The Muses have long since forsaken him. The Forbidden Fruit lies half eaten in his hand, tasting alternatively like sawdust and ambrosia. He is not melancholic, no, it was eons ago that nostalgia pestered him, now active emotions are merely quondam companions.
Though he stands on the cusp of adulthood, that supposed period of animate existence, he is already an itinerant traveller of the labyrinthine paths of the soul and now seeks to put an end to that wayfaring, he has found himself multiple times barely escaping from the siren song of the seven mortal sins, he has wandered yonder the veil of his dreams and found them all but broken, not by the instrument of another’s making but his own, he tried to walk back but instead stumbled into the ditch of self-pity.
Now, though he has escaped that most despicable and twisted hell, worse than any of Dante’s, he has unwittingly made a Faustian pact with it, giving up that most prized faculty, the faculty required to empathize, to sympathize, to love, to hate.
The faculty to feel.
So he sits in his chair, reading the experiences of sycophants, hypocrites, backstabber, liars, carnal malefactors in their very own arrogant words. He knows that the experiences are mostly hyperbole and the people sharing these are less than perfect, for the moments that they are Mr. Hyde are not meant to be told to the world, yet he stills reads them so that he can live vicariously through them but he also judges them, judges their every mistake. He is an empty husk, only capable of the most basic of human functions, even the instinct of self-preservation not there, haunted by a voice that constantly croons in his ear, asking him if it weren’t better if he simply ceased to exist.
