Philosophizing Depression

And so it is on occasion, that page after page after page, each moment surrenders into the next without pause. It is like that terrifying time-piece, whose long arms race (Newton might have invented differentials to make some sense of the crazy unrelenting time of such clocks) at a pace steady with its staccato cousins (the ticking clocks). But because it doesn't have that ever expected pause - the signal for the passing of one second - it arrests your vision, your imagination, your whole being is paralyzed by the flow of never resting time. Cognizant of your hypnosis, you want to steal yourself away but your eyes just go on searching for that hint of a pause. You feel your hair turn silver. The passing of time should never be this real.

You realize how your biography has been adulterated. You watch destiny violate your hopes. In a way, you feel you are still the girl from years past, reading your own self in the story of a knackwurst and the children's transport*. In the alleyways of your mind, you still orate your story to dazzle some audience and these twists feel like rape because they threaten to terminate the story before its written. You also feel you need at least three more words as powerful as the word 'story'. A new sense will have to be founded. The large part of you that is okay, is so because it thinks it can still avenge destiny by some greater heroism, possible only because now you don't have what would have kept you busy for years.

You are better than this exhibitionist, you tell yourself. There actually are selves in you that are good (enough?). Better is the enemy of good, and in your world right now, you are not good enough...let alone better. You know how you measure yourself by spoonfuls of accomplishments that you barter for worth. It so difficult to write in first person. But any other person is deceit, you feel like lying using them. Yet the intimacy of 'I' is so fundamentally disturbing that you cower behind the closest option - the reader. Let the reader become the read. Let him bare his own bruised mind (you achingly feel the need of a genderless pronoun).

Synapses are these odd ephemeral things. They huddle and convene by the thousands formulating a thought. Then they cage it in words, words with walls so high that seasoned linguists with grappling hooks may only, if ever, free the prisoner. And then, even those shadows of words are lost in oblivion. The only means of preserving that infinite moment of formulation of thought, however shabbily and inconsistently, is the recording of those words. Most of our lives are a struggle to verbalize, as tangibly as possible, the cogitation of these synapses.

And this is perhaps the only purpose of this treatise. To record how you felt at a certain unhappy moment in time. In posterity, when you have walked on into being another self, these words will help you remember - and if you can remember enough, you can be, and what you want more than anything is to somehow be. Whole.

~ March 12th, 2013.

* "The Children's Transport" by Lore Groszman Segal.