An Inquiry

It was a grey February afternoon, the kind where the light drains out of everything before three o’clock, when I first noticed something was wrong with me. I couldn’t focus. The office smelled of stale coffee and dust, and the air-conditioning was ticking that irregular rhythm it always made when the weather turned damp.

I’d been at my desk for hours without producing anything worth keeping. My mind kept drifting, pulling away from the work like a fish on a loose line, wandering into old memories that rose up unbidden—fragments of things long past, each one heavy with years I didn’t want to think about. There was admittedly some comfort in it. A desire to return to a place where difficult decisions only affected me and no one else. But underneath it all, something was seeping through the crack of that closed door like a black fog eager to suffocate.

The longer I sat there, the harder it became to drag myself back to the present. The blank pages in front of me seemed to recede, like I was looking at them down a long tunnel. I started cataloguing what was happening to me the way a corpsman might report on his wounds—my concentration shot, my mind feeling hungry for the past, this reluctance to move, to act, to do anything but sit in this grey half-awake state. Was it just melancholy? The February doldrums that hit everyone on days like this?

Or was it something darker? I didn’t know. But I decided right then I wouldn’t—I couldn’t just sit and wonder about it. I’d have to watch it. I’d have to pay attention to where it led, to prepare myself for the coming days. At the very least so I wouldn’t spiral into that great abyss once more. Whatever it was, at least I’d see it coming.