The ceiling is the beginning and the end of this world. My mind is the layer of covers above me in my bed, pulling with a strange kind of comfort. You can stay in here forever, and I will grow thicker and thicker, warmer to your heart. Protection. You will be protected. But once protected...?

I am trying to make something. I am trying to etch out this life on a canvas or a page. I don’t see anything, though. The walls have gone grey around me and I don’t dare get up. There’s nothing to get up to.

I miss you.

You were not a lover, you were not a dream, and I knew exactly who you were. Without my confidant, what do I do? I barely know how to think without you to think to. And so I breathe. I don’t think. I let the ceiling grow closer – the beginning and the end of this world.

I remember depression in ninth grade. What it meant then. It meant that sharp brand of punctuated misery that is all a thirteen-year-old’s hormones can sustain for long. Hot fluctuations and violence in the brain. Self-hurt and a religion of suicidal tendencies. This is slow. This is dark, but it never hits black. Black would be too much of something. This is more and more of nothing.

I can’t move.



You know what I love about E2? No matter how shitty I’m feeling, I write it up, and the moment I’m satisfied with it enough to post it, the cloud just lifts those couple of inches I needed to crawl out and see what’s going on out there and feel human. I will never cease to be amazed.