The Slow Suffocation of Survival

The dusty guitar case in the corner of your bedroom still smells like cigarette smoke and late-night coffee shops, though it hasn’t been opened in three years. Sometimes at 2 AM, when the apartment is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator working overtime, you catch that faint scent of wood and old strings and remember when music felt like breathing instead of a luxury you couldn’t afford.

There exists a particular kind of mourning for the person you were supposed to become. Not the dramatic death of dreams that happens in movies, with violins and tearful goodbyes, but the slow suffocation that comes with rent notices and insurance premiums and the relentless arithmetic of survival. Your dreams didn’t die in a single moment – they were eroded grain by grain, like sandcastles claimed by an incoming tide of responsibilities you never saw coming.

The alarm clock at 6 AM sounds different now than it did when you were twenty-two and convinced that sleeping until noon was a sacred right of the creative class. Back then, time felt infinite, stretching ahead like an empty highway under stars. Now it’s parceled out in forty-hour increments, measured in paychecks and deadlines, carved up and distributed to landlords and utility companies and the grocery store where you buy generic cereal because brand names are for people who can afford to have preferences.

When Dreams Become Dollar Store Notebooks

Your commute to the office passes the art supply store where you used to spend entire afternoons, fingers running over tubes of paint with names like Prussian Blue and Cadmium Yellow, colors that promised to capture sunsets you’d never seen. The store window still displays the same easels, the same brushes standing at attention like soldiers waiting for orders that will never come. You tell yourself you’ll stop in soon, maybe this weekend, knowing that weekends now belong to laundry and meal prep and the hundred small maintenances required to keep your practical life from falling apart.

The notebooks pile up on your desk – not the expensive leather-bound journals you once coveted, but simple spiral-bound ones from the dollar store, filled with fragments of stories that will never be finished. Half-formed characters live and die in the margins of your lunch breaks, their voices growing fainter as the months pass. You write on the train sometimes, balancing your phone on your knee, tapping out sentences between stops, but the stories feel disconnected from anything real, like messages in bottles thrown into an ocean of exhaustion.

Sleep brings dreams of stages you’ll never stand on, galleries where your work will never hang, publishers’ offices where your manuscript will never land on the right desk at the right moment. You wake up in the gray light of dawn and remember, for just a moment, what it felt like to believe in your own possibilities. Then the shower runs cold because the water heater is old, and you’re late for the meeting about quarterly projections, and the dream dissolves like sugar in rain.

The Weight of Phantom Limbs

There’s a specific weight to carrying abandoned dreams – not the sharp pain of fresh loss, but the dull ache of might-have-beens that settle in your bones like weather. You learn to navigate around them, these phantom limbs of creativity that still reach for things that are no longer there. The muscle memory remains: your fingers still curve around invisible paintbrushes when you’re lost in thought, your throat still hums melodies that will never find their way into songs.

The office microwave smells like other people’s leftovers as you heat up your lunch and scroll through social media, watching former classmates post photos from book launches and gallery openings and concert venues. You hit the heart button and type congratulations with fingers that remember the weight of a bow, the resistance of clay, the satisfying click of typewriter keys. The envy sits in your stomach like undigested food, bitter and familiar.

Your bank account shows the numbers that define your choices: enough to pay rent, buy groceries, keep the lights on, but not enough to risk, to leap, to chase the things that once made you feel alive. Financial stability feels like a cage built from necessity, each bill a bar that keeps you contained but safe. You tell yourself it’s temporary, this practical life, this sensible trajectory, but temporary has stretched into years and years have a way of becoming decades when you’re not paying attention.

The evening news plays in the background as you fold laundry, talking about people who followed their dreams and found success, people who took risks and won, people who somehow managed to turn passion into profit. You fold another shirt and remind yourself that for every success story, there are thousands of others who tried and failed, who bet everything and lost, who are probably folding their own laundry in their own small apartments, wondering if they made the right choice.

But late at night, when the bills are paid and the dishes are clean and tomorrow’s outfit is laid out on the chair, you sometimes find yourself standing in front of that dusty guitar case, fingers tracing the worn leather handle. Inside, beneath the strings that haven’t been tuned in months, you can still smell the ghost of dreams deferred, waiting patiently in the darkness like seeds in winter soil, not dead but sleeping, not gone but resting, not abandoned but postponed until some future version of yourself finds the courage to remember what it felt like to reach for stars instead of paychecks.