John's melancholy

            John Doe is stuck. Stuck in this pathetic routine that everybody else tend to call life. It’s basically one day after another, one lost hope after another, drifting away into nothing, drowning in misery. The perpetual struggle got lost along the way and the only thing left is to take each moment at a time, praying for survival, because redemption is long lost and forever forgotten.

            But that’s not the point is it? It says right there in the title that we should talk about melancholy or something like that. Well, truth be told, it’s a bit much to say that John Doe is a melancholic. He doesn’t really have much too crave for right now, so he tries to hide in the past where no one can bother him. But you can’t travel back in time unfortunately. The human race hasn’t been so kind as to offer him this option. So what’s left? One thing and one thing only. Memories. And John has plenty of those.

            Lots of things from the past go trough John’s mind, he gets haunted by various ghosts, some of the happy, some of the sad times. He likes each and every one of them tough, he doesn’t discriminate. It’s long past the time when John Doe learned to take the good with the bad, and now he knows that life’s full of misery and sorrow, but that shouldn’t make one sad. At the very most it should make him a cynic. But he’s not a cynic, he cares too little about the world around him for that. So he lets himself be haunted, missing his past as much as he despises his present.

            He thinks about Jane Doe, her presence sometimes lingers in the depths of his twisted mind. He doesn’t miss her tough. He knows too well that she is dead, and there’s no way he could bring her back. Too much has changed. People don’t change, that’s for shure, yet everything is now different from what it was when John was in love with her. He wishes nothing more than to go back to those times, when everything was simpler and everyone was less. But he can’t and he knows that.

            Basically John doesn’t miss Jane Doe, he doesn’t even miss loving her. He just misses the way he loved her. That unconditional, never-to-be-shared love that kept him alive and never let him down. So if John Doe is melancholic, then he’s got the melancholy of delusion. He misses his own self, he misses his old ideas, his old concepts, no matter how terribly wrong they have proven to be. Reality has failed him, the present has failed him, and the only thing left is to find shelter in his illusions of the past. He might even be wrong, those times could have seemed even darker at the time.

            Most likely, the times were bitter back then. John vaguely remembers the frustrations caused by his secret passion, and he resents himself for not saying anything when the time came to talk truth. But he doesn’t regret anything. He never does. He accepts what he’s done and what he hasn’t done, because altogether if it weren’t for those decisions, he probably wouldn’t be standing here today, revealing his darkest corners, exposing even the biggest depths of his soul. So yes, John is melancholic, but life goes on and his melancholy is just water under the bridge. Seize the moment, as they say.