Notes from a twenty-five year old underground

I am twenty-five years old,
and I am already dead.

No, Not dead in the flesh!
No, that would be too merciful
but dead in the spirit,
dead in the soul,
dead in all the ways that
matter to a man who once
believed he could write his name
across the sky in letters of fire.

Listen: I am a writer who cannot write,
a dreamer who has forgotten how to dream,
a man who wanted to see the world
but has never been farther than
the gray perimeter of his own despair.

They tell you that twenty-five is young,
that life stretches before you like an open road.
But what they don't tell you is that
some roads lead nowhere,
that some lives are stillborn,
that some men are condemned
to watch their dreams die of starvation
while they feed the machine of survival.

I wanted to write stories
that would shake the foundations
of heaven and hell.

I wanted to walk through
foreign cities and taste languages
I'd never spoken.

I wanted to love wildly,
fail spectacularly,
live with the intensity of a man
who knows that each day is a gift
wrapped in the uncertainty of mortality.

Instead, I am a clerk. A clerk!
From journalist to accountant to clerk
each step down the ladder of my ambitions
justified by the sacred word: Responsibility.

Each morning I put on the uniform of respectability
and march to my desk like a prisoner walking to his execution.

My father—ah,
My father!—he understood the futility of it all.
He simply left.
No letter, no explanation, no farewell.

Just the sound of a door closing
and the echo of footsteps walking away
from the burden of being needed.

I envy him his cowardice.
I envy him his freedom.
I envy him his ability to say,
"This is not my life to live,"
while I remain chained to the
altar of my mother's expectations.

She looks at me with such hope,
such terrible, suffocating hope.

"My son, the writer," she tells the neighbors,
though I haven't written a word in months.

"He's finding his way," she says,
while I drown in the quicksand of my own mediocrity.

And the neighbors?
God, the neighbors!
They smile their pitying smiles and ask,
"How is your son doing?"
as if they don't already know
that I am twenty-five and nothing,
twenty-five and nobody,
twenty-five and going
nowhere at the speed of light.

I have become a professional disappointment,
an expert in the art of falling short.

Every job I take, I take for her
to silence the whispers,
to provide the stability
that my father never could.

But each paycheck is a nail in the coffin of my dreams.

At night, I sit at my desk and stare at
blank paper until the whiteness burns my eyes.
The words that once flowed like water
have turned to dust in my mouth.

How can I write about life when
I have forgotten how to live?
How can I write about love
when I am too terrified to love?
How can I write about adventure
when I am too paralyzed to move?
How can I write about triumph
when I am the living embodiment of defeat?

The void in my chest grows larger each day,
a black hole that swallows hope and excretes despair.
I am suffocating in my own existence,
drowning in the shallow waters of my unfulfilled potential.

I won’t lie, but
Sometimes I think about the rope,
the bridge, the pills hidden in the medicine cabinet.

Would it be so terrible to simply... Stop?
To end this charade of being a man
with a future when I am clearly a man with only a past?

But then I see her face, my mother's face,
and I know that my death would be her death,
that my escape would be her prison.
So I continue this grotesque dance,
this performance of living for an audience of one.

I am a writer who writes nothing,
a traveler who goes nowhere,
a man who has everything to say
and no one to say it to.

I carry my trauma like a briefcase
full of documents no one wants to read,
stories no one wants to hear.

The greatest joke of all?
I am supposed to be the
chronicler of the human condition,
the one who translates
suffering into something beautiful,
something meaningful,
something worth preserving.

But I cannot even translate my own suffering into words.
I cannot make sense of my own story.
I am a book that writes itself in disappearing ink,
a story that erases itself as it's being told.

This is what twenty-five looks like
when you are born to create
but condemned to survive,
when you are meant to soar
but chained to the ground
by the gravity of other people's needs.

I am not living! I am enduring.
I am not writing! I am drowning.
I am not a man! I am a question
without an answer,
a problem without a solution,
a story that begins
with "once upon a time" and
ends with "the end"
before anything interesting happens.

But perhaps this is my story after all!
The story of a man who wanted
to write his way out of the underground
but discovered that the underground
had already written him.

Black_tale

P.S Maybe survival is the story. Maybe sometimes the act of enduring is the most radical form of writing