We invent mercy out of memory for world does not heal.
Without warning—here again—a landscape of unbounded barrenness. A blasted expanse where color has bled dry. The ground itself giggles like a hyena while the air thickens into a fugue of despair, a festering vapor rising from unseen graves. This land shackles my ankle; everything conspires to make the world unreachable, to turn clarity into murk. Has any soul ever learned to live with the gnawing poverty of affection, care, or love? With the unending cycle of sickness? These specters have chewed at me without mercy for as long as my memory survives.
I fumble like a whirling dervish, spinning without direction, unable to find rest—or believe it could ever exist. Sometimes I scream. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I do both, clawing for escape from the same grinding ordeals. These are no outbursts but grim rituals: I summon absurd courage, grip the edges of my unraveling world, and endure until the storm breaks, however briefly.
My brain is hard-wired not to annihilate itself. It spins fevered visions, grotesque and improbable scenarios, to avoid self-destruction—an evolutionary sorcery built into the human brain to prevent millions from self-annihilation. As I sleepwalk through days, I converse without being present, grin through gritted teeth, shed tears, surrender to sleep, and even croon hollow anthems. Oh, the charade. Vows of joy ring false—whether whispered to family or inscribed into the solitude of my own mind.
And still I rise. More times than I fall. When daylight retreats in the west and a vast pall of the night drapes half the world, a faint hymn stirs for those still attuned—the quiet assurance that dawn will return. It offers no triumph, only a slender grace: to mend the fractures, rewind the broken reel, and scour away yesterday’s rot. I know this truth, yet live as if I don’t. Am I fortunate to cling to this threadbare solace, this lukewarm shroud of comfort? For now, it is the only mercy fortune extends—not a cure, but a crutch I lean on, aware of its frailty, and for the moment, enough.
Making of:
Psychic wasteland as setting: not ordinary sadness but a repeating collapse, a landscape where even the ground turns hostile, so deprivation feels like a place to cross, not just a feeling.
Outbursts as ritual: screaming, crying, and enduring are survival liturgies—grim, repeated acts that keep the narrator from going under, a practiced discipline of staying alive one more day.
Evolutionary sorcery: the “hard-wired” brain generates grotesque visions as emergency magic that prevents self-destruction while distorting reality.
Public charade: conversing, grinning, and singing form a surface-normal life that hides a private catastrophe.
Slender continuity: the turn toward dawn promises only that night will end, not that pain will, so “threadbare solace” names a small, exhausted mercy that is fragile, insufficient—and, for now, enough.