And I keep on waiting. Waiting for the moment to come. The moment when I won't care. The moment when I'll feel calm. The moment of peace. I'm tired of waiting. How do I make my own peace? How do I gain more control over my own perception of the world outside? I have been searching for the answer. In books, in the wisdom of the past. In pleasures, the fleeting moments. In mirrors, other people's beliefs. Nowhere yet I have found how to make my own peace. I can “calm down”. I can tire my nervous system. I can distract myself from the waiting, from the worry. I can forget, for a time. But it comes back, time and time again. The cloud, black smoke, radiating pain of uncertainty – what does the black cloud contain? Fear, anger, regret? Resentment, shame, frustration, disappointment?.. I have wasted many years anticipating the cloud. I have trained myself. I have made myself familiar with every sign, every curve of the cloud – before it comes and after it passes. But I cannot get used to the rain. I cannot stop my nervous system from reacting to the piercing coldness of the arrows of water, icicles of hate. It's like agony to me, again and again. I cannot seem to bear the pain of human experience. Yet I live. I live through the rain, through the hail, the snow. I sit, stunned, shaking, but the pain subsides. And I ponder, over and over again, how to make the next cloud pass. How to avoid its waters, its vengeance. How to find peace. And I keep on waiting... Sometimes, more often than not, the pain is unbearable. The fear is intolerable. Yet I bear. How? How am I still alive? Am I alive? What does it mean to be alive?.. Is this madness? Is this how it smells? Does it reek of despair, is darkness its color, is it here forever?.. The time and space bend to let the darkness close over. And the rays keep piercing through it, and the hope is but a cruel joke. Why have hope if the cloud is to come again?.. And I have no answers. I've felt on the edge, under the cloud so often, and the fall has seemed so certain, that I do not know how it is that I still converse. Converse with you, my unknown, obscure companion, the one who I will never know, in you, somehow, I still stand. In you I seek the answers, still. Do not get me wrong. You, a companion of which I speak, are not an omnipresent power, no ethereal entity, you are – a human of flesh and bone, and to you I speak. In you I seek my reflection. And if in a Hegelian hell I am stuck, I am forever grateful and forever warring with you, my fellow human, my fellow traveler, my comrade in misery.