Resignation

Like most days, Ray was about to go to bed with a certain desolate resignation. He had been talking to his family about how he was starting to feel unwell again and he was asked to pinpoint the culprit for his pain. Was it anxiety about futures, exams, or something equally stupid? Was it depression about dying on a dying planet orbiting a dying star? Or was it just all of it?

Maybe he had been consumed by doomerism or a similar unspeakable fate, but each passing moment only seemed to make his life feel increasingly unbearable. What he did constantly feel, however, was this desperate longing for something—or someone—to pull him out of his own darkness. He looked at careers and people like lifelines, but the truth—that the life he imagined them taking him to would probably have him gasping and reaching for newer straws—was one he hadn’t quite learned how to digest.

Ray had spent the better half of the day questioning his career choices. Well, let’s rephrase that. Ray had spent the better half of his day questioning all of his life choices. He tried to think of the last time he was happy for more than a couple of hours.

“It has to be the summer of 2014,” his mother had answered when he presented her with this question.

Twelve years. That’s a long time, Ray thought.

“Of course there have been things to be happy about in between these years,” his mother confirmed when she saw Ray’s expression—one that said, quite plainly, what the actual hell.

Ray had been great at one thing all his life, though, and that had been writing letters of resignation. He remembered the one silly time he mustered up the courage to go to the tea shop alone, only to take a U-turn ten yards from his destination. He had been great at giving up on things—purpose, dreams, love, and maybe even the world and living at some point?.

Ray often fantasized about writing one last letter of resignation at times—one that would draw the curtains on his sorry existence—but, like most things, he gave up on that too. Man, imagine being a ghost—you would have to see it all, but be deprived of the joy of screaming at someone.

He once had a doctor give him the weirdest diagnosis. The doctor said that he had, at some point, forgotten what happiness was. It sounded so funny in the moment that he took a couple of seconds to laugh. But thinking again, without his hat of condescension, he had to admit that the doctor may have had a point.

So how does he reclaim this idea of happiness in his mind? He thinks in terms of escape—soul-searching trips (preferably to the Himalayas), soulmates (the kind described in Good Will Hunting), or even drugs (the kind that would leave him smiling, giggling, weightless). But the truth he must sit with is this: nothing can cure him. Nobody can cure him.

All he can hope for is that future Ray will find better ways to channel his frustrations, his love, and his anger—and, one day, stop drafting these pain in the ass letters of resignation to himself. Who knows, he might even call that happiness some day.