Portrait

I want to capture this feeling, because I don’t intend to know it for very long. It is not me and I do not want it.

I want to write down this panic, this head-thumping, ear-ringing pressure that makes me bite down hard and dig nails into palms, this wordless, thoughtless white noise that seems to be my default just now, like someone switches off the thinking, functioning me to leave this motionless, gibbering, shell that just wants OUT. I want to know it, what it is that takes hold these days, because one day it will seem as unreal as being alive does to me now and I won’t even remember what it felt like.

I want to remember this numbness. This monochrome vision. This feeling of not existing in my own body, looking through TV screen eyes at some stage-show I don’t understand rather than on a living, breathing world. I want to remember it so that when I get my colour back, my eyes that usually notice more colours than there are names for, when I get back to feeling like the whole world is plugged directly into my retinas and that I exist with every fibre and bone and surge and pump within it, when I get it back I want to be able to never take it for granted again, to never forget how gray the world turned when it all got too much for a while. In the years I couldn’t walk, I forgot what it felt like to run, and now it always feels like some kind of magic when I do. I want all this to give me a similar appreciation, as trite as it sounds. It might as well be good for something.

I want to inscribe this feeling of worthlessness, this doubt and paralysing lack of purpose, when the confidence even to have a purpose seems like a gift that was given to everyone but me. I want to record it. This thick-tongued, slow-worded, sloth of a girl that can barely stand to be looked at. How I felt when life seemed like something I was never going to be any good at, when every skill and talent at my disposal seemed like a joke, given that they had been granted to someone without the strength or courage to ever use them to any merit. I want to set it down here, so when one day soon I get my firework mind back to set me off on an orbit of action and  productivity and beauty and bravery and success, all the things I know I am capable of, when I won’t have time to look back because I will be so busy BEING something extraordinary, I will have the memory of it to look back and wonder at and exclaim “How could I ever have felt like that?!”.

I want to capture all of it. The no money, the empty bed, the feeling of no future, the feeling of being unlovable and incapable of ever making another relationship work, ALL of it. Because I am not going to have these things for long. Once I get to step into the future I have waiting for me, that I can’t yet know but that EXISTS, it exists because fuck me if I’m giving up on it and letting this bastard sink-hole win, I won’t have time to remember because I will be too swept up in love and security and promise and plans.

Sitting small in a puddle of your own tears is horrible and uncomfortable and embarrassing only while you’re in it, and pretty soon I’ll find a ‘drink me’ of some description that will give me back my size, and I’ll get to look down on my puddle and all its collected flotsam and jetsam and wonder at how big it seemed at the time. I’ll stride through it without another look and be on my way.

So while I’m here I might as well sit and laugh at my shrunken, damp, hopeless self, and read some good books, and catch up on some sleep, because depression is stupid, really, as is this ridiculous, melodramatic post, and I’m not going to indulge it any more.

I won’t be here long at all. You’ll see.

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