Sleep well, convict, for tomorrow you die.

Nausea. If I remember it correctly, my professor called it nausea.

It was supposedly, what every human feels when confronted with a decision. It is the fleeting moment where one actually carefully considers his or her option. It is the instant of insanity before the equally brief nanosecond called decision. Once we have decided, it disappears just as quickly.

Ha! I could only wish everything was as simple as that. Most of the world's problems are actually problems of the future. This is where nausea comes in. However, nausea or no nausea, puke or no puke, the fact still remains that people can still do something about it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce to all of you a new concept called guilt. It is the overwhelming sense of foreboding that retribution might just be around the corner. It is the low, almost infrasound, drone of a massive alien spacecraft cruising slowly in the dead of the night. It is the aura of unease that pervades the atmosphere hours, even days before an earthquake strikes. It is the deep, hollow rumbling of a volcano before it suddenly decides to sneeze, rendering thousands of people homeless in the process.

It is the itchy crawling feeling on your skin as you recieve your grades, only to stare blankly at a flashy, shimerring failure. It is the feeling of helplessness as you arrive late for your exam, only to know that the war has been lost long before the final battle began. It is both euphoria and hysteria; you smile because you have been freed from the dread of not knowing while you scream as you tear at your hair, dreading anew at the slow but inevitable doom.

It is a form of astral projection, as you momentarily leave your body and see your life from a third-person point of view. It is the art of puppetry as you animate your limbs through the puppet string of primal instinct. Your body moves of its own accord as the conscious mind takes flight. It is also the sharp return to yourself as a speeding car narrowly misses you.

It is the wasted opportunity to die for you are much too afraid to die yourself. You slow down for Death to catch up to you only to find out that Death slowed down his pace to match yours. It is the frustration knowing that Justice walks at a faster pace, much faster than Death and a bit faster than you, anyway.

Guilt is the hope that just around the corner, there is an assassin, a rapist, a robber, a child running with a knife in his hands, a speeding bullet, a time bomb, as a matter of fact, anything that could kill you, the entire event regarded as either crime or accident. Heck, maybe it is also the desperation to throw you into harm's way, knowing that, had you stood still, your life might have been saved.

Most of all, let me describe the singular and most basic description of guilt. It is the knowledge that the quagmire you are presently sinking into is your own doing.

Should all curses laid down never fail,
what misery would all of this entail?
Retain what strength you had before
but only that and nothing more.