Emptiness

As the plane circled downwards, I looked out the window. I felt suffocated by the weight of all my failures. There was so much I had run away from - a broken engagement, an abandoned job, an untold number of projects left incomplete. It had been a period in my life when everything I had essayed turned to ashed under my un-Midas touch. My family attributed it to planetary misalignment. They visited temples, lit lamps, said prayers to ward off the influence of Saturn in the seventh square of my astrological grid. They asked me to wear an amulet. They consulted dozens, scores of astrologers. Each astrologer without fail predicted one exact day in the coming months and years when my luck would turn. My friends explained my problem away as a quarter - life crisis. A well - meaning co-worker told me I was suffering from depression. I didn't know what to call it - I just knew that a chasm was opening before me that refused to be breached by the mundanities of daily routine. When the pressure of living from one day to the next became too much and the loneliness started to eat a cavity into my soul, I decided to leave. Looking down out of the window of ther plane, I felt soothed by the barren landscape. Looking down at the dusty trees, the scattered handfuls of dry grass and the impossible remoteness of this foreign country, I felt like I had come home.