You feel like crying. You feel like ensconcing yourself in a cocoon of stiff blankets, giving yourself to the decay of death, the hopelessness of reality.

Look how far you've deteriorated. Two in the morning, red-eyed and awake. Clothes strewn on the floor, and other sundries littering the matted expanse of scratched wood in equal disarray. What happened to the straight A's student, who existed in some fantasy in what seems like decades ago? Who knew the neatly combed and clipped hair would become an unkempt crop of indistinguishable locks; who knew the radiance of your countenance could become one that exudes sleeplessness, fatigue, and something that so closely resembles a deathly decomposition?

Every day you glare at yourself before a grimy mirror, reeking of stale sweat. As your bloodshot eyes pierce themselves accusingly, you see and feel it all, more acutely than the pain in your chest:  The grubby feeling of weight and ugliness on your body; the shuffled and grotesque appearance every morning - afternoon - and your pointless days of nothing well-spent.

You resent yourself. You can do something about it - you can clean your house, go for a quick jog - but no option appeals to you as favourable in the least. You have succumbed to despondency.

Almost as if I've given up, you think, groggy and angry. What a waste of space. Your diminutive room is in a mess, and your disposition even more so. But everything now, it seems, appears as a vague blur of no meaning, like a fuzzy static suspending itself over your conscience.

The tips of your fingers press themselves against the surface of the mirror; even they seem repulsed. The glass could have cracked.