You've known that hollow sound of your own steps in flight
You've had to struggle, you've had to fight
To keep understanding and compassion in sight
You could be laughing at me, you've got the right
But you go on smiling so clear and so bright
- From Fountain of Sorrow by Jackson Browne
Here is something I wrote a few weeks ago. As will become quickly obvious, I was in a blue mood at the time. Or black. Or black and blue. Upon finishing it I quite suddenly felt better. Much better. I have continued to feel fine and dandy ever since. It is as if I needed to purge myself of some awful, fetid emotional bile that was percolating in my soul. Remarkable really. Anyway reading it over I am amazed that I could have ever felt so miserable. It suddenly seems so distant. It feels no more relevant to me now than watching the Flintstones. An important thing is to make something of our misery. At least a lesson for ourselves, if not others.
There is a churning in the pit of the stomach. An overwhelming unease. The mind grasps for some reason to smile — to no avail. The psychic pain can be felt radiating throughout the body. The hands tingle within uncomfortably. Bowels constrict. Sweat beads form. Nausea beckons. No amount of water will keep the throat from feeling dry. Nerves seem so frayed that it is if they are permanently useless. Happy times seem like memories from a distant past, an impossibly long ago time.
The future is a jumbled mess of twisted pain not to be considered. It will doubtless be as bleak as today. There is no hope. Destiny is loneliness and empty death and a life wasted. It all seems pointless, the tension and the sorrow consume all. Any kind of sound merely taunts. In fact any kind of sensation, even a cool breeze, is an angry tease. Odors are different but each has the same negligent effect. The mouth tastes like defeat. Bland loss and despair.
Ruin.
The day stretches out ahead hopelessly long and unmanageable but also frighteningly short, like life. The paradox sears the brain. Nothingness. The void. Emptiness. All is fraud. All is agonizing death. There is no home there is only hell and it is right here and right now and always will be.
So it is. All this can be interrupted by horrifying panic and wild screeching anxiety. At any moment the omnipresent ennui could yield to greater suffering.
More pills please. What else is there? Exercise, meditation, sleep, human contact, sharing, laughing, music….Don’t work. They don’t change anything, not for very long. Even love cannot conquer all. The body sags with the weight of the suffering and the eyes can do no more than look blankly at objects that do no register. The mind is too preoccupied with killing itself.
More pills indeed. Is that all there is? Consider that they do little more than numb. They alter nothing. They blunt that sharpness of the pain and make it possible to get up and walk and talk and do. To do. To be. To have. To live. Of this world, a miracle of creation condemned to be for short time before plunging into blackness.
My life is sunshine, lollipops and rainbows
That's how this refrain goes, so come on join in everybody
Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, everything that's wonderful
Is sure to come your way, when you're in love to stay
Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, everything that's wonderful
-- From Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows by Lesley Gore
How awfully hard I’ve tried, at times, to destroy it all and render everything moot. Basking in self pity and self recrimination and self possession. Borne of the tragedy of my being. The silence now deafens. It is an angry retribution for my sins. It is so quiet now that I must be utterly insane. The quiet pounds against my head. I feel the angry scowl curl on my lips. That disgusted look that says how contemptible everything is to me and I to it. Life and I have broken our agreement to leave one another alone. We trample upon each other savagely. Ripping ourselves apart with me the sure loser.
I have no recourse.
The failures. The losses. The defeats. The dismissals. The denials. The rejections. The leaking soul and tired mind. Could I just walk into the ocean? Keep walking against the churning waves, the salt flying about me. Cold and soaked and straining against the surf, pushing ever forward until consumed by it all swallowing great gallons of water until death’s grip. No I could not. Something possesses me to go on regardless. Something wills to live and try and grapple and take what is coming to me. To die when life decides, meanwhile refusing to yield.
It all seems impossible yet altogether necessary. It must be done and damn the odds. Damn the consequences and all the added suffering I will have to bear. I was born of pain and live in it. It courses through me with my blood. Dispensing discomfort and anxiety and horror and depression and wearying my poor battered soul.
My day is crystallized in this, in these words and this message to myself and this attempt to make sense of more psychological torment. Here is where I am and this is who I am and why I am and what I am. The person sitting here writing and….
Clinging.
To who knows what.
Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home
Sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullabye
Golden slumbers fill your eyes
Smiles awake you when you rise
Sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullabye
-- From Golden Slumbers by Paul McCartney
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