The Seasonal Chronicles

DECEMBER - 2024

It's December again—the tumultuous December, when life ends at the hands of an unflinchingly brazen cold. As hopes dip into unsheathing horrors of fate, and woes intertwine into an unyielding vault of perennial desperation, life has become piercingly unbearable. Evoking valor and summoning little pieces of my fragmented existence every time I let myself step out of my fated misery, I feel like shedding off the skin of my carefully woven dreams, leaving the cast of my unfulfilled hopes to wither and wan, carefully plodding, never looking back at what destiny considered too heavy for my soul to be clothed in. As cold ascends further, I must find myself a cloak of warmer misfortune, lest I die at the hands of a cooler misery.

As days pass and life drowns in a chillier malevolence, this stinging pain of my existence continues to quiver my being. How am I supposed to find my purpose? My days begin at midnight and never end. If night is for cradling one’s resolve, then there is surely none for me. I am a reckless wanderer, having lost his conscience, aimlessly straddling through meaning and purpose, yet finding none.

As the season grows colder and so does life, my longing for existence has dissolved into an ache that I crave and recoil - a persistent ambivalence about holding on to little pieces of what is left of me. And as all these miserable feelings engulf me, blanketing me with a strange feeling of self remorse every-time, I strangely feel colder with each new layer being added. A gnawing sense of guilt and resentment keeps crawling my soul, and though sane and stable I seem, I have become a corpse within, a shell without a purpose.

The days blur together in a haze of emptiness, with the cold creeping through every thought, every breath. I find myself caught between the longing for something meaningful and the fear of confronting the very thing that could shatter what little remains of me. My heart beats, but it is a hollow drum, echoing in a space that feels too vast, too silent. I am a thousand pieces in a shroud, too alive to be dead and too aloof from death to be full of life again. I find myself getting drawn to the excruciatingly painful reality and the undying pain of the insensitivity of the past. As I sip the crimson resonance of persistent despair, my soul is enshrouded in the tumult of grief. The harder I try to let things not slip through the hands, of my ill destiny, the harder it gets to hold on to hope.

Days sleep into mourning and nights wake to endless longing for something that even the self does not acknowledge. There is a persistent absence of purpose, a continual disbelief in the meaning of existence, at the same time, there is is this vague hope of being able to find meaning in the meaningless. As cold enshrouds my hollow being, I am compelled into thinking how much of a paradox my existence can be - fleeting yet unfading, how am I supposed to house all these layers of my limitless being within a limited existence?

Am I not a mere mortal who dies in December cold losing to the absurdity of life?

Am I not just another hopeless manifestation of a forlorn cause?

Why must I ponder and dive deep into the warmth of purpose when I am veiled in the insensitive December dread of desperation?

What is this ache?

What is this flame of defiance burning within?