Nocturne #8 – Overwhelm
What happens when you turn off the noise of the world and are left face to face with your own dark reflection? This is a story about the inner enemy that makes you endlessly look at past mistakes and forces you to answer the question: "Why aren't you who you were supposed to be?". This is a confession about how silence turns into the most deafening scream.
Solitude, at first, always feels like a deceptive calm. It’s as if you switch off the world’s noise, close the door, and are finally in your own space. But this peace is just a thin curtain, and behind it, the real show begins. The moment the last light is extinguished, it takes the stage — my cruel self. The one I know better than anyone, and the one I despise the most right now. My own dark mirror. To be left alone with it, face-to-face, is the heaviest burden of all, because there is no escape. It is a part of me.
And so, it begins… The thoughts. But these aren’t just memories. This is my personal time machine, which only works in one direction — back, into the past.
Every night, I sit at the control panel of this machine and start “re-editing” the film of my life. I take that one, awkward pause in a dialogue and try to insert the perfect answer. I delete that one, impulsive action and, in its place, I write a new, wise script. I create alternative versions of myself, of my decisions, searching for that one “correct” option that I think would make me feel better. But this time machine is cruel. It doesn’t give me the right to change anything; it just, again and again, endlessly makes me watch my mistakes. Every “re-edited” scene reminds me even more painfully that the original version is unchangeable.
And in these eternal repetitions, self-loathing takes firm root in me. It no longer whispers; it screams:
— Why aren’t you the person you were meant to be? The one you could have been?!
— What’s stopping you, you pathetic fool?! Your own fears?
I have no answers. And it is precisely this silence, this lack of response, that is the most deafening scream. It’s a pressure that eats me from the inside out, filling me up until I feel that one day, I will simply explode.
And then I realize, that the most dangerous enemy isn’t the one who might be waiting outside with a weapon in hand. The most dangerous enemy is me myself — the one who lives inside my own head, the one who attacks me with my own thoughts, and who knows a thousand and one ways to defeat me, because it knows every single one of my weaknesses by heart.