For about two months after my brain snapped in half, I couldn’t listen to anything but instrumentals. Terror would grip me every time I’d hear lyrics and I hid in the safety of music that didn’t try to evoke any emotions. I wasn’t scared I’d feel too much, triggered by words talking about love - I was so afraid that i wouldn’t feel anything at all. That my internal machinery was so broken that I wouldn’t be able to feel any emotions again, that the big grey bleak clouds had seeped all the way into my lungs, co-living with the tobacco tar in my capillaries and leaving no room for a sigh of relief. No words. Dull every moment with mindless media consumption, anything to distract me from the fact that in a few months I went from having the biggest dreams and a life so full of promise, but now could barely even leave bed. The streets of my own neighborhood were no longer safe. My own mind wasn’t safe.

Slowly, the words came back. Then the progress stalled. Is this all there is? Is this as far as recovery goes? It’s been months and I can’t imagine ever getting back to how bulletproof I felt back in May. Instead, my veins just continue feeling like they're filled with lead. The words are back but now there’s just this static all the time. A background symphony of swelling buzzing sounds. It’s not calming like white noise or quieting like brown noise. No stimulation, unlike green noise. Pink noise, apparently, is a thing but it isn’t that either. It’s just a muffle, the sound of my separation from who I used to be. It’s an audio curtain, keeping me from reaching back or moving forward. TV static, radio static, brain static. All symptoms of not getting sufficient signal to make the show go on.

Underwater. 6 feet under packed, heavy dirt. My skin feels like it’s on fire, but only in a way that shortcircuits my nervous system. Not that kind of fire that makes you feel alive. The flimsy card tower of my mood is threatened every second to be blown away by the wind. All the elements are present and I’m like the goddamn avatar of clinical depression. 

This year started out so promising, too. Instead it just ended up being all about loss. God, I used to feel like the world was an apple and all I wanted to do was unhinge my jaw and take out a bite so big that the juices would drip down my chin. Instead, I just became unhinged and the gravity that held my life together grew too weak, things spun too fast, and everything got flung all over to distant corners of the universe. Now life is just a Vidalia onion with good marketing. No amount of shiny packaging can change the fact that I just bit into an onion, and a rotten one at that. 

With the holidays coming up, the worst loss of all has been stabbing me in the side. And in the throat. Actually, all over. It's like I'm trapped in an iron maiden and every inch of my body is being stabbed over and over. Are these pores or puncture holes? I was finally growing to feel like I had a family and now it's all gone. Right after getting out of the psych ward, I tried to reconcile with my dad but it was terrible. I couldn't look at him without feeling so much resentment. Any words I could have said rose up instead as bile in my mouth. The relationship we had turned to dust in my hands and I can't do anything about it. So this year will be the first I'll ever spend the holidays alone and the second time ever in my life I'll spend them away from my dad. Losing that relationship, with the person most important to me in the world, that's been the hardest. The keys to the kingdom have been thrown away and I'm locked out of home. What's worse is it's my own inability to walk back inside that's keeping everything this way. The prodigal child. I ruminate all day about whether to let them back in and then I puke in my mouth at the thought. It brings on a Nausea, which I guess makes me feel more like a Sartre lover but really mostly just makes me feel bluer. 

My google search history is not filled with holiday wishlists or what to get a parent who has everything except a loving, mentally well daughter. My curiosities have leaned more towards passive ways to kick the bucket. Or calculations for hanging ropes. Makes me regret lowering my ceilings. It’s a constant doom scroll of demise but I don’t think I’ll act on it. It’s too tiring waking up again not dead, even when you don’t get dumped. Maybe I’ll give it a year. Who knows. 

Truthfully, the cravings for permanent quiescence haven't really gotten any better, but unfortunately, the dark nights of the soul don't fit into my calendar anymore. Begrudgingly and with great huffing and puffing, I still have to do all the crappy life maintenance things that come with the territory of sticking around. Suicide is a choice but what happens when I'm too detached at this point to even bother choosing? I've never had passive suicidal ideation before, it was always an active pursuit. The anorexia was my marathon training, the acute self-destructive behavior with drinking binges my HIIT sessions, the cutting and the hanging, I dunno, sprints? I can't even think of analogies anymore I'm just too blue.

I was watching a video today of a memory from last year, you know when Google Photos sends you little reminders of the passage of time and how you can't physically feel joy anymore? Who came up with that anyway? No one wants to remember things, says my focus group of one. Real depressing shit, but then again what isn't to someone who's depressed.

But it's low-grade now so who gives a fuck. I just want to feel excited about something, instead of just under water.

A rare bird

 While I truly appreciated the compliment, I would be remiss to say I ever fully understood it. A rare bird. It was three or four times when you enunciated it in the most intimate conversations but geez. What the fuck does that really mean, man? And why did you constantly drum on about it? An improbable affection, but one I've nursed for a while now. Tender, if I ever had to choose a word for you and my emotions then project those across the Pacific Ocean.

Like a baby bird, mouth agape and barely breathing from the hunger and expectation of worms. That's how I felt. A breath of fresh air that didn't feel like one because my jaw was unhinged from screaming. Yet, there you were, soothing and calming and there.

Sure, it sounds dramatic but we met at very inopportune times. Personally, I was barely out of my scrubs, the whiff of the psych ward still unscrubbed from my skin. But that didn't matter to you. I felt like a damn pariah after being carted off and you saw through it all to call me a goddamn. rare. bird. 

Whatever the fuck that means.

For months, you were my favorite notification. Sure, it wasn't logical, since the logistics couldn't ever logistic the illogical. 13-hour time difference, but damn I felt so close to you. In dreams, in mind, in my throat like a lump I couldn't swallow. But when I move there, on your western continent after law school, you're not gonna leave the Midwest. But damn, it was fun to dream.

It was a brief foray into the unknown that I tried with previous men and the burn burned. Bad people. Narcissistic pieces of shit. One of them broke up with me a day after I tried to kill myself. That trauma haunts me, and hurts me to this day but you called me a rare bird and in turn, you puffed your chest and said all the words my ears needed to hear: You don't deserve to be hurt, you didn't deserve that treatment, you are a rocket of a person (whatever the fuck that means), and whoever was mean to me was your enemy too. Perhaps a bit more argumentative than I needed, coming from a relationship with a man who couldn't feel empathy, but it was appreciated.

Birds, rockets, and oh, let's not forget, rainbows.

Then Bali and the reality crashed down on our heads. My dear, sweet drummer boy, how would we beat this? We can't. But the feelings are felt and the ending doesn't end the way we would have wanted it to. Now what do I do, after recovering from the cruelest person I've ever met and meeting such a kind person, turntables turning and being on the other end and geez geez Jesus, no one knows what I'm talking about but God it's confusing to me too okay?

I don't think, I can't think, I lack the capacity to think, but if I had met you before that summer, then we could have had a different timeline. I am now guarded, more than before, more than ever. 

Still, you're here. Like you said, you're always here. And damn does that make me happy. 

 Do you still drop, stop, and roll when your skin feels like it's on fire?

What if it's from an internal burning, some deep coal mine blaze in your veins? It's been silently seething away, quiet and eating up all the oxygen for years, and now you're left gasping for breath on the floor. Hands turn to claws that grip so tight against your skin that they draw blood, even if you're oh so careful to cut your nails tight and short. If you could go down to the quick, you would. Take away the sharp, the weapons. 

The body is a vessel fully capable of betrayal. The mind, a soft enemy. In philosophy class, eons ago, my professor asked us who we are. Are we our bodies? If so, what happens if you lose a leg? Are we still the same, considering a fourth of what we thought was our identity has essentially been lost? It was the introduction class, noone had an answer. Over a decade later, I wonder now why he didn't ask more questions regarding mental health.

Am I my depression or is it a part of me? Is it not me? Does it destroy me? Am I a ruin? Lying here now, in a ball on the floor, a position I have mastered over the last months and taken to its pinnacle performance over the last few hours, completely frozen and terrified of moving, I have to wonder who I am when I don't trust my own mind. 

Oh god, the betrayal. It's the only one where your only real choice is to forgive, and not just forget. The self, who you have to face every day in the mirror. Moses split the Red Sea, sure, but if I can whine, and I will, I'm left with the far harder task of mending together a psyche torn apart with no god on my side.

Every morning has the chance to be perfect. But then the voices start and you slowly realize, with growing horror, that they aren't schizophrenic illusions but your own thoughts. The pulse of your wrists starts whispering, then screaming through the thin skin. Soon enough, the thud of your heart is all that rings in your ears. That's the first in the choir. Then there's the baritone of your vertebrae, calling out to you to snap them with a noose. It's a deep addition to the chorus. Your organs, those fluttering beings you feel lying flat on your back, palm to the belly. They ask for pills. 

It's a small song, but it lasts until the next morning. It's a neverending loop.

Everyday.  Everyday. It hasn't gotten any better, at best it's gotten to the point where the volume modulates. But when it's loud, the static, it fills my head, it fills the room. Sure, there have been okay days but how long can someone survive on just okay? I feel like a survivalist who has run out of rations, subsisting on rainwater and spare kills.

My body is alien. My body is a traitor. My body begs me to destroy it. My skin is scarred in white and purple and all I can see when I look at it isn't the tender flesh of a person, but a lack of cuts. The veins that pulse right underneath ache to be let open. Bloodletting, the release of it all. Once upon a time, I had dreams and projections into the future and now all I feel is dread for the next bad day. I used to feel like a person and now all I feel is a need that gnaws at my bones, begging them to meet the air and reminding me constantly that a scalpel is just there, tucked away into a book and now that I'm not supposed to be a risk to myself, no one will stop me, no one will find me. I feel this deep phantom pain constantly, but not from loss of limb but loss of any semblance of life.

I honestly don't know how much longer I can live like this.

 Have you ever cried so hard that your whole body just starts to sweat? My parasympathetic nervous system has never been my friend. Ironic, because of the name. The last two weeks I've been dealing with a low-grade depression that I've begun to regard as a pesky shadow that I can't banish no matter how much Vitamin D I manage to squeeze in. Asshole I used to date has taken this as the time to be a huger asshole, questioning if I have a life. No, dude, I don't. Right now? No. I have a chain of weights around my neck and I'm doing my best to survive but the last few months have nt been a life and if you had any compassion you'd know that. I hate that a fucking idiot boy affected me so much, but like before, I was already sinking and he just pushed me again. Now, I'm drowning. It's a catastrophic feminist tragedy, to be affected by a cruel man but it's true. He reminds me of my mother. Selfish. 

My whole body is betraying me. Head, shoulders, knees, and toes. It starts with my mind. Oh god it hurts. Then my skin, oh god it hurts. Then I stare at my veins, my wrists, all the places where I know a pulse beats and it feels so warm and inviting to cut. Recently, this has included the stress veins in my neck. What warm red secrets do they hold? My skin is so warm, so sensitive and I can hear it begging me to cut, cut, cut.

In moments like these, I'm most grateful for my dog. The little mutt, with her big brown eyes rimmed with funny eyeliner and starting to get sprinkles of powder sugar, she needs me. So every morning no matter how much I want to rot in bed, I have to get up, always with a groan, to give her a walk. She's a darling creature, truly, the sweetest animal. Never a complaint, always a concerned glance. If she wasn't here I doubt I'd even get myself up to go to the bathroom. Is it still low-grade if you can't be bothered to walk the 10 meters to the toilet and imagine yourself instead as a corpse covered in your own piss and feces, to be found by neighbors who trace back the stench of decay? Is it still low-grade if you spent the last 10 days bawling your eyes out, an activity only punctuated by pause when the mutt needs to go for a walk? What is the scale here, what is low-grade, what is happening to me and oh god how do I make it stop?

I've become grateful for inertia. It's second nature now to just sit on the couch, immobile for hours. If I could summon the strength to do anything, it would be a quick dash to the pockets of scalpels I've hidden everywhere in the house and oh god, to let the pain out again in blood again. I have been self-isolating, been getting worse and lower and dirtier, but I haven't been cutting. Instead, I've been crying. Fetal position, curled into the tightest ball my arthritic hands can compress me into and just screaming. Screaming and screaming and screaming. Occassionally a guttural, primal sound. Mostly, a plea of ascending volume. Please make it stop, I beg. Starting as a mewing kitting, ending as a screech. All the time, it's the closest I've ever gotten to a sincere prayer. Childhood with its sore knees crunching against grains of rice pales in comparison to the shrine of pain at whose foot I worship now. Make it end. Please. Make it stop. Please. I've done everything. The pills, the running, the therapy, the community, the busy work and still, as soon as I hold still, there is that hand on my shoulder, that ghost of a thought and it jerks me back so hard I get whiplash. Who am I even praying to? Jesus? Allah? Buddha? Fucking Santa Claus?

Wherever you go, there you are. That is the most threatening phrase I have ever heard. I'm my own biggest fear.

You know, a few months ago when I was in the Big Crisis, everyone was there. Even my ex who I despise was calling my friends trying to get my dad's number so someone could get to me before I did something irreparable. When I found out about that, honestly, I was outraged. How dare he care. It made me feel like scum, because I didn't. We abhor each other but he wants me more alive than I do? Ridiculous. But now? It's quiet. I go days without talking to anyone. Job contract completed and if class is canceled, I just sit at home until the scheduled mutt walks then I rush back home. How embarrassing every time too, since those guards saw me strapped to a gurney, screaming and bleeding and crying back in August. Now I asked them if my food and groceries had been dropped off. The holiday decorations are up in the lobby. I want to drive the little wood spikes attached to the candy canes into my chest. Passive suicidal ideation. Passive self-harm thoughts. Passive, for now. And horribly, I know that since the spotlight has shifted and I'm back in class and whatever, if I kill myself now then no one will know for days.

I am so goddamn terrified all the time. Who will walk my mutt if I fail again?