8 am, you wake up with the feeling inside your bones that something is going to crush you today until you are unable to breathe.

9 am, you take deep breaths like you are trying to swallow as much air as you can. But inhales demand for exhales; what you let in has to go out.

10 am, you hear the first words uttered by your beloved in a voice that might have scared you if you weren’t already scared. You are always scared.

11 am, you start feeling this prickling sensation like someone’s eating you up from inside. Like you are being hollowed out slowly.

12 pm, you realise it’s a chirpy bird that eats while singing hideous songs, and you are getting devoured and going crazy by all the noise simultaneously.

1 pm, you try to sleep to avoid feeling every bit of the process of being empty by taking a nap, but sleep doesn’t come your way like it used to. I guess this time, it cancelled the plan first.

2 pm, you are hollowed.

3 pm, there’s nothing to feel.

4 pm, there’s nothing to feel except the feelings you didn’t want to feel.

5 pm, you have opened a new book that talks about someone else’s emotions to find an escape from yours.

6 pm, escape is good until a word or a moment or a sound pulls you back into reality, and it’s too much to bear now because that one hour of freedom made you completely forget how to handle your own self, and now you can’t remember.

7 pm, all of sudden, something falls on your heart, and it’s all you can do not to stumble.

8 pm, this something is getting bigger and bigger and you wonder how to stop it before it becomes larger than you.

9 pm, by now, you’ve realised that there are not many things you have control over, and this thing inside your body isn’t one of them.

10 pm, it’s heavy. Enough to make you feel crushed.

11 pm, it’s too heavy to let your legs be able to hold the weight, too heavy to be able to breathe, so you lie down on the floor because there’s nothing else you can do and let the tears fall.

12 am, everything drops. Now, there’s nothing left except the feeling of being nothing and an ember of hope for a better tomorrow.