Chopping vegetables. Slimy garlic sticking to my fingers.
The smell of oil and burning curry leaves drifted through the kitchen, sharp and bitter.
Somewhere in the sizzle and smoke, I felt myself slipping, slowly, inevitably, into the land of gloom. Bad thoughts consume me. Sometimes they flood my head like a raging tide, all at once, impossible to escape. Other times, they seep in slowly, quietly, like cold water trickling under a door, until everything inside me is wet and heavy.
Tonight, they reached up from some underground reservoir of Weltschmerz, soaking the fragile, functional surface of my mind.
I didn’t even wash my hands after cutting the vegetables. I just grabbed the random notebook I had been studying from earlier, flipped to the back pages. I just picked up a pen — stained, tired — and began to write — smearing faint smudges of garlic and oil into the paper’s skin. I had to distract myself from the despondency before it swallowed me whole.
- Oizys.