Melancholic
I am an ebb of melancholy.
It is sweet like lemonade, then sour like squeezed juice. It doesn’t help that I enjoy the sound of violins. The agonizingly slow rise and fall of their tunes fill my room in gentle serenades. My heart brims with their emotion and pours into my books. I am endlessly inspired, and yet I feel immortally quiet.
I am unsure if I have had a true friend in years, perhaps not since childhood. I loved my friends in the military, but truly they were bullies. No intelligent mind belongs to any crowd, and always the intellectual lives in solitude; they thrive in the loneliness they do not recognize. They normalize their self-isolation. I, too, am seldom aware that I sit by myself in the low light of my room, the only breathing creature within its space.
Sometimes I wallow.
Most times, I smile when I remember to. It is a rich existence that revolves around books, especially when I find time to read outside of writing. Often I consider it such a shame that I cannot do both at the same time. I am surrounded by hardcovers and softcovers, all of which are my friends. Some of which I wrote, most of which were written by peers long dead and gone. How I wish I could’ve spoken with them. Perhaps read alongside them in silence.
Always, always I am cognizant of the tick of my life and the slow yet fast passage of time. To many, writing is a slog that they curse and cry over as the bane of their existence. For me, literature is a jewel which I carve my life out for, spending countless hours, whether in the mornings or nights, just to spend a little longer at the beauty of my craft.
Hello! We’re D.J. Hoskins
We are Davena and Jason Hoskins, co-authors of 30+ books and siblings who write under the pseudonym D.J. Hoskins. Three years apart and in our twenties, we have been fascinated by stories from a young age. Davena is a student attending Princeton University, and Jason attends Georgetown University.
