Tag: mental illness

may/june 2022.

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may 15 — watched the lunar eclipse tonight. the moon looked bruised and bloody, hurt by the dark. i felt like that last, slivering flare, clinging in the face of consumption. a remnant, singing brand of light, white and gleaming like a new tooth in a whole sky of darkness.

may 26 — hair is shorn off. a nation of fury and spitting venom and grief, unimaginable grief. too heavy. some days it’s hard to imagine goodness in the world at all, that last, faint, trembling ember in the coal pit.

off to colorado tomorrow. back to my selfish reprieve deep in the mountains, hemmed in by reminders of a world left untouched. a hypothetical earth where there’s only beauty and silence.

june 4 — my loneliness is a comfort, in many ways. it’s the only constant i’ve come home to; that resigned return to the circle of my own arms. something new, please. a sharp thorn or a fresh breeze or even a new kind of hurt. love shouldn’t feel sisyphean, should it? what would i know of it, anyway?

june 14 — a truant summer has bedded down into a muggy, relentless heat. a white haze hangs over the city like wildfire smoke, slinking between the buildings and the cracks of windows. as thick as a drowning. i feel like i’m relearning lessons and relearning them, again and again and again. stale revelations about love and loss, exhumed and buried and exhumed. waiting for something to stick like a housefly in honey. waiting for stillness and assurance and — mm, i don’t know, conviction, maybe.

i’m waiting for something i have no name for. i imagine it making eyes from me across the bar. striking me like a crack of lightning or a heart attack. i’m waiting for something that has perhaps already happened to me, to an old version of me. sometimes i feel like i know less than i once did, like i’m unearthing capsules i already plundered and buried. maybe i am indeed moving in reverse.

i still come to the well of the world and drink from it. i’m still searching for something in the depths of it, in the dark-bellied depths of it.

nothing more to say. the heat feels damned, a thin layer of hell. too hot to think. i’m always imagining myself through funhouse mirrors. unable to render any other image. maybe if i keep absorbing the beauty of the world around me — if i look for it, seek the grail and find it — i’ll reflect that too.

january/february 2020.

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feb. 10 — i’ve been going more numb by the day, like a limb falling asleep. sometimes that happens, when there’s nothing to jog the bloodflow of my life. i seem to atrophy when there’s nothing external to push, prod, tug me into a new shape. i stop moving. a moth in molasses.

i’ve been searching for something to wake me up.

jan. 13 – i’ve been more depressed than usual lately, and my depression can be fickle, taking bored, callous snipes at my most easily accessible insecurities and shortcomings. like an especially dedicated vulture, picking to the bone with its beak.

self-martyrdom is an ugly look, and i wear it atrociously, but for now i’m tired of wrestling for the control panel over my stupid little life. i think i’ll just let the cards fall where they may. a passionless existence is one i’ve always feared on a base, gut level. and yet.

undated — i’ve kept intimacy stored up in hidden nooks inside of me. hoarding it nervously, guarding it selfishly. i’ve been trying to allow myself. despite the fear. and one thing i’ve discovered through an anxiety disorder is that fear never depletes; it’s a yawning and endless well that never runs dry. there is always and always more fear, no matter how far or deep you try to claw your way out of it. but it’s the same with love, and i haven’t found the balance yet, like those synapses overlay each other. i’m well-practiced in donning fear as armor—habitual, reflexive, wry, self-deprecating, deflecting. fear has always consumed the spaces where love should reside, like it’s eddying in stilled pools, dammed off from flowing freely. i do think i’m at least more self-aware, more self-compassionate in that regard than i ever have been.

jan. 2 — my bitterness is all teeth and claws—an acid drip eating away at the core of me, to rawness. like the myth of loki chained in a cave as a snake’s venom stripped away at him, drop by sizzling drop.

anger so wide it could burn my whole world down; sometimes so clean and sideways, like a knife neat between two ribs. it starts warm and sharp, like whiskey in the throat. then pulses, a coal orange and livid.

the moon gourded and belly-up. the moon a pearled, bulbous fish eye, a coppery ring around it like an oil spill. as i drove, i imagined a hook sinking into it, snagging in one of those chalky hollowed craters, pulling it down to me with fishing line until my palms ran with blood.

once a boy cried because the moon followed him home. it was a well-worn penny of a story, offered to me so often, so long ago that it’s faded and thready in my recollections—one of those inherited stories that, for a moment, when you idly think on it, catch it in your hands before it wriggles away, prod at it—it feels almost mythic, almost unreal. know what i mean?

the boy died when he was twenty. i never knew him. sometimes it feels like i did. i still think about him crying over the moon, the tenderness of that preserved shard of story.

what else? i woke up dreaming of the seesaw creak of a dock rocking—the dock at my grandparents’ old lake house.

at least the sun is out. at least the wind is warm.