I find myself wondering where my passion has gone. I wonder when I lost it. I used to enjoy things. Used to breathe in colour, in description and words and books and nature and adventure. Used to crave so many things, used to want so many things. Once upon a time, I used to breathe in life. I can’t remember where it went. Where I went. When I lost me. I search the mirror. A stranger stares back, looking for the same thing. My days bleed into each other. Day after day, week after week, month after month. Year after year. How many years have passed since I felt like a person? How long has it been since I remembered how to be me? I can’t remember. I can’t remember what it is to be anything at all. I am lost. I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to live either. I look back. Vast amounts of time have passed, slipped by without my notice yet somehow I haven’t moved at all. I am a living ghost, solid flesh with nothing inside. I can’t remember what is means to feel. I used to feel, I know I did. Ancient memories of a past me live in my brain, a mythological creature. She knew how to laugh, how to cry. Me and her are the same. Used to be the same. I don’t know how to get her back. Don’t even know if she still exists anywhere but the deep recesses of my mind. These days I just wish the world would swallow me up, would suck my feet out from under me until I sink into the earth, and then far far below until I no longer exist. Until I don’t have to wonder anymore, what it means to exist. What even is existence? When I speak to people, I don’t feel connected to them. When I reach for them, I don’t know how to make contact. I am a lone planet drifting within a sea of twinkling stars, each so bright and unique and alive. They know how to connect, how to feel. They know. I am desolate, silent and alone, wishing so much to be as bright as them, wishing so much to reach them, to live among them. They know. But I don’t. I am a burnt out star, my own twinkle long since extinguished. I am no longer one of them. And they are not like me. My heart is numb, my insides hollow. I want to disappear. But I can’t. Would anyone notice, would anyone care, if I simply dissolved into dust and scattered myself amongst those twinkling stars? If I cannot be one of them, can I not at least be around them, stardust floating among the stars? Always an observer, never a participant. I am a nothing, forced to be a something. I exist, I continue to exist, even though it feels like I’m barely here at all. I never asked for this. There was never a choice. I don’t want to be. I am stagnant, cold. Lifeless. I want to remember what it is to be alive. I want to remember what it is to be excited, to be passionate, to want to become greater than what I am. I want. But I feel nothing. The world is a void, sucking in everything I used to know about myself, everything I used to be until all that remained was an empty shell, the husk of the person I used to be. A meaningless existence. What is the point? There is no point. When did I stop being me? When did all the little things that made up me slip through my fingers? When did I give up on bettering myself? When did I lose my passion, my will, my happiness? When did I let that dark nothingness, that endless oblivion, slither in and steal my heart? I’m drowning in myself. I buried myself long ago under an ever-growing mound of despair. No surface in sight, no air to be found. I am being swallowed up my myself. I cannot breathe, yet my lungs still draw breath. I cannot move, yet my limbs continue to carry me forward. I cannot feel, yet my heart still screams. I cannot. Yet somehow I still do.