maybe it is better to write.

I am scared. I woke up, not from a dream, I think, but if it was then it was certainly a dream of an emotion - the sensation that something vile was running through my veins. I felt it in my forearms first and it spread outwards to the entire body, and i felt like my body was wracked with corruption, each muscle tensing as I curled up.

It felt like fear, except I don't know what I was afraid of, and that in turn scares me.

And with it came thoughts of mediocrity, fears of loneliness. I suppose it is what people call a panic attack, except the question still lingers?

What was I panicking over?

In a world where every event has a cause, every cause, an effect. Every event is contingent on another, a straitjacket strapped together in a chain so tight and so intricate.

In this world, you breathe the word unconditional, and it sends a quiver throughout the universe.

It started from a simple question. Why were we alone, and unliked by many?

And so we spent too many nights sitting at quiet void decks, picking apart the motivations, the cracks of selfishness, weakness and human nature that characterized all our relationships, our friendships, and our friends' friendships. And from these findings we mapped out the web of human relations, and to prove our hypotheses we repeated the experiments, controlled the variables, adjusted our findings until we perfected the method by which these relationships were forged. And then we set out to replicate them, to exploit our findings, to practice this method of charm that would soon garner us many friends, social acceptance, and a smugness at having hoodwinked them all.

We may have been born awkward. But we learnt. And we came to the conclusion that no relationship was special, for all could be replicated - both the joys of shared laughter, and the relief from sorrow that listening and empathy offers. With certain situations, certain reactions could be elicited - there was nothing special or unique about the people offering these things - what was important was belief in the product, belief that the masses inevitably held, belief that we learnt to feign, since we could find so few that offered the spontaneous alternative.

For it was so painful to be lonely. It was so painful, and it still is.

Only now we are old men, ossified in the world that we willed into existence. The mind is no longer agile enough to find the rabbit hole, and all is not well in Wonderland - the Red Queen sits on her throne of bronze, inseparable from the jabberwocky, and the White Queen is nowhere to be found.

In love with the knave of Hearts, she cries, cries, cries over her tarts.

When heart turns to bone it yearns to crack

And today I woke up to the tail end of a dream - you were singing a new song as you changed for work, closing the door softly as you left.

Ah, it's good to be back.

The great thing about studying things like literature, of course, is the opportunity to tap into the thoughts of the greatest thinkers past and present. Freud once said that the ego is very much defined by our interactions with others, and never has this resonated more so with me.

I've returned home, and the existential crisis is now gone. I see the life that I have built for myself here, the life that I can always return to, the life that reminds me of who I am, what I stand for - compassion, love and understanding. I remember now, what this state of grace that I used to speak of is, what it is I aspire to.

Because my friends may pull me in many different directions, but this is good - it only renders the core tighter.

You've got it wrong again Tim, this overseas thing. You've done everything that suggests discovery, but you've forgotten that the point of it was growth - inside.

I understand.

There comes a time when we draw upon all our thoughts and feelings, and decide to put them into action through the medium of words.

It is difficult - so much sadness, so much anger, and yet an acute awareness of the vanity of conveying them, an inadequacy with words. Sometimes we dream up a close approximation, a metaphor, a phrase that resonates with what we want to say to the person. We click compose, we watch the letters appear on the screen, and our sentiments are somehow verified by the rhythmic clacking of the keyboard that shapes these passions into words on a page.

And then there will come a time, when these thoughts must be transmitted. We move the cursor to hover above the button, but for all the clacking of the keyboard, we cannot bring ourselves to send it.

And when we do look away, to find some courage despite the silence - just enough to press the button - when the finger strikes - the click is deafening.