Sometimes I return to old diary entries and marvel at my honesty. I expressed my emotions so freely that I cringe to remember them--overwhelming anger, sadness, and angst that I don't even remember. I wrote about them to forget them.

Now I don't even write. I wander through my days, inexpressive, forgetful, and removed. Encased in intellectualism. Ivory tower discussions about real-life problems, by people who have never experienced the real brunt of racism, poverty, or educational disadvantage. They remove, abstract, distill, analyze.

I am complicit. I write, speak, and breathe jargon in my veins, remove, abstract, distill--I analyze until emotion dissipates, until life just becomes a series of dull, practical decisions. My solution to my problems is to focus on my work until exhaustion takes over and throws the problems to the background. This is life.

I ran away from the antagonists, and feel strangely undefined without them. What is a protagonist without a well-defined villain? He is content, mundane, and uninteresting. He is on his path to success, to stimulating education--but he's still not there yet. I wonder if he will ever get there, or if he will be perennially dissatisfied. I wonder if he will always close himself to others, avoid the possibility of rejection, and sulk in the vacuous space of self.

Why do I insist on having friends who can see into my soul?