed. A phantom beyond shut doors —tryna make sense of loose change.

They don't tell you things like this when you ' re young when the strings of life are still perfect. Faultless. Just firefly catchin' and Disney-ish happily ever afters. Alas! You pick your poison and wait for life's bitterness to finally shove itself to the empty parking and sunken cities of your soul.

It is the fragility I have to live with despite the courage I fabricated from years of trying to co-exist in a world, seemingly like an inhospitable place for someone like me who felt things so deeply and true.

Alas! In the words of Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers: "How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?"

Eren