despair
Some days it's just all shit. You get out of bed and it's foggy and gray and you have good intentions but then something happens and you have an argument and are thrown into despair and cry and your world is drowned in mucous. Or maybe it's just me. Sometimes my world seems to be teetering on the edge of an abyss, my grasp on sanity too weak to even call tenuous. I'll be happily stumbling through life and then something slaps me upside the head and I leap off a cliff and into a bottomless pit of self-pity and terror, a quagmire of greasy black goo that I don't even have the will to pull myself out of, couldn't even if I did.
Today was especially bad. See, generally I delude myself into thinking I'm basically a happy person, but really I not-so-secretly suspect that the madness is always there, just lurking barely under cover, just this side of insanity. I wonder if this fear of relaxing hold and slipping into dementia is common at all, or if it's only common among those who truly are slightly mad and need to watch it in order to stay sane. Maybe someday I'll end up in an asylum and I can finally relax my hold on the world and just drool quietly to myself and let the teeming hordes of demons rage through my mind unchecked, raping and pillaging and burning everything that was ever me.
Today it all just seemed so futile. I suppose it was and is just general garden variety time-is-passing angst. Everything just seems so pointless. Why am I here? What purpose am I serving? Is my life worth anything to anyone? Is there any good reason I shouldn't just throw myself off the nearest nicest cliff? Other than the fact that I can't pull myself together enough to use a kleenex, let alone get in a car and drive to said cliff. Stupid job, stupid activities to make me forget that I do nothing worthwhile and am nothing worthwhile, no point to it all, wouldn't it be simpler and cleaner for everyone involved if I just wasn't?
The romance of suicide always appealed to me, but I've just never even been able to seriously contemplate it. It's too easy, to clean, too final. Truly giving up. No, rather, pretend to be insane. Lock yourself up, take too many aspirin, lightly cut your wrists, but not so much you do more than bleed a tiny bit. Throw some things, scream a lot, cry, rake your nails across your face and this time don't tell everyone that it was a mishap with a cat. This time don't cry on the bus or in the metro bathroom, don't think about jumping off of bridges, the ones you walk over every day. This time just curl up and try to shut out the world and snivel into the pillows and promise the demons that you'll never eat, never talk, never open your eyes again. Be as crazy as you want to be. Go catatonic. Let go. Relax.
People who tell me I just need to relax really ought to re-think that advice.