it's 12:15pm and i just woke up from one of the strangest experiences of my life.
i'd originally gotten up around 8 with the settling overcast morning light as insistent through the blinds as the cats' playful hints upon their breakfast making it impossible for me to continue to ignore my consciousness and remain in bed with the dread of the day keeping me from finally forcing myself up and opening the blinds and moving through the place turning on lights to offer the rooms the semblance of a bright morning and into the kitchen to give the cats and the fish their food, and as i sat on the toilet with the mirrored shards of dreams of angry disappointed consequences of love without redemption blinding reflections through my wobbly head in my hands, i considered crawling back into the cocoon of my bed with the covers over my head but i realized i’d soon find myself back to exactly from where i’d just come and clearly needed to get away from. and since it’s sunday and therefore a fatter newspaper awaited me on the doorstep, i decided to follow through with my semi-daily routine and see what the day would bring.
so i warshed up me face and i brushed me teeth and combed back me hair from me forehead and pulled on yesterday’s underwear and jeans from bedside and pulled a new t-shirt over my head and stepped into my rattyfying sneakers and stepped out the door and scooped up my paper and into the day i drove to starbucks and settled myself ohh so comfortably into one of the big leather chairs they have there, and i perused the news and found almost nothing of interest and as the half hour i was there continued to tock on and i downed my buck-sixty roast, i could feel myself sinking. i could feel myself shifting downer and downer from where i by then wearily, warily watched at the world and i sensed that my sad eyes grew sadder as that shitty realization was realized and i knew a new sinkhole of depression had opened beneath me through the night and i was on my way to being swallowed up whole, and as that sense of desperate despair i’ve grown to know so well but hadn’t felt in ohh so long swept over me like a shadow of ravens’ wings, i left my half-unread paper a freebie on the side table and i took my coffee and i took to the road, thinking maybe a drive and some music would lift my spirits, as it so often does, but didn’t.
so i ended up here at home again on the can with my head in my hands by then shaking a bit and feeling so little more than a microbial bubble-boy trapped in a cellulose blister of near-suicidally desperate disconnectedness from the world around me, and considering for maybe only the third or fourth time in my life dialing 9-1-1 for a lift to the psychiatric emergency room in order to protect myself from the groaning fear of suicidal ideation that played through my mind, but accompanied then by the now-familiar catcall of migraine that often consists of a dizzy unease from my head to my entrails, and knowing that sometimes for me a downshift in mood predicates a purely physical affliction – the tiredness of body that manifests itself in the mind perceived by mine as depression even before, for example, the onset of the flu – instead i downed a half milligram of klonopin with a short glass of alka-seltzer plus, the combination of which often puts me into a sound sleep from which i awaken with only a numb reflection of my pains and my head a bit clearer and restful. and as i undressed and cocooned myself into bed with the cats comfying themselves around me and i told myself that as long as i did nothing, nothing could harm me, the world and i dissipated by sixteenths of inches until we disappeared altogether and i finally fell into a deep three-hour sleep that was easily the equivalent of six.
and i woke up with sun light full-filling the room and no memories of inconsequentials of dreams or of ravens’ wings or of either desperation or depression. and suicidal ideation? not a whit of it.
and that has never happened before.
and so, now, heading into my 52nd year of it, i am still often awed by the strangeness and power not only of life but of what i learn about life i’d only hours before dreaded the wish to end, and now wish only to settle comfortably into for the rest of the day.
go figure.
I can’t.
it's 12:15pm and i just woke up from one of the strangest experiences of my life.
i'd originally gotten up around 8 with the settling overcast morning light as insistent through the blinds as the cats' playful hints upon their breakfast making it impossible for me to continue to ignore my consciousness and remain in bed with the dread of the day keeping me from finally forcing myself up and opening the blinds and moving through the place turning on lights to offer the rooms the semblance of a bright morning and into the kitchen to give the cats and the fish their food, and as i sat on the toilet with the mirrored shards of dreams of angry disappointed consequences of love without redemption blinding reflections through my wobbly head in my hands, i considered crawling back into the cocoon of my bed with the covers over my head but i realized i’d soon find myself back to exactly from where i’d just come and clearly needed to get away from. and since it’s sunday and therefore a fatter newspaper awaited me on the doorstep, i decided to follow through with my semi-daily routine and see what the day would bring.
so i warshed up me face and i brushed me teeth and combed back me hair from me forehead and pulled on yesterday’s underwear and jeans from bedside and pulled a new t-shirt over my head and stepped into my rattyfying sneakers and stepped out the door and scooped up my paper and into the day i drove to starbucks and settled myself ohh so comfortably into one of the big leather chairs they have there, and i perused the news and found almost nothing of interest and as the half hour i was there continued to tock on and i downed my buck-sixty roast, i could feel myself sinking. i could feel myself shifting downer and downer from where i by then wearily, warily watched at the world and i sensed that my sad eyes grew sadder as that shitty realization was realized and i knew a new sinkhole of depression had opened beneath me through the night and i was on my way to being swallowed up whole, and as that sense of desperate despair i’ve grown to know so well but hadn’t felt in ohh so long swept over me like a shadow of ravens’ wings, i left my half-unread paper a freebie on the side table and i took my coffee and i took to the road, thinking maybe a drive and some music would lift my spirits, as it so often does, but didn’t.
so i ended up here at home again on the can with my head in my hands by then shaking a bit and feeling so little more than a microbial bubble-boy trapped in a cellulose blister of near-suicidally desperate disconnectedness from the world around me, and considering for maybe only the third or fourth time in my life dialing 9-1-1 for a lift to the psychiatric emergency room in order to protect myself from the groaning fear of suicidal ideation that played through my mind, but accompanied then by the now-familiar catcall of migraine that often consists of a dizzy unease from my head to my entrails, and knowing that sometimes for me a downshift in mood predicates a purely physical affliction – the tiredness of body that manifests itself in the mind perceived by mine as depression even before, for example, the onset of the flu – instead i downed a half milligram of klonopin with a short glass of alka-seltzer plus, the combination of which often puts me into a sound sleep from which i awaken with only a numb reflection of my pains and my head a bit clearer and restful. and as i undressed and cocooned myself into bed with the cats comfying themselves around me and i told myself that as long as i did nothing, nothing could harm me, the world and i dissipated by sixteenths of inches until we disappeared altogether and i finally fell into a deep three-hour sleep that was easily the equivalent of six.
and i woke up with sun light full-filling the room and no memories of inconsequentials of dreams or of ravens’ wings or of either desperation or depression. and suicidal ideation? not a whit of it.
and that has never happened before.
and so, now, heading into my 52nd year of it, i am still often awed by the strangeness and power not only of life but of what i learn about life i’d only hours before dreaded the wish to end, and now wish only to settle comfortably into for the rest of the day.
go figure.
I can’t.