Writing about this again makes me sad. Writing at this time makes me sad. I cannot tell the difference between joy and sorrow, for even when I am open, there lingers a sense of sadness, of missing something that echoes in the back.

Somewhere along the way, I had lost myself, and I was not able to bring it back. It has been so long that I no longer recognize what was taken from me, nor what I have become without it. It comes as a feeling of absence, of a far, distant dream, of a spring that would never come.

I only ever know calmness when I am unbearably sad. Kafka was right: there is a certain serenity that comes in sorrow, a clarity hidden in the fog of illusion. Yet I still cannot identify what is missing, only that something is, in fact, missing.

I miss my father. But it seems I am using his grief to explain the sadness I now feel, although such feeling has lived within me for as long as I can remember, until I began to romanticize it. It has now become a silent clarity that my heart understands.

During the day, I am dreadful of the world I ought to face, the speed I must run in, the battle of life, of people, as well as the self. During the night, sorrow fills my heart, as I have run so fast I forgot to exist, to perceive myself as anything other than a machine. It is dark, yet when I look in the mirror, I see a tired, weary face that clings to the night like a bee to the last flower of spring.

In the night there is a stagnancy that liberates the heart of all its duties. Though sorrowful, it is nonetheless the realm of peace and silence. There is nothing to expect but a long solitude and the surrender of the mind. If spring were not to come, at least I am shielded by the night. Before it is time to fight again, I can rest, take my turn in the way I wish to exist, or not exist at all. It does not matter.

Maybe spring never comes. Perhaps that is what’s missing in the theme of my so-called life. Perhaps I am a bit insane. I attempt to shape a feeling, yet I cannot possibly replicate the exact feeling in words, can I? It is like trying to explain music; you can never truly express it unless it is experienced by the individual himself. Sylvia was right: you just cannot write things as they truly are.

Is that a silly purpose, or merely an illusion? I wish to explain, to understand in my explanation. It matters not what is understood, only that it is understood in the way it was intended.

Is that possible? Or was I assigned with something that lives only in the psyche? It’s kind of a rip-off, to be honest. Why are we given such urges if we ultimately fail at pursuing them? Like defining a certain shape of the clouds, that is what the wish to describe equals. No matter how much I try to express, I am only understood within the walls of my perceiver, my reader, outside the walls of my constitution.

I always wished to offer an experience rather than an explanation, with the breeze, the sequence of thoughts, of sensations, with a peaceful excitement of harmony, just as I had felt while creating it. That is my purpose. And yet, I fail to portray the feeling of the spring that never comes.

Let me try once more.

A spring, a lucidity, a felicity that comes after a long coldness. Something that does not make much sense, yet is the path to the so-called fulfilment. Something that awakens the heart. A look you take in the mirror and are able to recognize what you perceive. A look of finding your home.

A spring that never comes is a flirtation of such feeling. A siren you hear in the midst of winter that eludes your heart with hope, only to find yourself further than where you had begun, where the night left you. You perceive the blooming flowers as you stand in the darkness, unable to find warmth yet close enough to smell the jasmine.

A spring that never comes is the entropy of matters, of experiences, and of things. It is the inability to step away from the calmness of sorrow. It is a false understanding of reality, a failure to remember what has gone missing, as well as forgetting to search the moment the day begins.