This is not a city for depression.
The beginning of a depressed state starts almost like a bad horror film. Everything goes flat and two dimensional; events around you are simultaneously less important and more painful. Time draws out into slow motion. Movements are profound but lacking real meaning.
There’s no escaping it, this self-involved masochistic trip. The mind in its dull desperation seeks to blame others, but there really is no one else. This is a walking Purgatory. This is an ambulatory Hell.
You watch other people move through this flat paper-doll world. You envy them their normalcy; you as three or four dimensions of solid melancholy are covered in ten thousand papercuts, oozing.
Sounds so incredibly emo, I know. But that’s because it’s in words, and language for all its usefulness is no more than trite in the end. Words don’t press into the reader’s mind the feelings described; words don’t put you into my shoes.
If words could do that, a fair amount of people in my past would be far more understanding than they actually were.
Voices blend. More than one person talking at once turns into a meaningless susurration; a vibe edging towards menace.
Sometimes the phobias rise up. One gets suddenly very mindful of how many people touch the bathroom doorknob, the time clock, the microwave. The food stalactites in the microwave left by other careless humans begin to terrify — each one is a little dagger of contagion waiting to plunge into your harmless lunch. There are things left in an office refrigerator that have evolved to join the Old Ones, sleeping in long strange ages, hopefully unmindful of the light from the door.
You can hear the coughing and sneezing and snorting and hacking and sputtering of those around you. You can smell the stale reek of cigarette smoke on their clothes. You have no choice; you must be here in the plague pit with the plague victims and eventually be physically assaulted by the plague virus.
Your stomach churns. The burn from the acid, from the anxiety and melancholy made manifest, gives you flashes of hot and cold. Maybe the over the counter medications in happy manic shades of pink calm your guts for a few hours.
Maybe the Fear is too much.
Somewhere there’s an island for me. There’s a beautiful place with warm weather, and a wonderful empty beach as far as the eye can see. There’s caves with plenty of shelter, and an inexplicable supply of safe food, food that I can have. And there’s the husband, and some cats, and the Yarn.
So. Much. Yarn. More yarn than a woman could crochet in ten lifetimes.
And there’s nothing to do on this island but eat and walk and love and crochet. And there’s no one else on this island but those that cause no harm.
My body’s in the City; my heart and soul are on the Island.
