If "better" can be used so casually, so dismissive of both etymology and truth, then I suppose I am improving. But this is only a nauseating attempt to humanize the abject, scented, and sealed within a box that masquerades as profound revelation. It is the noxious perfume of packaged sorrow. Yet, a semblance of anchorage exists. A colossal trident, hurled through the abyssal gloom, embeds itself into the seabed's soft, bleached sand, a morbid certainty, a welcome one. Today, however, my lungs fill with brine; the descent feels terminal. Sometimes I throw the trident before severing the noose. A wish for compassion manacles me now, a desperate plea to leash my heart's rampant, unfortunate reflexes. A bald patch now sits upon the beautiful, not uncut, hair of graves. My palms reek of hexenal, a medicinal, metallic-sweet tang cut with the sharp, ferrous lick of iron a subtle, subdued scent of a fresh wound. The magnanimous cruelty of small things remains, still, magnanimous. This morning, I found a young stalk on the rosebush, its edges serrated like a primal tool, tiny thorns embroidered into its tender flesh. I pressed a fingertip deep into one. Just one, a deliberate, surgical incision, a singular sensation to mute all undercurrents. Today, I choose only one flavour: Tapal Lemon green tea, a classic palate cleanser. No cinnamon, no spearmint, no cacophony of disjoint flavours wreaking havoc on my taste buds. Today, I will be one thing. A perverse hatred burns for this stupid, warm-toned light, planted like a malignant star above the skull. My retinas have been bombarded to distortion; I can't see a damn thing on this page. I crave the cold, equitable governance of a cool-toned ceiling fixture, so that I may pay the price with something other than my sanity. And the need to stop these nocturnal vigils I have consecrated is a well-worn, disregarded truth. My mouth and throat are a wasteland of extreme bitterness; even water, the supposed *aqua vitae*, enters like a dose of liquid poison. I wet my lips and almost gag on the flavour, its as if my mouth were growing stinging nettles. The sputum from my throat seems to have burrowed through my brain, blocking at least one ear for days. Sometimes, when it's deathly silent, the air crackles with a low ring, or, far worse, with the harrowing sounds of silence itself. It speaks, I swear to you, it does. These loud, guttural sounds of existence always recall that book from the college library—a collection of short stories with a striking red cover. I can almost picture reading it under the bright, hot sun, sitting on the hard, moist soil where only wisps of grass remained. The back of my neck was soaked, the white georgette sucking all the heat and amassing it. It was uncomfortable to the point of psychic abrasion. I cannot recall the name of the book, but the nauseating paranoia it inspired remains, a parasitic, physical weight ever since. A story so saturated with hopelessness, I can still feel its mass dropping again and again in the pit of my stomach, like a rock fracturing the still surface of a stagnant stream in a cave so damned that only the ripples register. A creature who befriended a lighthouse, the last of its kind. A creature who died of heartbreak. Surely, there is nothing worse than remaining when all has passed. Cold creeps back in. What else did I do today other than this exhaustive, self-indulgent lament? But by day's end, an equilibrium was struck. A drop of sunshine slept in my lap, its small, pink nose dusted with soot from God knows where. A warmth, tangible and unconditional, a reason to both live and to die. It's not that hard, really, I guess, to hold both poison and its antidote in the same mouth. To be more than one thing.