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These are some of my favorite things... 4/15/2004 8:43:43 AM
I used to read other people's thoughts with an urgency, as if I were trying to lap up their anguish to feed my own bleeding heart, to give it a reason to keep whining. I remember often hearing the phrase "some days it's easier to get out of bed than others" and I thought to myself 'Yes! I know that! I know how that feels! I don't want to get out of bed either!' How stupid I was. The physical effort that it takes to drag myself from bed, one limb at a time, drains me to such an extent that the rest of the day I walk about like a zombie with hardly even the energy to smile. Now I really know how it feels. And I wish I didn't.
They say that a sign of depression is that you give up the things you previously enjoyed. For a while now I thought that was a crock of shit because since being pregnant I came to enjoy eating with the kind of shameful delight that makes fat people sneak into the refrigerator late at night when no one else is watching. After he died that enjoyment only increased, became an obsession really. Now it seems it's the only part of my day that makes my brain perk up and take notice for two f***in seconds. But then I realized I had given up things I used to enjoy. Alcohol tastes like stale milk on my tongue, thick and nausiating. And no matter how much I drink anymore, I can't get drunk. Oh I can stumble around with my eyes half closed like I'm just this side of falling into a coma but I don't really feel it anymore. It just feels like a different degree of the mental and physical exhaustion that fills my every day.
And the writing... it's pretty much tapered to a halt. After that day I tried to write what I felt but it seemed the poetry was depressing me more than life itself because the pain I put into permanent words would come back to bite me in the ass when I least expected it. My writing had given it a life and it had chosen to spend that life hunting me down with a ferociousness. And really... were there any words I could have typed into this antiseptic white box that could even come close to really letting the world know what it feels like? And does the rest of the world deserve to know what it feels like?
My highschool best friend abandoned me. She lived not two miles from my brother and when she heard what he'd done she wrote me off completely; made a passing comment to my ex boyfriend who she'd been contemplating courting that she was cutting out the negativity and drama in her life. Did you hear that Robert? We caused poor Meagan too much drama. Maybe you should visit her in the second coming and show her just what a bit of drama is.
Wishful thinking. I know. You are never coming back and she will never know how bad she hurt me. And, after such a callous remark, I doubt she'd care anyway. Learn a lesson, any of you who bother to read this, learn a lesson from my ignorance... innocence is rarely genuine and the more harmless a person seems the more dangerous they are.
The things I don't enjoy anymore... reading. Today is the first day I've picked up a book in six months, unless you choose to count the falling-apart edition of Anais Nin's diary upon which I would flip a page for an inspirational quotes much like prude, dried-up old baptist nags flip through the bible. But Anais Nin, genius that she was, does not really offer any positive inspiration for those days when your brother blows his brains out. So anyway, I decided that, in order to regain any semblence of self, I would have to read something again. So I picked up "We Need to Talk About Kevin" by some guy... Shriver I think. It's about a woman who hates her weirdo child from the moment he's born and he grows up to commit mass murder in his highschool. I thought it was appropriate and so far her long-winded manner of speach manages to keep me destracted for a moment anyway.
Truth be told, the only thing I can bring myself to care about these days is my daughter. My mother wants to use the insurance money from my grandfather's death last November to fly up and see my baby but she can't afford a motel. And my fiance's unbelievably cold and uncaring family will not allow her to stay with them. His uncle has a three story house in which he lives alone but somehow my little old mother is not welcome for a few nights. I would say f*** them but I find it hard to care about that anymore either. Which brings me to the subject of what I may miss most. My anger. I used to enjoy my sense of self-righteousness. Every so often I can conjure a livid blue spark of that old rage at the world's injustices. But it's all for nothing. Isn't everything?
My one hope... is that I can manage to raise my daughter correctly until she's old enough to strike out on her own and then, if I'm lucky, I'll be free to wither away to nothing.
