I have just curled up on the couch with a beer and my cats. The house is empty save myself of human activity for the first time in months.
I have hit play and The Hours is now covering the screen. Nicole Kidman works the beginning of the movie playing Virgina Wolfe (a personal icon of mine) with a narration of her suicide note followed by a very long swim in the river.
Few movies affect me as this one does and even fewer comfort me as this one does. The cast is Emmy and delicious. Staring the greatest actresses of my time. I am in the mood. When I sit to watch this movie… I know. The mother of darkness, my soul’s never ending companion is upon my mind like the weight of a soft naked woman sleeping. I am depressed. No cause or reason. Just depressed.
I like the quiet of the house. Empty of life save my kitty sharks, prowling the house and my own thoughts.
My husband and son and uncle are at a family BBQ. I tried (and my husband praised me) to attend. However I was not “there”. I could not smile for the life of me and in the face of happy, talking, socializing people I withered like so many dead flowers. I had to escape from the people I truly love because I could not keep up. The sweet naked woman that blankets my mind stirs and sends me to myself. I needed aloneness. To leave the awkwardness. To lay beneath the down with her. To be alone with her. To suffer and embrace the depression that controls me.
I want to be social. I want to be normal. But I am not. I never will be.
I have always heard that I should never allow this disease to “control me”. But I am starting to think that maybe, just maybe, I should stop fighting it. My mind has worked this way all of my life. I strive to be “normal” and thus make a mess of myself. I do not want people to see me as different, crazy, depressed or what have you. But I want people to know. I have a disease. I can see things others cannot. Should that hold no value? I can see in the dark. But like all in the dark, I lack the gift of the sun, of light.
So here I am. Feeling quite pathetic. Like a child on time – out.
The hours of my life pass so loudly, shuffling through time like clinking high heels on marbled floors. But only I can hear them. They would call this madness. I must be mad. But the floor must be walked. The hours will pass.
My life will end up floating through a cold river. My words written on endless paper. My time will be spent struggling against those waters and those words. I will break all of my bones upon those river rocks.
My time will be spent with a soft, naked woman who curls along side me and whispers. Or my time will be spent missing her while she is away.
She whispers to me during the hours. And when all is silent. I can hear myself.
“Dearest. I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of these terrible times and I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices and can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems to be the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness, you have been in every way all that anyone can be. I know that I am spoiling your life and without me you could work.”
I will not recover this time.
I will fall asleep with her… I will.