It's funny how white noise becomes an irritation when it snows. The snow blankets everything and a hush falls down on the city and it's just such an unnatural hush - or by technicality it's the epitome of natural, but it's just out of place in the city. The noises of cars and buses are commonplace, mundane - a dull roar. But now, with big, fat snowflakes making themselves comfortable all over everything, those noises don't belong.
The snow's balancing on the branches like words on the tip of your tongue. It sits there almost mockingly just the same. And it's going to stay there until something changes. Temperature, wind, situations, healing. Everything depends on everything else.
Depression is the hush in a snow storm. When everything that's normal becomes wrong. I only wish it lasted the same length of time. A five hour bout of depression would be fine; but that's never how it is.
Times like this, when school's about to start again, I think a lot more about how I shouldn't let it be in charge, how I shouldn't fold. It's just so easy to trip into the giving arms of depression, though. It's quiet here.
Everyone's advice, no matter how well-meaning or warm-hearted, comes down to the same thing: get over it. Like it's something I can just step right over if I just add a little jump to that step. And I beat the phrase into the ground: easier said than done. The idea of being healthy and well adjusted and functioning is certainly a nice on, but it still comes down to the fact that it's easier to stay in bed. It's easier to be comfortable being miserable.
I hear "suffering from depression" a lot, and maybe that's my problem - I don't suffer from it - I've come to embrace it. It's what I know best and it's become more comfortable than anything else in my life.
There's no sleep like the sleep that comes in the storm of depression. It's something I'd be willing to wrap myself in and stay with all day long.
And it's never as simple as just getting over it. Depression is the weight of not just one snow-covered mountain, but the whole range. And it's the kind of mountain range that you end up getting lost in, and you're screwed because it's a solo trip - you don't have any travel mates to turn cannibal on when times get desperate - you just end up eating your own heart.
Depression isn't some room you're in and can just open the door and walk out of. It's not some outside entity. Depression is you. Every skin cell, every stand of nerves, every millimeter of vessels, every bit of muscle, ever sliver of bone, every single last organ, every drop of blood. "Getting over it" would entail tearing myself to shreds, dismantling myself, and burning the remains. The best I can do is to keep it at bay, but it'll never be gone, it'll never really leave me. It's become the only thing I know I can always count on being there, no matter what.
I've begun to think about writing him a letter. I know I could never speak to him in person. That I know for sure. But there's so much left to be said - I can't just leave it all at the lip of the voidcalled "moving on." Abandoning that would be like abandoning a child - in a snow storm.
But how the hell do you even start that?
"To my most loathed Robert,
You're a pedophile and a miserable human being who robbed me of four years of my life."
That's no way to start a letter. Or maybe in this case it is - I owe him nothing and he deserves nothing less than hot pokers to the eyes.
I want to tell him that I don't remember losing my virginity. But it's not simply that I don't remember, but I'm almost certain that I've blocked it out. And not just that single incident, either - but most everything up until about the middle of my junior year of high school. It seems to me that that's not okay. That's not normal.
I want to tear his heart out and feed it to his dogs for telling people that he and I didn't meet until I was fifteen and that we didn't start dating until well after that. I guess it's easy to bend the truth when you have face to save. But I was TWELVE when we met. All I wanted for my thirteenth birthday was to get a guitar and learn to play it.
That was the worst decision of my life. We met when I was twelve and I lost my virginity at the age of fourteen to a twenty-nine-year-old-man. I though he was twenty-four. And yes, that five year difference did make a difference.
And it's been suggested, by one of his friends no less, that I was a slut and stupid for having sex at that age. It was stupid - but it was never something I felt that I had control of. And there's no law that defines me as a stupid slut - there are mountains of laws that define him as a pedophile and as the sick degenerate that he is, was, and always will be.
In some ways I wish he could know the damage that he's done - and in still other ways I don't want to give him the satisfaction.
