Jacquelyn Scieszka

For various reasons, I've been taking pills. You know, to make me feel okay. It can be quite like a weight on my chest. I could breathe, barely, but I cannot smell. I can open my eyes, but cannot see. It's nothing. Not darkness, not black, I was feel nothing. A pill altered my life,—and, perhaps more importantly—my personality. The stuff that makes you one in eight billion, what we value most about the self. The rarity of that internal, personal, emotional essence grows more and more, the more folks forget to use condoms, the less often people take their last breaths, and hopefully for them, in hospital beds rather than in a large swathe of fire accompanied by wails for help. Given prior circumstances, numb was better. Not good, just better. I went from a complicated pit with nuanced ridges to the flat surface above. I wouldn't say it was bad, to have pain ebbed away. All feelings and opinions pushed aside, and I was left with.. nothing. I felt like a passenger in a train w...

If you've been acquainted deeply enough with the internet over the last decade (particularly post-COVID), you'd have noticed that it's not just that we're not happy.. it's almost like we don't want to be. Now, what is irony, anyway? Google Dictionary would define it as: "of or like iron." Oops, wrong irony. Google Dictionary would also define irony thusly: The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect. It's basically sarcasm, in a sense. Oh you know, lying. For fun. Irony is also a fun literary device I like noticing a lot. Different from Chandler Bing, irony in fiction is when the audience realises something the character does not, here's a situation where both humorous and literary irony are sizzled together:  On a fateful Valentine's Day, Kate whispered into her lover's ear. "Naomi, I'm so glad you're alive. I sure hope nothing bad ha...