Melancholy

09/24/15

Melancholy is a funny word. It's word that I first encountered reading. I read it many times, somehow, in my junior year of high school. I never looked it up, but it's meaning bled through and I understood. Eventually, a context in my high-school setting screamed for the word to be used and I said it.

For the life of me, I do not remember what was being talked about. Only that it involved two students and two teachers talking about something not particularly related to school. I remember only how I said the word.

Meh lanch o lee

There was a look on the teachers' faces. A look that conveyed they knew what word I was using immediately, but that they needed a moment to process my incredible error.

And immediately upon seeing their faces I had understood an error had been made. That I must've managled the word. I braced myself and they laughed and laughed at my mistake.

This trivial little moment was something rather amazing to me. Upon making a silly error and being corrected in a slightly embarassing way, I was not upset. Remembering now, that may have been the first time. I had been correctly in embarassing situations many times, and that will surely continue, but this was the first time it did not upset me.

Now, don't get me wrong, I was a bit defensive and quick to explain my hilarious error, but for context this was the same me that threw a temper-tantrum literally kicking and screaming on the floor over a stale-mate occuring during a chess match. There was maybe a year's difference between these two moments.

Even more amazing is that I didn't reflect on that moment at the time. Or at all until now, almost a decade later. It was just a silly memory that came to say hello from time to time. And unlike other silly memories I don't cring at this one's presence. I give a little laugh, or perhaps a slight smirk.

I think about the word from time to time. To me, it is an alien feeling. Something that does not resonate with my experience. At the very least, it does not come to me without my wanting it. I might want to feel melancholy, and so it happens. But even then, it isn't sadness. It's more a deep thought in a shallow meandering. An apparition of apathy.

Of which I find myself now. There are things I should be doing, things I would enjoy doing, and I simply find myself unable to choose to do them. It's something I can do all the time in the right context, but right now it simply is not available to me. It's like, here's this button that does the thing, but now I push it and it just makes this obnoxious tone and nothing else.

So I think.

I think about why I can't do something I should be perfectly able to do. I think about thinking. I find music, and video, and reading to inspire more thinking. Eventually there's all this noise in my head that it just cancels out.

And then there's silence.