I hinted yesterday that darkness was coming. Or rather the darkness is here, but that today I would write about it. I left work, and drove different highways to my brother's house to check on his cats (the boys are well, beeteedubs), finally got home two hours after I left work, ate a found objects, watched an Eddie Izzard DVD (this is relevant), and went to sleep.
It's 2:30 am. I woke up, had to pee, thought I'd start typing. I don't know how much I will write tonight. I'm not entirely sure what I will write. And mostly I don't know if I will be brave enough to post it once it's done.
This will probably be my most jumbled and rambling post ever (which is quite the feat). If I manage to get through it, if I say everything I think I want to say, I won't be up for self-editing before posting.
And one more caveat: I'm at my imac. I just don't feel like trying to type this on my phone, even if the wix app didn't have an slightly drunk autofill. Instead, I'm battling cat-butt-on-keyboard. She already deleted the first sentence of the previous paragraph so I had to retype it. So I moved the keyboard up onto the old DVD/VCR player the imac sits on so the screen is high enough it doesn't hurt my neck. But that means I'm typing over her body as she lays between me and the raised keyboard. Which is awkward. And she moves so I can't always see the keyboard and the typing annoys her and eventually she will nip at me.
Yes, I am stalling, thank you for noticing.
I'll start with yesterday morning. It's not the start, not by far, but it seems as good a place as any. I had some old miscellaneous fabric I promised to give to R bevause I added several kids to her next summer reading program and she was going to have to buy more fabric or some of the kids would have to get paper instead of fabric. Please note: R was not mad at me. She didn't demand fabric from me. The fact that I can see, in such a short period, that giving a coworker fabric as a self-imposed guilt fine for both of us just doing our jobs, this is big positive. Anyway. Fabric.
Which I put in a bag. Specifically an Eddie Izzard Force Majeure bag. I didn't go to the show. Friends of mine did a few years ago in West Virginia. They bought a block of tickets. Invited me. But I didn't go (altho I really wanted to). They said it was a great show. They stayed after, mingled with others who had such a great time they weren't ready to just go home, and Eddie came out and chatted and answered questions. I really wish I had gone. But I couldn't. They gave me a Cake or Death shirt in the Force Majeure bag (it's a plastic shopping bag, not a fancy just or hemp tote, which just has the tour logo on it) for Christmas that year.
I had sort of explained to them why I couldn't go despite really really wanting to go. I'm not sure how many of the unspoken words they heard, especially J who is a licensed therapist. I said I couldn't go because I couldn't imagine being in a crowd, squashed in a theatre seat with strangers all around. Which was true. I had to force myself, trick myself sometimes, into going out to the grocery store even. I was a panic attack on two legs every time I left home
And I was worried about money. The Izzard ticket wasn't expensive, but it was an expense I couldn't justify. I don't remember the entire sequence of events. According to wikipedia, he played Charleston in July 2016, which seems too early to me. I remember the concert as being in the fall. But only because I remember only two things really from summer 2016.
My cat, Ivan, died. He was probably about a year and a half old when I adopted him from a no-kill shelter. He died fifteen years later. It broke my heart.
I didn't understand it, didn't know what to call it or why it was happening or . . . well, I was at loss for all of the journalistic w's. Through the telescope of time I can clearly see I was in a major depression.
It started long before Ivan's death, long before I was fired and had to fight for unemployment benefits and to keep my house -- but those things just gave it fuel, fed it and stoked it into over a year of indescribable misery. And that summer, June and July and August and September and into October 2016 (here's where I get cagey, can't even, now, type the straight out facts) I had a plan.
If you have ever fought through depression, or if you are on the other side of the desk like my friend J and help people with depression, you know what I mean.
I didn't sleep well. I was always tired. I'd go to bed early and toss and not ever really be quite comfortable and finally fall into a lucid dream where I felt like I was awake and aware of every passing minute only to slip from dreaming I was awake into actually wakefulness and realize I had slept because more time had passed than I thought. And repeat throughout the night. Until I didn't doze again and really was aware of each changing digit on the clock beside me. And then I would just lie there in bed, as still as possible (that was important) until the alarm blared and I got up and slogged through another day.
I don't know, now, if the plan arrived whole or if I added to it a little each night. I do remember lying in bed and waiting to see if I had one more waking sleep coming or if this was it for the night, and listening to the outdoor night sounds change from furtive rustles to my next door neighbor (in his late 80s/early 90s then, and now passed) open his door and walk out to look for his newspaper and then back into his house and maybe he would do that several times until the newspaper actually came, and the birds twittering away, and finally the working day car doors and car engines and car brakes stopping too sharply on the main street a few blocks over. And as I listened to all of that, I walked through the plan in my head. Over and over and over until the alarm.
I wouldn't realize I was crying, had been crying for some time, until I moved. Then I'd be startled by the wetness of the pillow. I'd go into the bathroom and wash my face without looking in the mirror over the sink. I don't think I looked at myself in a mirror for months.
I'm going to pause here for the night. It's been over an hour since I started. I'm making crazy typos. My sentences are out of control. It's not like I'm leaving you on a cliffhanger. I did not die summer 2016.
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