I've had this thing going on in the back of my throat since yesterday. Something akin to shoving a piece of sandpaper up my nose, and rattling it around for a bit. It's nothing extraordinarily agonizing, but this illness has certainly disrupted the regular flow of life. Due of my complaining, my wife has given me some pills, which I took before I left for work. So instead of doing my duties to the company, I find myself sitting here in drug induced stupor, contemplating my existence. I should be doing work, and I know that if I don't I'm simply making things worse for myself in the long run, but the chemicals have control at the moment. I'm watching the little numbers float across my screen like clouds instead of discerning their relation to the company. I will pay dearly for this later. So be it.
Things have been revolving very strangely in my part of the world for the last few months, and I'm not even sure of the specifics of these problems, let alone the solution to them. My interactions with those around me have taken a surreal and convoluted turn. When I'm supposed to be concentrating to the world at hand, I find myself looking back on the world as it was, trying to make sense of little scraps of information and what little memories I'm able to retrieve from darker times. I've been talking about going to the doctor for this, but this idea merely gets kicked around the field for a bit before I put it back in the toy box of my mind. I can understand that these feelings are not going to subside some day, and that it will be better for me in the long run to try and sort out my head, but it's a lot easier for me to sit around and mope than to be "pro-active" about my life. This is how I dig myself into deep holes that take even more effort to climb out of than it would take to try and fix things now. This is the way depression has always been, and for more of us than I can fit in my head at once right now.
Instead, I do what the rest of us do from time to time. Sit in dimly lit rooms, listening to the depressing music of the past, and wallow in our own shortcomings and mistakes. Sit in empty bars with our heads on the cool, damp wood, wishing more mightily than we through we could that we could wake up tomorrow and breathe in the fresh air and appreciate something without feeling guilty about it. Shake our fists at ghosts we pretend we can interact with, and come up with the perfect thing to say to make them all disappear. Sure, I do all of this. We all do, whether or not we bring ourselves to tell other people about it. This is the state of human nature.
I've got people walking around me right now, doing little office things, trying to be productive, while I sit here with my eyes closed, typing and wishing more than anything to be under the covers. Thinking about the realities that will never come to pass, the people that will never exist, the biochemical compositions that simply will not form in my brain long enough to allow me to reach enlightenment, or whatever greater thing there is out there. More than anything, I want to be a part of this world in a way that I am not, and have not been for a few months. I want to bury the dead.
While at my mother-in-law's house a few weekends ago, she was talking about her tinnitus, and how the only time it has stopped in the last few years was when they stopped her heart during surgery. She said that she looked at her doctor and said, "It's so quiet. Don't turn it back on yet." I found this terribly profound. This feels like something I want, like being weightless, suspended. Just turn it all off, just for a little bit. Put me in the dark of ether.
Don't turn it back on yet. Give me a minute.
Okay. Reset. Bring it all back.