The solemn youth leafed silently through the pages of his book, not reading but instead hating himself and longing for something else, something different. The room itself was dark, and that was working to relentlessly tug and pull at the youth's spirit. He could do nothing to help the room's ambiance, however, since there were no more lights available to turn on. He was just sitting there, despondent, alone, in need of change.

"It's funny the incredible energy you can unleash when you're depressed," his professor, Gilharty, had said to him while in Gilharty's office.

"So I hear," the youth, Holofernes, said in response.

Gilharty smiled at the youth's doleful response. "I mean it, you sad sack. You like to write, don't you?"

"It's a goddamn curse."

"What is?"

"Writing."

Gilharty was genuinely touched. "Why do you say that?"

"Only depressed people write well. Only people with rotten childhoods and miserable personalities and bitter souls have enough in them to write well. Fools and people who are happy write shit."

"You're obviously upset," Gilharty replied. "Let me tell you that for the most part you are right, though I would never admit that to you if I weren't in a cynical mood myself. However, you have to learn to harness your depression. You have to use it like a runner uses nervousness and how a weightlifter uses anger. You have to use it to write the best pieces you can. It's no use to you to sit alone and feel sorry for yourself, you know."

"Indeed not," Holofernes said to himself, alone in his dim room once again, the weather cold and dark outside and making him shiver and feel like dying, making him feel like running away and screaming and hitting people and falling over and crying and not eat until he died and suffered more forever and ever until no one cared and then to suffer more again, since that was his lot. He couldn't read now. This book was interesting to him when the weather was sunny and warm and he could go outside with no shoes and read in the open sunlight with blades of fresh, young grass between his toes. As car motors froze and old women slipped and broke hips on sidewalks outside in the frigid air and awful, relentless wind, Holofernes realized with grim certainty that he was trapped in a world where he could not be happy, and there was nothing out there to comfort him. No one when those he loved were dead or not the same as when he loved them, and the ones he had now hated him when he wasn't around and loved him when they saw his face.

He had no one, he knew with certainty. No God, no girl, no true friends, no pet. Nothing but his anguish and his Gift that was the source of his anguish and rage and despondence and depression. Alcohol was no good. Religion was no good. The friends he had were no good. Coffee soothed him and books helped him escape, but Holofernes knew that any love he had in this world would soon be attacked and slaughtered by the never-ending iron fist and leering death mask of his despondence and depression. He looked at his book, his aching, weeping, dying heart yearning, wishing, craving for somebody or something. However, everything he wanted went to everyone else, and he needed to learn to deal with that.

Use the depression.

He needed to learn how, since he had no other option.