ANHEDONIA by Melancholy Sunday

Imagine a sorrow so profound you fall right through it. Pain so intense you no longer have the capacity to sense it. In its place you feel nothing. You sink down, anesthetized, until you are nothing but a pinpoint of light; you lie very still and rest in the silence; for millennia you contemplate darkness.

Entombed in the desert, you imagine a well. You thirst to bring it into existence. First, you must dig, slowly into the ground, handful by handful, deep into the earth, until a trickle of water begins to burble and gush. It is there you gather your strength; you sit for ages beside the cool waters of this well, as slowly the waters rise and nourish your roots; and you grow wise and awaken.

And from your soul a cry emerges, from centuries of suffering and privation, a stately agony that singes all who hear it—hopeful in its longing ... and beautiful, and free: for without its lusting, solemn hope there would be no song. Only suffering.

And so you sing, but having as of yet no language with which to clothe your melody, you fixate on the liturgy which has sustained you for millennia in your pain. Accretions of light in agony, metaphors suspended in time, ideas catapulting, leapfrogging through the ages. You learn what it means to worship, and you worship, darkly, through a shattered prism the light which guides you. You feel it gathering within you and then proceeding out from you in jagged lines to greet your long lost savior, who smiles with joy to take you in his open arms.

But you are already a husk, and your body has died, giving all it could, to flower and sow.

To the wind, its song ...

"Words, words, words."