There's an emotion yet to be qualified when staying up late at night.

A sensation where you aren't tired but aren't alert or aroused.

You're focused but aware of yourself.

You have a weight on yourself, an inertia that doesn't allow you to feel much of anything.

It drags your cheeks down so you're locked in a permanent neutrality.

I don't know if it's the remnants of my depression that my medication hasn't been able to strip away or if this a universal phenomenon; I certainly felt this way before.

But it isn't sadness, it isn't depression, at least I don't believe so.

Whatever it is feels amazing.

It's a peace, a calm, security, but not a satisfaction or lack thereof.

A key part is solitude: a guarantee that the day is over, nothing is preventing you from doing anything, besides the duty to go to sleep, though that is a time in your control.

No one is awake, and if they are, they will not talk to you until the next day, absent some unconceivable emergency.

At the same time you feel an emptiness — perhaps that's my procrastination to sleep combined with my urge to achieve the ultimate state of emotional completion — you feel that you need to do one more thing that you enjoy to indulge in.

That's another thing, you can only enter this emotion through indulgence but not excitement — monotonous pseudo-enjoyment is the best path.

I would label this state neutralness but it is simultaneously so intense that it feels wrong to dismiss this as a lack of emotion.

It's in a category of its own.

Perhaps it's my overthinking, my introspection, my tragic combination of calmness and intensity, all of this that brings me to this state.

Perhaps I'm the only one to ever feel this way.

I lay in an affect yet to be described by words, a territory uncharted or undocumented, and it makes me feel uniquely distant from the regular world of labels and the known.

As I write more and more, I lose my focus, my daze, and I escape this emotion.

I grow tired, I yawn, and I'm gone.