The chaos of depression.

I am a screen door in a tornado. Tied to an abandoned house. An enthusiastic tsunami , trampling the horizon from the ocean's mouth. I do it for love as the world drowns, and I'm unable to stay stable. The lighting with no sound, i stole the gravity from the underground. I am unfinished business. no screws to call loose. a conduit for fleeing marbles down a spiraling chute. My life is a loaded gun , but i'm too afraid to shoot.
I am a dirty soap box, stepping stone for those who are all talk. I'd throw rocks, but I've long since been cast. If i had a heart it would be made of stained glass. My thoughts are winds of pain, a whim's crow on a paint chipped window pane. Life hit me below the belt, i'm nuts. Mental illness sucks. I'm out of my own mind before my eyes are shut.
I am a quivering mass of panic. my blood is screaming murder, my smile calm as a hammock. Faking my way through the day i can't stand it. I mask every stabbing, painful jab of sadness , cause by every gasping breath i take on this planet. I go to the deep ends of the shallowest scenes, so that i can be seen as the flashes of lighting whose thoughts are not clean. My baggage is packed with wooden spoons and butter knives, fluttering to my own beat like a seizing butterfly. syncope at the lunch rush of my day job, almost got me laid off, but a faint whisper from an old demon i thought i paid off....there's no method to my mind, it's the shattered heart of chaos.

The Dark Side of Depression.

Pickles are delicious. Not the sweet pickles though. I hate relish too. Kosher dill and sour are the best. I love to drink the pickle juice as well. Even before the jar is empty. I love the giant pickles you can get in the old school sub shops. I would always get a large meatball sub and a large dill pickle from the jar on the counter. I would take some of the meatballs out and cut up the pickle so i could  put it on the sub roll and then put the meatballs back. I've got heightened senses, so just talking about meatball subs has made me really hungry for one. I can taste the marinara sauce and Italian seasoning right now.  The tart of the pickle, the sweetness of the sauce, the warmth of the bread. I can really taste it. Sometimes i would crush up potato chips and spread them across the top of the sub. Having a heightened sense is good when I make food because i can recreate what I've eaten elsewhere. Piecing together all the things that make me content is my most relaxing of all tasks.
I try to apply the piecemeal recipe approach to other aspects of my life as well. Whether it be fitness, positive energy and knowledge, or creative writing and art. I can take elements from moods, days, feelings and piece them together into a writing, a workout, or even research project. I've always felt it important to apply all your senses and capture their meanings in time to use toward a lesson in life or just a silly joke. It makes it more authentic and convincing. That heightened sense also helps me remember the dark places i never wish to return.
The thing about the darkness though, it's the most deceivingly comforting. It makes you feel safe because you can be yourself without fear of judgment ( or so it makes you think.). People can't see your flaws, insecurities, and demons. I have demons. The darkness makes the blackest of clouds look like a guiding light. Thankfully I've found a true guiding light and have managed to escape the cold embrace of my own darkness.
Admittedly my mind does travel there sometimes, but i quickly use my tools of recipe making to snap back to reality. The biggest mistake you can make is to feed that darkness with drugs or alcohol to numb your pain. All that does is weaken your wits and bury you further into the lonely corners of your mind. I know this because i tried to bury my dark thoughts, and myself with excessive pills and alcohol. It really was a dark time. A time i welcomed rather than escape. I thought i would be safe. I created my own space inside my head where no one could through. To me it was a sanctuary, while others saw it for what it truly was: a tomb. To escape the noise i would go to that place in my mind where reason and love couldn't find me. I saw reason and love as my enemy. As someone out to get me, and destroy like the rest of the world. I blurred the lines between help and harm because i was wounded. And if i was going to go, i wanted to be the one to say how and when.
Sometimes at work I'll be holding a knife doing on of many random tasks and I'll lose sight for a moment and imagine plunging the knife into my stomach. My heightened senses can make me feel the cold steel bonding with the warm blood as they absorb my hands. I visualize this as if it were actually happening. I sort of like it. And the acknowledgement that i sort of like it brings me back to reality , and the guiding light ( not a religious reference, simmer down.). I need this little lapses in time to remind me i never wanna go back there. I never want to live that feeling again. I never wanna be alone on a pull out couch with a tattoo machine, permanently scarring my hand, because at that moment i thought i could catch a shooting star. That mark still remains on my body as a reminder. A reminder NEVER to return there, but also never forget that it always looms. Lonely like me.

The Lonely Side of Depression

I often take great pride in being an island, and sort of wear it as a badge of honor. Some days i just can't bare it though. There really is the undesired loneliness that dwells in me and there's moments where i let it overcome me. I'm not saying this for compassion. Reassurance is nothing more than a passive aggressive barricade between who i am and who you think i am. Fear of being rejected for who i really am has made me in to an island. I still, at 36 years old am completely insecure and unsure of my role, and who I am supposed to be.
The thing i hate the most is that i know i am expressive, and frequently display it. Inside though, I know it makes me look crazy. And there is no bigger stigma in the world than being thought of as crazy. It means no one takes me serious, and I'm quickly dismissed from groups, cliques, teams, and so on. That can be a massive pill to swallow. To know that you don't fit in anywhere. Even with the outcasts. I am so alone, that sometimes my thoughts don't even speak to me. And my fear of rejection, and failure causes me to take my expressions to certain extremes because I'm trying to push people away so they can't get close enough to hurt me, or see my flaws and ridicule them. It's not that i wanna be alone. It's not that i don't like people. It's just that i feel so out of place no matter where i am, and who I'm with. Everyone seems so secure and certain about themselves and their decisions. Even if they're not, they create the appearance that their ducks are in a row, and their lives fulfilled.

I am so ashamed of my failures and shortcomings that even the scariest of masks can't hide it. I am too vulnerable for my own good. Again, i don't seek reassurance. I don't know what i seek. All i know is that this feeling, this weight of loneliness that accompanies me on this dead end walk is starting to hurt. How does one go one not loving themselves? Especially when I don't know who I am. How do i find my own comfort? I get so defeated by my own thoughts that i sleep the entire day when not working. I see others my own age and younger leading normal lives. Even if they're battling a war inside, they navigate the fiery maze with confidence.
I don't feel human. I go to pick up my son at his school and i don't feel human. I see all these parents gathered and talking to one another about sporting events, fundraisers, their kids grades etc. and I'm just a fly on the wall. Even if i try, i feel as if no one sees me at their level. Even close friends. Even when i try, i know I'm just a misplace grain of salt on the feast of life. Shades apart from any light.

To watch life pass me by from this vacant island is crushing. A crushing wave of hopelessness, and a sobering reminder that i feel like the sand that doesn't get pulled back in to the ocean. I feel stuck as you all move on.  People I know starting families, owning homes, set in careers. I've isolated myself to the point that i may never discover a way off this island.
I don't know who I am, and there is nothing more lonely.

Celery Stalkers

i can't step away from the pain. I can't walk the unbalanced beam without falling from refrain. I shake the wind and drown the rain. The predators descend on barren fields. I'm sunburned but you can't have the peels. You're hungry, and you're stalking your meal, but I'll starve you to death by making it all real.
You lurk in shadows, i AM the shadows. You hang in desolate fields, i am the gallows. Abandoned by life so you steal cupid's arrow, haunting the innocent, but there's no " maybe" old sparrow. I'll clip your wings and ground you 6 feet. No means No you fucking parasitic leech. Howl at the moon, but she's too good to speak. Crawl back in your hole before i rip your tongue out through your cheek.
Watching like a crazed lone celery stalk. Never picked, so you try to chop. You try and walk. You delusional piece of shit, stop trying to connect the dots. the setting sun's orange sky see's you no more than after thought.
Don't confuse with vengeance, it's sleeping. I'm just here on the behalf of remembrance for those who's innocence was stolen from safe keeping. You're a drunk fucking chipmunk screaming in to an elephant's trunk. No one can see or hear you. You're lost like our lunch. You make me sick, and every thought you have of prey, is an action that i take to take away your light of day. back off.

Sometimes..

Sometimes i just wanna eat a bunch of pills and smash the bottle over my head until i bleed out a chemical spill. I'm a walking time capsule buried in my thoughts. If I'm just a moment in time i'd rather smash the clock. Sometimes i'd rather be forgot, because your memory is my memory and that's all of you that i got. I see the future and i am its past. Sometimes i wish i were the beach where your waves crashed instead of a cracked image in a faded photograph.

Sometimes i wanna lose my temper, walk in to a crowded building and..Fuck! i can't remember. Sometimes i take too many pills and that's why i can't remember. Sometimes i don't wanna remember because the eyes are still tender. Melting through an endless reel of my soul being dismembered. Sometimes i wanna be weak. I find myself floating above the stairs cuz i cringe everytime i feel the wood creak. Stop noticing me, I'll be gone in a blink, don't speak of me, sometimes i wish i didn't think. Sometimes i don't remember.

Sometimes all it takes is a picture to stall the machine as the human inside tries to wipe the face clean. I hate to impede, but sometimes i wish you were here so you could watch me bleed. Stop me please. Sometimes i scratch the surface of your forgotten hypothesis and realized you were right, that i was the remedy. Sometimes i take more pills. Sometimes i boil water till my imaginations overfilled. Sometimes i pine for atrophy, and sometimes i kill my shadow as i sleep happily. Sometimes i can love. Sometimes i cough blood. sometimes i listen for clues to remember what i was, but the current never comes back. All i hear is foaming waves sweeping rocks under the pedals from the lilacs. sometimes i don't remember.

#Icantbreathe

I can't breathe. It's more than just the asthma and floating ragweed.
I can't breathe. It's the humanity dying right in front of me,
 the inanity constricting on the throats of our sanity.
I can't breathe. It's the tears I'm choking back,
our streets are painted black with red filling in the cracks and i'm not ok with that.
I can't breathe. Has anyone seen my inhaler? don't shoot just reaching for air. but you wouldn't care.
I can't breathe. there's too much pollution. Sorry Darwin, but humans have suffocated your theory of evolution.
I can't breathe. you've chopped all the trees, should have swung at the knees, if only he were lighter a few degrees.
I can't breathe. I've been coughing up blood. Serve and protect themselves well next of kin drops tears in mud.
I can't breathe. Justice is blind. Unless your skin's darker than mine. You're more likely to be fitted for a pine where as i'd just pay a fine. Sweet Lucy, never meant for this.
I can't breathe. cuz the rich are making money hand over fist. While they watch us kill each other so that they can exist.
I can't breathe. How can one be safe? when the people we elect blame the victims who are raped. The people who "protect" us won't allow air to escape. time to rename it the United Police States.
I can't breathe. Way too much hate. 11 times he pleaded, why'd you have to subjugate? You broke an oath, and now a family. My fists are up,  you don't fucking scare me.

post script.

It's all gone wrong, man. Everything's been corrupted and destroyed beyond reproach. Something as so simple as loving yourself and others as we go through our brief journeys on this plain. We're just visitors. Tourists who are supposed to be enjoying the scenery and the company of others. We took something so simple and we smashed it into a billion complex pieces and watched it bleed into our descendant's purity, and we did nothing. We're all gonna die, man. Why hand this great gift over to our progeny as it crumbles in flames? Flames we lit because we would rather no one have, if we couldn't have. We were given everything and we still wanted more. We burned this place to the ground because we wanted more. We killed our own species for more. We trampled the scenery and stabbed our mother earth in the heart with industry and the notion that prosperity meant taking from something without giving back.
They ate at the table with kings while millions outside their doors starved. They raised the cost but stripped us of our value. They gave us the scraps  to appease and distract. They gave us shiny objects to look in to while they robbed, raped and murdered us. They put us against each other while they sat on their thrones of ivory and laws and counted their money, while discounting us.
The meek didn't inherit the earth. The earth inherited the meek. And i laugh. I laugh  because all the sheep walking in a straight line, believing they are free, are headed to their own slaughter. Deep down they know this, but they've grown so complacent, and defeated that they no longer know better. They trudge aimlessly toward the hell they created. This is the hell they built, bled and died over. This is the hell they were told they'd never see because they were sold a dream. They were sold a dream and a handful of beans. All they had to do was offer their soul and allegiance to the nameless, faceless machine. They gave their values, dignity, sweat and tears for a drunk promise. And when they had nothing left, that nameless faceless machine marched them towards hell. There was no fight. No dissent.
Up until that final step before they were pushed in to that polluted, fiery ravine they still believed they were free. They believed they were doing the right thing. For some greater good, that was nor great or good. And as they rotted below the machine grew stronger. The machine had more, and with less to share it with. (Not that they would share to begin with.) That brass ring they hung above was nothing more than a door handle to the draw bridge that would crush us before we could reach our promised land. We became the rock garden. The stepping stones. Fighting and killing for what we don't need, because they convinced us we needed. They need us and we didn't see that. We were the numbers. We were the strength. They had the paper. Silly little paper that we let weigh us down. We let drown us in debt. We were scared of their paper. We foolishly wanted their paper. We wanted to be the machine.
And they fed off our hope and spit us back out in to the ashes.
It's gone now, man. The hope, the strength.  The buzzards circle over humanity and i sit on the edge of a cliff with my bottle of pills and a notebook. I never wanted their paper. I was just happy to be here. To visit. They can push me off the cliff into the sea of broken promises. But my hope stays with me. They couldn't kill that. I never had so i never wanted. When I'm old and grey, breathing my last mist. I will shut my eyes in defiance because i never lived blind. My death will mean that i lived. It will be a "fuck you" to the nameless, faceless machine. Even though it's gone now. The last shred of humanity in the world. I've got something they can't take. Something you can't buy, or kill, or discriminate against. I got something you can't oppress. I've got a goddamn soul. And may it carry on through the universe like a lone butterfly threading a needle. I didn't let the world corrupt me.