Breathe Deep, The Gathering Gloom

The joy I felt upon seeing her is reflected back at me in Abby's face as we move to hug in the dorm parking lot. 

 

Bliss.

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If you have been on a ship, far enough away from shore that water is all you see wherever you look, then you will know how I feel. I didn't tire of writing my journal, nor has the novelty gone away of being able to look back and crisply remember a day or a feeling or a moment. Instead, I have walled myself off, sealed myself away for the most part. If you have rung me up on the telephone, I certainly haven't answered and probably haven't called you back. Yes, it's like that. I am in a place so far inside myself that I can't even talk about it, nor will I. 

I suggested it's akin to being at sea, but that isn't an apt metaphor. It is more like being deep in a forest at dusk. The sunlight is fading as the sun sinks behind a ridge, and you can't find where you are on the map. Its a map you have studied so carefully that you convinced yourself you knew it by heart. Instead, you can't make heads or tails of its paths and landmarks. So you wander, or you just sit in one place, paralyzed, too befuddled to even know how, let alone which way to go.

Holyoke is a nice respite, but I keep asking myself why bother trying to find the way back? What is there back there in the world of purpose and choice anyway, but more dead ends, more sheer drops 1000 feet down, should I stray a few inches from the middle of the trail? Sigh. 

My heart hurts when I walk. That is real, not hyperbole or melodrama. Sometimes it hurts when I am doing nothing. That is true about everything, actually, not just my heart. Sometimes it hurts when I am doing absolutely nothing, when I am as still as a corpse. Which should be more worrisome, the heartache or the anhedonia? I just walked 10 feet to the hotel bathroom and back, and it feels like someone is standing on my chest. 

It is just a lot. My body is a shambles. Knees ache, shoulders chronically painful (and at times providing me the joy of sharp uncontrollable pain), chest telling me that merely walking is too much at the least opportune moments, and a brain that is about as comforting as Danny Torrence, the little boy in The Shining. 

I cried much of Wednesday night away. I was going through a pile of mail I had dutifully ignored for so long I can't tell you-- (the joy of depression is that when I can't motivate to do things like read the mail--all I can do is worry about what is in the mail but then can't do anything to find out what is in the mail unless a severe crisis threatens--which it did on Wednesday) and I saw a letter to me from the University of Washington Willed Body program. I thought it was to be a letter gently urging me to leave my body to science. It wasn't. Instead, it was a notice that Jenny's body is done being used, has been cremated and the ashes are ready to be sent to me. I was overwhelmed or perhaps overthrown is a better way to describe how I felt. Here I am living this pathetic paltry life, in an empty house with no dreams, no aspirations or will to even exist much of the time. Then, as subtle as an ALLCAPS text message, the whole shit show of Jenny's death is back again to remind me how much I hate living in this meaningless universe, this existence devoid of hope and the possibility that things will get better with time. 

Even in darkness one can find beauty. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Rosetti's "In The Bleak Midwinter," Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," Picasso's Guernica, Kushner's "Angels in America," the examples are numberless. But such things are rife in profundity. Mundane suffering, the pain of my day to day life, holds no beauty, only the terror of the turning page, of the coming day.