A mixture of gnawing indignation and waning stoicism left me with an inexplicable urge to pen something. I might be a little better at making peace with myself when I'm intoxicated but alcohol only fortifies my growing disillusion — I don't need that tonight. I'm blessed with enough cynicism to last me another a decade.

Funny how, for once in 2017, I longed for someone to prove me and my darned scepticism wrong. My bad, I was so desperate to be wrong, I made an erroneous assessment, a fallacious assumption that it was safe to tear down my walls. To my chagrin, my unerring sense of intuition hit the nail on the head. Again. "You should've listened," the staccato murmurings that flooded my mind reiterated. Yes, I should have listened my injudicious self. The irony.

You court spontaneity — one that's on a brink of recklessness — as ardently as I once did. We're identical to a fault. In a parallel universe, we would have been kindred spirits. Soulmates. Better halves of each other. But in this, our rapacious thirst for success only pulls us apart.

Behind the towering walls I erected — the same ones I allowed you, a stranger, to tear down — I have long forgotten how dismay tasted; how disappointment is an obstinate refusal to leave until it shatters you over and over; how despondency comes in willful, unyielding waves. In the face of calamity, I reverted to my 15-year-old self — a meek, timorous adolescent who was eager to please.

I don't know what's expected of me now. Should I keep up my sardonic humour? Am I supposed to glow with misplaced pride and laugh your caprices off? Or impersonate the role of an impassive mortal? What can I do to eradicate the swirl of rueful remarks — my defence mechanism — that are threatening to whittle me down?

My ostentatious display of defiant fortitude continues to conceal my proliferating despair. Maybe that's enough. Perhaps one day, we'll find our place in this world.