It was summer. The middle of the morning.

He sat at his desk and looked at the books piled high around. His desk faced a window and he could look up and out. He remembered that he would sit here, studying, for hours. No, not studying; the word was too passive to apply to what he did: he would pick a topic and strip it of its secrets, devour its strangeness until he could put his foot on its dismembered, distinctly labeled carcass, and scream that he was king.
But he didn’t do that any more. It wasn’t that he couldn’t, just that he didn’t. He didn’t know why. He was still the same, his mind the same instrument it had always been. And all he knew seemed to be receding into a fog, facts insidiously reclaiming their independence, while he floundered in a quagmire of lassitude.

He was feeling faintly downcast, a frame of mind that was almost habitual to him now. He tried to imagine the worst that could happen to him- No post graduation, stuck in a soulless job, no career, stuck behind a pharmacy in a claustrophobic little room. It didn’t really affect him. It was like his life was coated with an anesthetic, and he never felt anything anymore. He couldn’t understand why he felt so numb, so deadened.
It was like, he thought, that he had no concept of his own academic mortality. He had always drifted. Always. But even drifting, he never failed to win. He didn’t understand that here at last was something that he couldn’t throw aside, muttering ‘I shall contrive’, and still succeed. He felt he had never known what it was like to feel that something was final, something really mattered.
He was always trying to fill a void inside.
He hadn’t been happy for a long time. He had no reason to be unhappy. His marks stayed high, he had many friends, many things to do, he loved what he did, and he had books and music and poetry. But he wasn’t happy.
He had so many personas to keep up to so many different groups of people, so many masks that he couldn’t recognize his own face anymore. Say-funny-things-to-make-you-laugh Guy, quirky Guy, bluff-good-fellow, quiet-confident-answer-any-question Guy, intelligent erudite Guy; he changed his masks to suit the company.

Maybe all he wanted to find was somewhere he didn’t have to pretend anymore.