It's hard on me to walk to work every morning thinking that I could be wasting my life and all that I could possibly have. I feel that with this job I'm getting no where and I that I'm doomed forever. My family don't understand, they don't even seem to care about what is on my mind. Sometimes I ponder on whether or not I mean anything but a source of income to them. I keep my chin as level to the ground as I can, but sometimes those voices in my head doubt, and I begin to listen.


My wife, Ariella, is the woman I decided to be with for a reason I have long since forgotten. I don't see any beauty in her lifeless soul, just a pile of lies and dreams she crushed within me. Her brown eyes are a bottomless pit, leading down a dark, cold and empty puddle of black tar. She holds in her mind the key to destroying all of human kinds happiness. I do admit that love was once between us, but something there died. I stopped wanting to be around her when her smile faded. She became stressed at work, making her bitter in the evenings when she would come home. The person I had fallen in love with vanished in what seemed like a week. She slipped away from my grasp, and there was nothing I could do about it. Our relationship hardened to the point where no help could crack it.


Ariella became sour as ever right after the birth of our first child. It was a delicate boy born unto us a year after our initial marriage. The naming of my son was left not to me at all, but was given to Ariella without any discussion. She named our boy Johnson, a name I was almost ashamed to address him by. He was my first son, the child that makes every man proud of his name and status. Johnson was a joy, but with him came the fangs in my once caring wife. I was denied the right to even cradle my infant in my arms. Ariella was the main caretaker and she made it obvious. She made the impression that I was nothing more than the gravy train for her and her baby Johnson. I was nothing to my family. I meant nothing to neither my wife or my son. Every morning when I went off to work I bowed my head without even a wave of goodbye.


Work got stressful for me soon after my son's birth. Timing couldn't have been worse. I had a new mouth to tend to, a new house to pay for and my paycheck suddenly became a question. Stress and anxiety swarmed in my head, inside battling a raging civil war that had no winners. My mind pulled apart in ways, leading to the point where my hair was falling out in hand fulls. Being a new lawyer I was sure to become used to stress, but I was being bombarded with too much. I couldn't stand to have my family stop caring and my shift get pulled tighter. I worked more hours trying desperately to do my job, having only the disappointment of failing in my path. I felt myself cracking into a million pieces, I felt myself becoming trapped in a endless whirlpool.


My second child was born three years after the birth of Johnson. My daughter's name was once again chosen without any consent on my part. I felt set aside from a major part of my life, but I said nothing. Ariella chose Jasmine for my little girl's name. Jasmine's infancy flew past without me hardly getting a chance to engage in it. I was tight at a work and my baby was missing out on a father. Ariella wouldn't let me in on anything that had to do with the family at home. When I asked she would simply shut me out with harsh words that cut me like razors. I slept every night in my son's room, soaking up the only real time I had with him. I'd watching him breath in and out as he slept, almost weeping at the fact that he was growing up without ever thinking of me as a father. I would cry myself to a light, disrupted sleep, full of nightmares and heartache. In the morning Johnson would be gone from his crib, already undergoing the daily occurrences with my wife that I was completely ignorant to. I would dress myself, head out for work only with the knowledge that I was a pointless figure in everyone's lives.


I sit here today thinking that I still have no choice in what happens to my life. I can't go back, I can't move forward. I don't know how to communicate how I feel about missing so much, I don't even know how to stare someone in the eyes. I'm lost in normal life, I'm lost in something that I should be well familiar with. I lost my hope for this life. I lost my will to go on. I lost my purpose in my days.