Catatonic Kid

When you’re trapped inside the bell jar of depression it can be dangerous to try and alter the course of the illness: like waking a sleepwalker. It remains, however, your job to try to do just that because it’s just as risky to stay the course. You are the lone protester stepping in front of the tank. You never know quite what to expect when you look into the void: darkness isn’t always the same as emptiness. Its melancholy is fed by your very desires, and it lives strangely, outside of time and place. It sets you adrift though you know you could have deep roots if you so desired but it stops all desire before it can sink in. From time to time it wraps you in longing but only for things which dimly register as once having meant something to you so you easily let them sail by, carried on a breeze brought up from the depths of your own soul.

Your mind is a tomb, which seals itself shut. Some days you’re the life of the party, others you’re a wounded porcupine curled around a gin and tonic, and still others you’re just an old soul with a tendency to search for reprieve in the oddest places. You’ve an empty palm held up as you look to love (or something like it). You are aware of the destruction depression leaves in its wake but choose not to care much of the time, only it’s something of a stretch to say this is choice at all. It is more of a default position which inertia grants you no leave to undo. Your apologies deflate you further because the insincerity alone stops your breath. Your penitence is often given without thought to the future but you can laugh at this, and at your costly companion so perhaps all isn’t done with memory and proof of life.

You are an out-of-date bottle of milk, and though you may not yet be off things aren’t quite right, all the same. It’s hard to find the words that translate yourself into something others can relate to:

How do you wrap the slowly cooling breeze around you?

How do you capture the flicker of an ember in your palm without snuffing it out?

Depression is the monkey who steals your hat only to sit on the highest branch throwing peanuts at your head.

You’re slippery, a clown trying to work the trapeze and the higher you go the more you feel your heart constrict in your throat. You’re at once audience and ring master, and neither - you’re just the show. I never know precisely where I am in relation to things and though it should be a simple fact that I am an adult and it is a childish state of discontent, it never was nor is.
It’s a darling, in the Bollinger sipping, buttered scones for tea sense. It’s also a demon perched on your shoulder, and you’re a mild- mannered postal worker doing time in a world in which you do not really fit. It bothers and bruises you.

You keep investing your potential in the recursive patterns of the tongue it lines up in front of you, so many dominoes, which bump and grind against your teeth. You’re a shaman in search of that ferris wheel word that mates all other words, makes them fuller, greater than the sum of their parts: The one which will undo the latch and set you free. Then you’re read, as an open book, and you remember that there’s always something there to remind you that the other shoe will drop, regardless.

I can’t define the moments when my mind slips away from me and I stop trusting the universe to show me the right way, the way that is mine by right and reason.
Depression is my Everest, and I must needs climb it to discover some unknown country, some ethereal balance made accessible to me only at the very top of the world.

There I’d become the sound of the final phrase, and all that is my own would be in the final syllable. All that remains is the edge of breath that lingers after I have spoken, and after which I cannot recall what it is I have said or even where I was heading to begin with. I think perhaps if I found myself there then the pieces might fit together more easily, and my surety would be known and not merely sensed.

I cannot trace the lines of conversation back to their beginnings and so I do not know myself, and cannot understand what it is you must see. The devil’s in the details, and I forget all but the final card played. Without that card fixed firmly in my mind’s eye I am adrift in a sea of sound and light, and all the tones that live between these.

Depression guides you in some things though, for you rapidly acquire the capacity to side-step your way to unexpected conclusions. Just when you think you have depression down it goes and switches sides on you but artfully enough to project the idea that it’s the flip side of the same coin: Not so beyond the pale that you can’t see the slight of hand but still too quick to stop. You’re constantly in catch-up mode and so you live a life on the verge of collapse, where any minute any one thing can be too much, can boil your blood and leave you wondering where the saintly patience your practiced in your dreams has gone. There’s a flood that breaks the dam at the changing of the guards. For a pause you lost the beat and so it came, rushing through you and left you daunted by whatever small and simple task stood before you.

If there were any mistakes I could go back and alter in my life I think I should try to convince my former selves that silence is a bigger sin than almost any other. So much has gone unsaid that the water under the bridge is a constant flood washing the sands from the banks of my mind.

I’d tell myself, as I tell you now: Take as long as you need to write your symphony because after all is said and done far more hope and a little more pride will come of the things you have taken your time with than those that came out in fits and starts and found completion before you had a chance to ask yourself what it was that you really wanted to say in the first place. In the beginning was the word so whatever that word is it must be the right one for whatever lies ahead.