The sky has been damp for over seventy-two hours at this point, and I have been in this tavern writing this for approximately forty-eight minutes. With Coin plodding along at the back and feelings rising over intellect, a mental collapse is duly.

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I am certain the future resulting from all the vespertine hours spent in this tavern would be a long summer memory that just never dies. A summer wholly made up of days that all melt into one another, and nothing separates them. Where I am stuck vehemently looking for any fuckin reason not to take the plunge from the ledge, I continually find myself in. A summer where I spent an entire month weighing up if the future we envisioned for ourselves was still possible and how I wished I was not so much like my mother. The summer from over a decade ago, with softer skies and progressively warmer days. When summer was not the season of grief.

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Even if it does not make sense to keep dwelling on my tragedy, I refuse to get the help I need. I am too afraid to find out who I would be if I were medicated or how I would go through life without everything ceaselessly making me anxious. I keep on praying for everything to come to a halt. The hours, the stream of traffic, the unsteady pace people walk in, mostly the endless cycle I'm stuck in. I will never escape this infinite void.

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I envy the vertigo Icarus felt before his fall, the purest form of it forever being at a close yet unattainable distance—the purest form of the void that beckoned him and the impure we are fated to face. I have grown too weary of waiting on a future where I have burned my bed and, at long last, abandoned my wounds, past selves, and old-world blues. 

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In this post-summer (read: winter) perpetuity, the days individually are not very long, but there are too many of them. Yet, right now, the moon shining on the tavern's window is a bit more beautiful than the dreams that did not manifest or the people who did not end up staying. All I want to do for the remaining hours of this perpetuity is to be in the archway of life, pleading to my deity to allow me to shade away my burden of regrets, only for Him to not even look in my direction.

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My blood is the first to err; my head just follows when I think about how many passive hollow hours I have spent within these tavern walls. The replaceable calls on the loop and the rituals holding the moments from my ruin still make me believe the future I envisioned for myself is still possible.

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Thereafter, I am in a room where I can sit by the window and see the ocean. There would be no one else, and I would not feel a shade of anxiety or self-hatred. For the first time, experience a regular day. And writing this down is the only way to keep my story perfect.

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To my reader for being patient this long, I will leave you with a spring just coming to life before I go.