The Suff by augustusvulpes at Inkitt

the Suff

Daily life presents itself to me as an uninterrupted exhibition of laughter, ease, and contentment. What I register, however, is not harmony but a striking deficit in elementary cognitive depth. A group of four young people nearby, absorbed in their shared amusement, becomes the focal point of a corrosive impulse: the desire to approach them and articulate, with surgical cruelty, that their intellectual rivalry scarcely exceeds that of higher primates—and that their cheerfulness is merely a product of fortunate ignorance.

The beer in my hand is supposed to offer relief. It does not. I persuade myself otherwise, rehearsing the familiar lie of improvement, though I am acutely aware that no genuine progress has occurred.

Gradually, I have come to experience myself as an alien presence—an entity increasingly isolated, as though I were a machine programmed to extinguish all forms of proximity and connection. I am not easy to coexist with. This much is undeniable.

Their voices remain indistinct, yet their enjoyment is unmistakable. Perhaps the only remaining dialogue worth engaging in is an internal one.

I observe others with precision—almost with talent.

Yet I lack the capacity to extend that same competence toward myself.

I criticize the collective, their participation, their superficial immersion in life,

while simultaneously refusing to intervene on my own behalf.

If I do not assist myself, who possibly could?

At this moment, the urge to cry is overwhelming. I am restrained only by the public setting. Once before, I did cry out—not metaphorically, but genuinely—for help. No response followed.

The conclusion forms effortlessly: I am irredeemable.

Despite repeated assurances to the contrary, I have never truly had anyone in my life. Claims of presence were made, but presence itself never materialized. I have always been alone.

Recently—absurdly—I found myself emotionally destabilized by something trivial, something recent, and the sheer fact of that reaction enraged me. My mind collapses into a singular chromatic fixation.

Red.

Red as saturation.

Red as intrusion.

Red as total occupation of thought.

Reason recedes. Sanity fragments.

I find myself overwhelmed by hostility toward those who appear content—those whose lives seem complete, coherent, and intact. They possess precisely what I lack, and I cannot comprehend the mechanism by which such an imbalance is permitted to exist.

Pain no longer concerns me.

What supersedes pain is impulse.

And the impulse feels violent—not necessarily in action, but in intensity, in inevitability.

I interpret this sensation as fate.

Red returns—insistent, obsessive, impossible.

I desire it.

I despise it.

I wish to eradicate it.

Let it go, I tell myself.

Release it.

Acknowledge it.

And yet, beneath the self-directed contempt—beneath the admission of my own inadequacy—there remains an undeniable truth: