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.