The Black Roses

It is an autobiographical tableau, an odyssey of a stoppage of my life where I battled with depression. I recreated the mental and emotional states during a particular period. I photographed myself an

"I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them." ― Oscar Wilde

The red roses are my favorite flower. I am a thinking thing. I know that as I realized René Descartes must not have told a lie. Life has a zigzag path, and all life forms have to walk through various alleys, streets, and avenues, especially those who are sentient beings. The autonomous self cannot always control emotions, and emotions can erupt fiercely with imbalances of dopamine, serotonin, or other hormones. I am not an ironman nor superhuman, nor do I have any superpower. It was more than a half-decade ago, and life was interrupted by reality rejection. I was diagnosed with a depressive disorder.

I walked through many doors of the hospitals to visit the second Gods – the doctors. My mind said the broken pieces of my heart would be fixed just as kintsugi. I struggled with derealization and sometimes felt as if somebody had drugged me with LSD. I waited day and night to join those broken alleys. I was scared, and the task was arduous. I couldn't able go anywhere alone. Sometimes, I felt distracted, disoriented, and petrified as the thanatophobia abducted me and took my joy away. It was too hard to handle the pressure from the capitalist society, social injustice, and the toxic minds around me. I told my closest souls, and no one responded positively. I have no complaints to them anymore. Every second half of the day always started with a mood swing and vertigo – I kept thinking it might have been the last day of my life. I was then looking for a higher purpose in life. There might be no actual purpose, but as long as I have consciousness, whether I am a simulated hologram like in the movie Matrix, I feel it is better to live this life. I started helping myself overcome the malicious demon of the dark time of my life.