R-10

Exhaustion permeates my very marrow these days. I spend sixty to seventy hours a week working. Forty at my full-time job, in which I strive to carve morsels for the populace from the flesh of a spiteful, hateful, cannibalistic beast which seeks to emulate all the wretched aspects of cancerous cells. Twenty to thirty at my part-time job, in which I am treated as something innately inferior and unintelligent, solely by the merit of my position.

Despair uses exhaustion to hollow out the bones, to scrape a place for it to overtake the warmth of blood, to drive life out by nestling into the heart; deep, deep it burrows, a virus implanting itself in the core of a person, spewing its necrotic paralytic through veins and arteries until its victim can no longer hear the pleas of life, can no longer remember the sensations of joy and contentment and peace.

There are many forms I like to take. Crow. Fox. Octopus. Hearth. Sea. Sky. Constellation. I feel my wingtips drag on the grass more often than not these days. I miss the feeling of a warm, cosy den. I feel myself struggling to escape from snares and puzzles. I feel the memory of heat being driven from my flesh. I feel cut off from the openness I need, overhead or underfoot. I feel cut off from the luminous tales one can find in the night.

So many of my dear ones, too, struggling, straining. Despair is seeking to take us all out in one fell swoop. And I am proud to say that it is failing.

We are turning to so many things to fend off despair. Art. Each other. Our loved ones. We are reaching out, holding hands in hands, all quivering, all straining, all fending – and all warm, full of love in love in love. Tyranny would have us believe we are alone, for it cannot thrive when union abounds.

If the now is difficult, we create things to look forward to. A wedding and a vacation and a visit and a party and another party and collaborations and creations; we see past our strife, to the rest of our lives.

I hope you have that, my fellow. I hope that you remember your heart isn't solely in your hands, but in the hands of those who love you, in the hands of those you love. If you feel alone, reach out! Reach! Those hands are yours for the taking. They will take your hands, pull you into arms, into chests. Your hearts will beat together, drowning out the dirges of despair.

I love you, my fellow. Perhaps you are a stranger to me; this is irrelevant. I never see love as an inevitability; it is a choice, it is a verb, it is something one does. I love. And I love you. Love is the pursuit to understand and empower the fullest measures of a subject. I want to know you, and I want to support you, to help you thrive and grow. Love is an action of life, of living. To live, we must love; to love, we must learn. To stop one is to stop all. I challenge you to strive towards immortality, to learn, to love, to live, endlessly, through everything, forever onwards.

And I will walk with you, my fellow. I love you.