Sometimes, I get flashes of melancholy – the kind that weighs me down and follows me, straddling on my shoulders for days. These flashes don’t have specific triggers. Maybe they do, the eyes, eyes that make me feel ashamed of my ability to even afford shame, or melancholy. I was riding the bus yesterday. At a bus stop, a group of teenagers were joking and messing around, laughing rambunctiously the way children do. Then I saw him - a chubby adolescent boy, standing in the shadows, less a foot from them, just looking out, looking at me, looking into me. He was dressed in the same school uniform, carrying the same baton as the other kids but why was he alone? Why wasn’t he laughing with them? Why does he look so sad?

Sometimes I tell myself that it’s okay, that it’s all okay, that it will be - these people do have loving families, enough to eat, idyll lives, no worries, but it’s more of a consolation for myself than anything. The reality is, these problems do exist. Maybe not for the faces who’ve triggered my concern, but in others, others I’ve yet to encounter and worry for, to the ones I dismiss, find no cause to care about, maybe even despise. And that makes me worry.

Misery is a luxury. At my darkest I’ve repeated this. That I should be grateful that the worries I have are often fixable, that the only grief and illness that ails me are the ones that are unnamed, inexplicable, often self-conjured, existential, and more significantly, escapable. Granted I find the escape route from my head.

Until I do, I’ll carry on looking out of windows, withstanding and containing my occasional compassion, helplessness-induced melancholy and hope that we both have strength enough to rid the demons that hamper us.