Grey days
(Melancholy Logorrhea would make a good name for a band. Or a horrific disease. Like one that made you cry and write mopey livejournal entries so much that you died.)
So, this is what I think. For the past godknowshowlong, I've been like a flooded turbine. Water gets dumped in me, and I spin and spin in order to get rid of it. If I slow down for even a second, I'm just overcome. I drown. I filter out that which isn't pertinent, that isn't useful, and just keep trucking along. But where am I going?
This past month has been the exclamation point on a year-long run-on sentence of slow decline. Most of you know the particulars, but basically, I came as close to stopping as I ever have. My engines got flooded to the point where I was practically leaking water from my eyes every day for a month. Everything hit me, from now, from last week, from 7 months ago, from years ago. I just stopped moving, and I looked down. And I saw a dead albatross floating in the water.
In many ways, I don't let go easily. Some people who may or may not still read this thing will probably take severe issue with that statement, but I think it's true. I still hold on to memories and people and memories of people from years and years ago. I'm still angry about stuff that went on in my childhood, that I barely even remember anymore. I'll probably be angry about it forever.
I think it's also true that I don't hold onto things easily either. I will, in a transient fashion, have ups and downs and get close to people and whatnot, but I don't know how to keep hold of things for the long haul. I don't think most people do. I think it takes a lot of failure and a lot of heartbreak and a lot of human wreckage and a lot of work to teach one how to get things right. Boy-meets-girl movies drive me up the wall. They only show the beginning or the end. Never the middle.
I have a minor obsession with human wreckage. Never happens at the moment things are going wrong, but inevitably, down the road, I'm overcome with guilt and nostalgia and memories and I just collapse because, holy shit, how awful a person am I. I did this. I'm responsible for this. I should've done more. Been more.
Then the turbine kicks in and I remember it was never as simple as that. There was always circumstance. There were bad times. Lots of them. An endless sea of depression that washed into things and never hit low tide. Negative feelings. Out-of-whack feelings. There was a reason for it. It's not all me.
And just before the engines clear out the floodwater, I wonder for a second if I'm just filtering out that which isn't useful with lies I tell myself when I'm laying down to sleep. But that isn't useful. Why dwell on it?