Litost

Some feelings are like dreams that pervade every corner of one's spirit like a mist, that do no let one think, act or even be. Some trace of our dreams persists in us as if we had not slept properly, and a daytime torpor warms the stagnant surface of the senses. It is the intoxication of being nothing, when one's will is a bucket of water in a yard kicked over by a clumsy foot in passing.

One looks but does not see. The long street crowded with human creatures is like a fallen inn sign in which the jumbled letters no longer make sense. The houses are merely houses. The ringing hammer blows coming from the book shop have a familiar strangeness. Each blow is separated in time, each with its echo and each utterly vain. The passing carts sound the way they do on days when thunder threatens. Voices emerge not from people's throats but from the air itself. In the background, even the river seems weary.

It is not tedium that one feels. It is not grief. It is the desire to go to sleep clothed in a different personality, to forget, dulled by an increase in salary. You feel nothing except the mechanical rise and fall of your legs as they walk involuntarily forwards, on feet conscious of the shoes they're wearing. Perhaps you don't even feel that much. Something tightens inside your head, blinding you and blocking up your ears.

It's like having a cold in the soul.

*This was a collaboration with @Ellard_Vasen in Amsterdam.