this, too, shall last
cn : clinical depression
what remains invisible to most people outside the spectrum — depression makes you doubt any emotional closeness as the inception of a bruise. how do you tell someone you adore that they are also focal to your trajectories of avoidance? especially when you began by experiencing them as nothing but sheer rocket flares of joy. people like me — we are always scared, tottering on the hinges of this fear that you will hurt us if you come close enough. because those whom we allowed this closeness very often did and in such unspeakable, tortuous ways that we still are rattled to our very ribs. the only way i know i love something is when i contemplate all the ways i can leave it, slowly. shutting myself up right at the mouth of a confession. it is a form of learned helplessness and it constructs itself as a milieu of negative taxis. it is a permanent circling of the hedgehog’s dilemma with or without your own individual’s volition. in order for happiness to exist, one must accept another fully, without being continually suspended in some sunless indecision and yet the moment one tenders into the instinctive appetite and accepts the other is the beginning of this retaliatory wavering, of tabling methods to a punctilious rejection.
i keep thinking of nicole brossard — “i can’t get close to any you”. it is hard to tell if i can’t or i don’t want to — it is always unclear whether it is a matter for inability or invisibility. depression is anger with its tongue cut out so what i know to do best is fold within myself and stay silent for as long as it takes to forget all beginnings. sitting on the floor right now and looking at this array of childhood-to-adolescence photographs, i am trying to locate that specific moment in time where the mind dichotomized, was knuckled under a reddened sheet of water in the bathtub. i walk clothed in doubts. all the time. people come with suggestions & instructions. people don’t know how deep the the tear has trailed. on so many days, i have prayed with whatever i can endure of faith (which in itself is very little, tbh) to be something/anything other than this. this exhaustion that runs from fold to fold, from rim to root — it is means for lengthy eclipses. so long i have thought of pizarnik writing — irse, y no volver. & then i grieve for what i lose knowingly, with all that i can still muster to hold without harming in myself. am angry not because i don’t understand but simply because i don’t have a choice not to. char says — je suis né comme le rocher, avec mes blessures. (i was born like the rock, with my wounds.)
this fucking rock & all its wounds. the rock that doesn’t relent. am always making up for some perceived lack. am no one’s anything even when am always present because if am not then i fear i will be forgotten because am that minute to my own modes of being. clinical depression makes me go from ember to arson in o to 30 & there is nothing that can slip itself in between to discipline the fire. & who is left with all the burning, body traced in the smell of charred tires, gasoline leaking from under floorboards & a throatful of smoke? — me, of course. always me.
& sitting amidst the flames i still wonder about how do i extend the “possibility of life” between myself and another. any other.
(scherezade siobhan)
