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As the sky outside his window darkened with clouds in the late afternoon somewhen in November, Ezra sat at his desk with his eyes closed, holding his face straight into the lightbulb of the lamp sitting on the smooth, black surface. The tip of his nose almost touched the glass, no heat radiating from the brand new LED lamp. He had started this practise as a child, when he longed for spring during the winter months, pretending that the blinding, white light was rays of sunshine meeting his eyes through closed eyelids. He would pretend to hear ocean waves, bird chatter, or the sound of a swiftly thawing brook, but as he got older, he found himself more and more yearning for complete silence and blankness of the mind accompanying this somewhat helplessly orchestrated blankness of sight.

He tried his best not to think, but his head felt like bursting. Life, whether lived successfully or not, always retained an air of wading through deteriorating debris. There simply were no moments of immobility, everything was adrift at the mercy of circumstance and the consequences of mediocre to bad decisions. Things were inevitably getting lost in the stream as you struggled forward. As far as consequences were concerned, he couldn't help feeling like both him and all the people he cared about had made mostly quite frankly terrible choices. Some had profoundly overestimated their powers, others had retreated into a superficial farce of normalcy that ate away at the ground they stood on, and yet others were gambling away past achievements for pipe dreams that they had elevated to life goal material for reasons beyond Ezra's understanding. He was scared that sooner or later, they would slip from his grasp, maybe even out of his sight. All of that, of course, on a scale that allowed to pretend that everything was ok, sort of. And while that happened, what exactly was he doing, a passenger on this apocalyptic merry-go-round? He honestly had no idea. Everything in life seemed ok, if you didn't pay attention, but boy - you didn't wanna see what you saw when you did. And, of course, there was nothing you could do about it on a scale where it would seriously matter.

He could only allow himself to react to everything every once in a while, to get it off his shoulders. So that's what he did, holding his face into the lamp and processing all these human defeats that sometimes concerned him, sometimes didn't, all the chaos and the unnecessary sacrifices. A drop of salty water made its way across the curve of his cheek - one tear for what could've been, if it weren't for. Another followed - for what could never have been, because things were what they were. One for all the losses that he'd already had to swallow. One for the losses he had to brace himself for. One for the hits he'd had to take, and one for those he'd handed out. He opened his eyes briefly and gazed at his reflection in the chrome-plated shade of the lamp, noticing a droplet caught up in his eyelashes. Sometimes, he mused, you probably even fail at crying. He actually hadn't intended to cry. He'd just had to mourn everyone and everything for a little while, because it was November again.