You are too young to be dead, And too old to be alive. What remains is the empty aging of a broken heart and lost faith. The girl you love is afraid to fall in love. The boy you befriended leaped from the highest building in a split second with closed eyes and called it freedom. Perhaps, those of us, who have seen the ground too closely in the depths of loneliness are not afraid of falling from great heights. And there you lie: in bed, gazing at things that haunt you even with open eyes. The old man in the opposite building still grins at your weary face. His daughter smiles at him from a 4x4 photograph. Your mother dismisses your depression as lack of sleep, and your father, too disinterested to care. The social media influencers label it as lack of love, and overhyped poetry is touted as the solution. You jot down a page of misery, suffocating with all that you should have forgotten by now — but then, the things that persist hurt the most, don’t they? By the next day, you’re already half asleep in your sorrow and too exhausted to rouse it. What to call this growing sadness remains elusive. So, you get through the days. You do everything you’d rather not. The girl you love is still afraid to love. The specter of the boy who departed smiles at your helplessness to see him. Your mother continues to blame the painful sleep cycle, and your father is busy buying time from a God who has lost faith in the world he himself created. What remains is you and the bed you find yourself in right now, reading another piece of Instagram poetry, reminding you of how you managed to survive. Because you are too young to die and too old to truly live.
