Depression is a dark shadow, a veil over my eyes. It is like heavy concrete blocks on my legs, paralyzing and dragging me down into the devouring abyss. It is a very manifestation of separation – I am all alone. I am abandoned. You have hurt me, you have abandoned me. Whoever you might be. I don’t know that for sure anymore. You seem to be something that exists separate from me, split off. I don’t know you, and yet you are so close to me. Apparently, you can take on all kinds of forms. Mother, father, brother, sister. Friend and lover. God. You left me. You have never been there for me. You have abused me. I am lost. I have been searching for you all my life in all appearances, and every time I supposedly encounter you, and this vacuum within me meets the projection of my longing, you become the mother, the father, the beloved, the God who has forsaken me. There is nothing left for me, what remains is this annihilating void that absorbs whatever I am. I am nothing.
So I seek sleep, oblivion, numbness. In success and wealth. Possession and status. Approval and intoxication. I want to escape. Anywhere but out of this prison of loneliness, rejection, neglect. Out of this maelstrom of suffering in which I seem to drown every day. I want to die and yet I fight desperately for survival each day. I want to live, but I can’t find the door to life. No one has been there to open it for me. No one invited me in. I was simply neglected. And now I am lost, my cries, my screams, my pleas, my pain echo unheard in the void. In all I hope to find you, you reveal this fundamental emptiness to me again and again. So my elusive happiness is a constant illusion, a distortion. A brief intoxication that makes me addicted, putting me into withdrawal. Each time I mean to remember, but what this memory precisely is, is not revealed to me. You keep changing your form and the moment I think I have finally found you, you turn again and again into a dark shadow, into this consuming nothingness.
This emptiness is a groundless abyss, into the unknown, foreign terrain. Haltless fainting. I try to close my eyes, but even if I see nothing, I feel the pain, the despair. I can’t hold you, you can’t hold me, I can’t hold on. As I cling to you, your shape melts in my hands like sand. I fall and fall, deep into the veiled illusion, around me clouds of mist, gloomy figures whispering insistently in my ear all the anxiety and hopelessness of collected and unconscious memory. My cells vibrate to this hypnotic melody that splits and disconnects me internally.
Here I am now all alone, just in the presence of this shadow, even my projection has dissolved into nothing. I want to run away, but I cannot escape the shadow. Down here in the darkness it torments me with its painful history, with my past. It wants to force me to look at it, to listen to it. I close my eyes as tightly as I can and cover my ears. Its presence is unbearable, dark heavy clouds of smoke that make it difficult for me to breathe and burn deep into my lungs. I try to take as shallow a breath as I can, to become invisible, maybe then it will forget about me. I try to numb it, to suppress it, to escape into distraction, hoping that in my numbness, in my restlessness, it won’t reach me anymore. And in doing so, it drives me closer and closer to the abyss. I am exhausted, I can take no more. Its persistence steadily increases the dose I need to escape from it, to be able to ignore it. I oscillate between coma and hyperactivity. In this paralysis and restlessness, we are chained as hunter and hunted. I can’t take another step, I only turn around my own axis, caught in a vicious circle.
Waking up in the morning is the constant revival of yesterday, and today is the constant grueling escape from the past. There will be no other tomorrow, no new tomorrow. I have lost, I am lost.