The fight.

Some days you want to lash out.
Hurting in small ways that defy description.  Near-invisible, uninvited insects crawling under your skin.
Not many of them.  Just enough to make you want to lash out.
You want to lash out with envy at the tip of your knuckles. With terrible injustice at the tip of your tongue.
You want to lash out at every empty boast you've ever made. At every deception you yourself have exposed.
Every exaggeration and every idle lie. Through all time. From every quarter.
You are the protagonist with no name in Hunger, wobbling through a Kristiania of your own sealed and crippled and darkest thoughts.
You wanted something more and maybe it came. And maybe it went. And will be no more. Or will be too far off to be worth anything.
You want to lash out for every toy, trinket or heart you never possessed.  Or every one you did and squandered.
You want to cry "Why me?!" because it is something you've never cried before.  You want to scream it in a public place to make a fool of yourself in a way that you have not yet made a fool of yourself.
You want an answer and you do not want an answer.
You want cash.  Not much.  Just enough to get the bills and the rent and the outstanding loans paid down a little. And though they don't amount to much in the eyes of the not-understanding others (very much like your crawling insect woes), these worries are yours nonetheless.  Yours to resolve or not.  Yours to meditate upon or ignore.
But remember my attentive friend, if you ignore them, they'll return with the coming of darkness. When all the help desks are shut down.  When all the drunks have taken everything from the ATMs. When only the creditors seek to be your phone friends.
Some days you want to lash out for all that should be yours but the voice in the back of your head and the sloppy depths of your heart keeps repeating, "You are not worthy.  I was lying.  I was trying to deceive you and I succeeded with flying colours.  I did it as a testimony to life's ways. To the ways of others.  The ways of humans and animals and fungi whose sole purpose is to infect you so that it can go on.
And you cannot. I was only trying to instruct you."
You want to lash out and land one solidly in your own solar plexus so fucking hard that sleep may result from the wounding.
But you will tire.  As you've tired before. And will again in times to come.
For we are good at that.  Us people.  We are good at shadow boxing and grinding ourselves down. On indifference.  On consuming.  On knowledge that is no knowledge at all.  Occasionally on hate (but not too much).  On joyous, celebratory  altruism (but far too little). On talk, on work and on finding work.
Do we grind ourselves down on love?
I don't know.
I suspect that love is the respite between battles but I've seen too much evidence to the contrary.
And now I must apologise for lashing out at you.

Not drowning. Assessing.