nothing will change

on symbolism and losing myself

the dusk bathes the city in a blue shadow, the cold air bites at my face with a criminal sadism. the moon emits an ominous pale light. the street light, alone, tries to fight the darkness to no avail. clouds gather across the sky like thoughts wrinkling a forehead. everything feels different under the spell of the night.

Night, street and streetlight, drug store,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century –
Nothing will change. There's no way out.

You'll die – and start all over, live twice,
Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canal's rippled icy surface,
The drug store, the street, and streetlight.

— "Night, street and streetlight, drugstore..." (1912) Trans. by Alex Cigale

in symbolism, everything has a deeper meaning. an object does not stand by itself, but it is instead a symbol, a representation of something else. an idea is suggested, and it hides behind it an emotion, a “state of the soul”. the emotions portrayed are often sombre, uncanny. symbolist works of art bathe in melancholy, dread, exhaustion, decadence, weariness, longing. these emotions are evoked rather than stated, through symbol, color, atmosphere.

Igor Viksh Denisov – Lost in autumn

the inorganic bright balloons seem out of place. nature reflects much better the dull feeling of living without fully being alive. the balloons drift above the trees, caught in them as if in pause. they are a drop of summer amidst a grey winter afternoon. they are the hope that it will get better, and the ideal to strive towards.

i don’t know if i believe in this hope that it will get better. it’s so hard to live over and over again every day fearing the future. to live either regretting the past, or wanting it back. the past will never come back and the future seems a nebulous nothingness where days blend into each other. the effort needed to sustain life seems huge compared to the energy I have.

somewhere in my past I have become broken and I don’t think I can be fixed. did i lose pieces of myself bit by bit, petal by petal, a flower watching its petals dry and rot and crumble down to the ground until what remains is a dried-up ugly stalk good for nothing other than reminding the world of what it used to be? or did i lose myself all at once, on one particular day which at the time felt no different than any other, but which has started somehow a descent that never reached its end?