Insanity's Cure: Third-Person Silent

The birds he's watched from his front porch all seem to have a rhythm to their step, a plucky beat that syncopates beak stabs with claw grabs as if excited in anticipation for flying. Why can't he have the same rhythm or at least some sort of music to his motion? As it is now he is barely breathing, his heart hardly beating. There must be something better. There must be some sort of revelation. There must be a way to take flight.
Leading the flock

He was a parrot of other men's thinking leading a life of quiet desperation until he read a book by a true American scholar. His fleets of fancy and wondrous wonderings, considered Emersonian at best, kept his feet marching to the beat of another drummer until he realized what little effect he indeed had on the world around him. He wasn't living life to the fullest; he was living life as if he had already died. His resume would be his tombstone; his life's work - useless toil. He leads a life of silent desperation.
Social noose

He sent for a new life today, but the post office was closed and they don't have rush delivery on such organic items. He was hoping to demonstrate some sort of exacted justice on the whole of this spectacular joke he found himself the punchline of, somehow doing so by replacing himself with someone better, but life isn't that simply changed. He sent for a new life the next day, but he didn't have the money to pay for its delivery. And so the joke continues.
Try again

He sometimes holds his breath long enough to forget his favorite memories. He is sure this is some sort of brain-damaging activity, but he finds it to be exhilirating, like a winter swim under a frozen river or a million-foot fall from an airplane. Sometimes holding his breath is the only thing that gets him through the day. It is only in the forgetting, in the slowly dying, that he realizes what truly matters in this life - absolutely nothing less the present moment.
Can hardly breathe

Give him a reason and he'll justify its contradiction. His life is a perplexing mix of hypocrisy and justice, love and pain, joy and fear, cataplexy and catatonia. If you tell him to stay alive one day longer when he's already dying he'll admit that life is but a dream. He had a dream once, confused with real life, in which he foresaw his own tragic death as some sort of brilliant masterpiece of artwork. His funeral would be the exhibition or the awards ceremony, a celebration of its genius. Now is the time he keeps chasing, but he is fallen behind.
Believer