For the past week, maybe five days, I’ve felt that familiar feeling of decay, mold growing around my fingertips and roots coiling around my throat and blood flowing slower and colder. I can’t seem to get myself out of bed and when I inevitably do, I just end up sitting on the couch for hours at a time, taking in whatever colorful, narcotic programming I can. It’s not in me right now, whatever was there a bit ago. I feel separated, partitioned off.
My most self-destructive habit of all is suicidal ideation. It’s the comfortable place my brain goes when it’s understimulated or trapped or overcome with this nihilistic terror. It feels so… narcissistic to think about your own death as much as I do on bad days. But it’s there, it’s got this parental pull on me, it’s the sea I ebb to. What makes it worse is knowing I’ll never do it. It’s just maladaptive daydreaming about a world where I don’t have to think anymore, where I’m no longer me, I’m formless and thoughtless and observing and everything I ever was or ever was supposed to be are little wisps and I don’t have to be responsible and I don’t have to be expected of and I don’t have to disappoint anyone and there isn’t an I and something that used to be there is just merged and subsumed into that big congregation of consciousness that lies right beneath the me. I’m tired – my bones don’t feel like they’re sitting right.
I know where the reprieve is for all this. I haven’t been doing anything really. The novelty of the gym and running and drinking and smoking and being social and present has gone away and if I force myself back into some of those things, some amount of color will come back to me. But that’s the hard part, isn’t it? Doing better when it’s hard enough to do anything? I don’t know, I miss being moronically happy, even if I was acutely aware that it was a snap reaction to my future exploding. There’s freedom in that, but once that too loses its novelty, I’m just left with what was and is – a nearly thirty year old kid telling himself it’ll all be okay one day. If I died today, people would say “oh, he died so young.” But when I’m living, I feel so old, I feel so much of my life dragging behind me, I see so much of what could have been back there. And I’m not a regretful person, that’s what I’ve always said. But on nights like tonight and days like these days, everything flows into me and sits in my shoulders and pulls my head and neck down with them. Why have I sat passively as time moved around me? Why do I feel no different than I did when I was thirteen? They say the way you spend your days is the way you spend your life – I’m really scared of that.
jeez, louise 