Paint the town red...

Perhaps life's simplest and most frequent mistake is to take who we are for granted in our anxious anticipation of who we might be. I came to a place where I am completely done with being someone who would turn to all the empty things of this world to satisfy my innermost needs. I was through fabricating solutions of my own devising, crafting makeshift concoctions that never hit the mark.

Anticipating sorrow to neutralise sorrow - that’s paltry, cowardly stuff, he told himself, knowing he was an ace practitioner of the craft. But he was happy for other things too: that he'd be doing something he'd never done before, that his days would be spent in a world that was so different to him that he could feel a sheen of anticipation crawling all over. Thoughts could no longer keep themselves in a critical equilibrium. The silence was oppressive; the occasional sounds of birds and cars struck him as unnatural, out of sync. Every sound was twisted and crushed beneath the weight of some unstoppable force. And in the midst of this, he waited for something to happen. Something's got to happen, he felt sure. It can’t end like this.