a short phase of nervous breakdown.

Extremely exhausted by three consecutive mind-draining reading sections, I collapsed on the bed with a large part of my consciousness taking refuge in somnolent state. In the midst of darkness, there was a curving route of thought that I remember strolling along with much ease, not even bothered about commanding a vestige of resistance. “What I have just done might well be useful much or less,” I thought, “to attain this goal, to help me arrive at the appointed station unscratched.” But … where are you going, again?” I stumbled over a rock into a deep lake. “What ideals are you chasing after, again?” the sentence emerged from a dim and distant piece of memory. The seemingly harmless question, uttered by a familiar personage, once had crushed me to tears, yet against which I never succeed in building up a defense mechanism. I murmured intelligible words about whether or not I knew the exact answers, and sank down gradually. However, preferred not to be drowned by this suffocating pressure of dark waters, I stubbornly turn back to the favorite topic of brooding: fear of failure seemed to have become such an imminent threat. “But you haven’t failed, you silly, what is the point of being all time-profligate by mulling over things that linger in the course of the unknown future?” The serpentine trap of dejection opened its wide mouth again. Presence of things that linger, things in between, in the middle, things yet to have happened, or stay unfinished, like this, always happens to immerse me in an ominous sense of melancholia. I picked up the phone and, soberly deprived of the intention to reserve equanimity and vulgarly hungry to define myself through bold assertions, rashly texted:

Between the two scenarios of succeeding and failing is a pitch-black void, standing within which man can’t help but thinking that either way he never really knows where he is heading, to heaven or hell, and feeling unbelievably sad. I never remember how I felt during that trying period of taking university exams, after every extra Physics class, or Math training, at noon and night when I am completely alone. I just know that I was a disturbing mess and wanted to die so bad.

then hit Send to the first number on the list, finger-crossed in the hope that the victim could not make out the connection between ‘man’ and ‘me’, or the hidden string between the past-tense desire and my present depression. He could not, for he replied with empty encouraging words.