Time. He wished there was more time, and he hated wasting time, but he couldn't help it. He needed time to rest but even when he did that, he would stare at the clock waiting for the hour of nothingness to pass so he can go back to work. He had tried before, tried working all hours straight — doing the things he needed to do — but as time marched on, so too did his energy steer away from him. The work had beaten him down, crushing his mentality until all he was was a pool of tears and an empty vessel — no thoughts.

"You should rest, regardless," A thought persisted through his tired mind. He stared at himself in the mirror; the dark circles that bruise his eyes too visible to ignore. But he'd yell back at his pathetic tiredness. He simply cannot. After all, he just simply could not accept himself the way he is now.

If he had more time.

Yes, if he had more time, he could be better. He can prove to himself, to others, to the place he deeply loved and looked up to, that he can be better than what he is now. He feels like, no, he knows that he can do better. He just needed more time to be able to handle it all.

But everything was overflowing — buckets and buckets of situations and feelings overwhelmed him — drowning him. He couldn't gasp for breath in between each problem that arose. Like a bubble, he felt himself bursting apart under the weight of this sea.

He has to shut out his emotions. He has to cut those ties before they ate away at him. He has to destroy what weakened him inside. No more of that. Not if he wanted to impress.

"Pull a fake smile and carry on with determined eyes," He would tell himself, but the words are just as they are — simply words. No meaning behind it when he said it aloud to himself. He knows he was doing it for the future, but what about now? It did not matter. He would suffer and endure. He had to. If he wanted to be accepted.

No rest. No feelings. No breathing anymore. He was like a machine, working in routine every day with one goal in mind.

And should the days come where he feels something resurfacing again — things that he was certain he had severed from himself — he would remind himself of the faces and images that made him hate himself so much. To improve. To be better. He would think of himself — his own failures and blame that tiredness for those failures. He couldn't stop himself. There is no time for that.

He hated himself so much, but the feelings just continued to return, no matter how much he had worked to make things better.

But it was not just his body growing weak from his time spent doing things to be better. No, it was the fact that the things he was doing — what exactly he was doing — that made him hate himself more.

Average.

Everyone did it in the exact same way he did. His peers worked on the same skill set as him — maybe even better.

And that's what shredded him from the inside out. He yearned to be just like that. To be able to do more with himself. To achieve. To be the best at something.

Yet, his body and his mind could not stand it. He kept pushing himself though. He needed to. If only he was not so weak, so … average, he would have already been where he wanted to be.

And that's what killed him the most.