From here, the block on which you live is an indistinct singularity. They arch over the sidewalk, forming an inexorable tunnel. There are trees, as bordered by their impotent miniature fences as you are by the bubble-drift that carries you instinctively homeward, and their purple, blue and black leaves shimmer in the dark. You are bordered by familiar and yet meaningless facades, night-burnished brickfronts, the lonesome haloes of inconsistent lamps. You become aware of the place you live, and the path your feet follow feels like a sad little sliver of the larger world, a segment in an enormous viral civilization, a solitary mousetrail through a place where life is happening on the fringes beyond your vision. Such songs are personal and while not depressive, are nonetheless invested with some swell of emotion you would not call wholly positive. You have the inexplicable urge for the kind of song you only rarely entertain. The hard intrusion of earbuds nudges at the airlocks to either side of your head. You know the way back to your residence with sense-memory, a place you have not left for long enough. One, two hours ago, in the crepuscule but before the dark, you could have been described as tentative or even hopeful you went to a local gathering-place, or you visited a friend you are in the habit of visiting. The season is early summer, and it was warm earlier, but now you are walking in a night that is best described as mild. Your moments of melancholy are the most swollen of your life, and they may arise at any one of the following times: The slender hairline between melancholy and all other feelings is impossibly personal, highly subjective, but as a rule it can be identified by its romantic beauty, and by the fact that despite its void of purpose, its emptiness of reasoned direction, it is anything but empty. Melancholy is as formless and rare as a pale nebula-cloud against the backdrop of infinity it wants to be held, against all of the laws of physics. Depression is numbness, and melancholy is a comet-trail purity of feeling to be grasped like a stellar ribbon, tied around a moment, burning it bright into something fleeting and directionless but no less purposeless for that fact. To be swallowed in melancholy is to immerse in conscious, intentional unhappiness, the sort that, perversely, makes one happier. Melancholy is like a silvereen sky-blanket shot through with shafts of light, like the sun after a storm a dismal image that is nonetheless hopeful. Swathed – no, more like ‘swaddled’, and in that regard melancholy is comfortable, a lozenge to be masticated for a reason, a sadness that has pensive pleasure melted into it, something it’s comfortable to suckle and to be wrapped in. The concept of ‘sadness’ implies grief and a certain hopelessness, while ‘melancholy’ implies a sorrow with purpose, an emotion with which one can be swathed as if it were a shroud. They are words meant to be aspirated ‘melancholy’ involves a softness in the throat, and to vocalize it is to sigh, a little bit, which is fitting. Visually, at least, it could be like a homophone of ‘symphony’, as in an assemblage of beautiful instruments, as it ends in the same sometimes-vowel and contains the same orchestra of consonant blends, the sort that migrate softly from the wet and rarely-used places of the tongue. ‘Melancholy’ is in and of itself a fascinating word.
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