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It's 9am and I'm in Copley Square. The sun has just squeezed past the trees, and a cool breeze greets the early rising tourists and other assorted wanderers. The smell of freshly lit morning cigarettes permeates the air.

My tailored coat and slacks defy my disheveled mentality, but hints of my current state of mind leak out through the scars on my dress shoes and the stray threads fraying from my shirt. I collapse onto a park bench, heaving my shoulder bag aside, and begin to rub the sleep out of my eyes.

But I can't seem to rub out the exhaustion. The increasingly present fatigue of a life long lived but short of experience. The dull nagging pain of a never-ending sprint to nowhere.

I grip the bridge of my nose tightly and pull in a breath. Blink once, blink twice, look around.

People move past with a clear sense of purpose. Lost in thought, lost in conversation, lost in their own lives. As if things mattered so much. As if they'd ever thought about whether things mattered so much.

And here I sit, lost.

--

I'd never felt such a profound sense of emptiness. Not a self-aware emptiness; not a deep sadness or loneliness or angst. Just a complete disconnect - a lack of worry or care or passion about pretty much anything.

I'd felt it for a while, I realized. I just hadn't had a chance to reflect on it until then. What a funny thing, though. Introspection without subjecthood. Self-reflection without self.

I've since returned. The sleep helped. The days off helped. For the first time in months, I thought about music. About writing, reading. About friends, about adventures. About lovers lost, and lovers yet to be found.

And I actually cared. It all felt important again.

But I'm not without scars. Some of the passion, some of the vibrancy, some of it has disappeared. That youthful earnestness has been dulled, stained with a subtle complacency. And I'm worried. Worried that this will continue to occur. Worried that with each sprint, with each long grind, I'll lose something.

But, for some reason, I'm not as worried as I was before...