it’s like …
it’s basically like …
like you’re … in a dark room. a pitch black room, that you’ve never been in before, and you’re fumbling around for a light switch. and nothing feels like a light switch, and you’re moving your hands around in the darkness, all along the walls, you can feel the texture of the paint, but you can’t seem to find that raised plastic with the little nub in the middle. and as you move your hands around you brush up against this thing or that thing and since it’s dark you don’t know what it is. eventually, you can’t find a light switch or the door or anything, so eventually you just give up and in order to stave off insanity you start feeling the things in the room. you’re trying to make sense of the things in the room. is that a shirt? am i in a closet? what is that thing, what is this thing, you know. soon you’ve taken all these amorphous blobs in the darkness and you think you know what they are. that’s a shirt, definitely, it’s on a hanger. that’s a toy car, like an RC car. you think you know everything. but you still can’t find a light switch, or a door handle. you can’t find a way out. and now that you think you know what everything in the room is, you get a sense of what the room is. it’s a closet. it’s a basement, whatever. you’re certain of it. how could you be wrong? you smelled everything, you touched everything. and now you’re here, alone, in this room, no lights, no sounds, no door to open, no windows. pitch black. and you’re just there. and it’s like, “well now what?” you know? now what? what’s the next step? maybe you scream, maybe you scream at the top of your lungs and bang as hard as you can on the walls, just scream until your throat is hoarse, until your arms are bruised. but nothing happens. maybe you sit and think about shit. but nothing happens. you’re just alone in a dark room you can’t escape, no matter how hard you try.
that’s how i feel. almost every day. and see, the days i don’t feel like that are like when there’s just the quickest flicker of light in that room, like dim candlelight, for just a second, but it illuminates the room enough that i can see that i was wrong about everything. that wasn’t a shirt, it was an old shawl. that wasn’t a toy car, it was a, i don’t know, a toy dinosaur. but i was wrong. and now i have to get that light back, because i want to be right. i know i won’t get out of this room but at least i can be right, at least i can know about the room i’m stuck in. so i wait. and then another flash of light, and i take a mental image of another object. and then i wait. and wait. and another flash, another mental image. and that’s pretty much what my life is like, when i’m not depressed. a brief glimpse into a well-lit room, in between months of waiting in the dark.
