truth

The following is (unfortunately) not fiction.

I feel dead lately. What a cliche, ‘I feel dead’. Living death. But this cliche is not a
lie. (Who said that cliches are lies? Not me; but maybe I thought so, sometimes.)

Still, I feel the strangest thoughts occurring within me, for the first time.
Sometimes I’m sure that someone’s in my house or right behind me (I breathe faster and
faster, close my eyes tightly, run up the stairs, clench my fists, my knuckles white and red).
I learned how to make it go away, because the nice therapist I just started going to talked
to me about it, and I remembered that breathing in and out really slowly helps. One’s
breathing controls how things circulate in your body; when you panic, the adrenaline
crests…

She said I only have mild depressive symptoms, which is true. I’m not clinically
depressed, and I never have been. (I always had the words and the pictures to keep me
from losing the worlds and the words entirely.)

Living in a globe made of melting glass…

Still, I’ve never physically hurt myself until now, and even now I’ve only done it
once or twice (just hitting my head against the wall… it didn’t hurt that much, it was what
it REPRESENTED that counted. It was a sign of hurting myself, of loathing myself. It is
not not NOT good to do this, because it makes me worse. WORSE.)

I guess I’ve been feeling a bit better in the last week or two. I started
eating again (when you feel like this, you lose interest in everything, even things you used
to love, things you used to simply do without thinking…) and I can concentrate sometimes
when I read. I care about some things again. Not that I stopped caring. It was more like
hibernation… hiding from myself. Leaving the top layer, which is bumbling and stupid,
half-asleep.

Sometimes I get the paranoia really badly; I began to think that no one likes me,
although there’s no real reason to think this. It’s happening a little less now. It started
mildly after my grandfather died (far back in October, a month that reaches farther than
the eye could possibly see). Right when he died it started, just a bit. Then it got worse and
worse, and now it’s getting a little better. Sometimes I feel like I disgust people (for the
first time in my life, I decided that people disgust me. Yesterday, I found this, something
new and ugly growing under my skin. My own disgust for myself becomes superimposed
over the rest of the world, and then reflected back to me, so it feels as though I disgust
everyone. It’s horrible. I’ve always loved people.)

I used to have a center, but now I wheel through the stars and they are empty.
Sometimes the world seems to lose all it’s color and all it’s form.

As I said, this is not fiction. It would be nice if it were.