Eight Months

It's been a long time since I've felt so lucid. Or at least, ready to explain all this.
In a few [less] words.

It's not the most challenging of things to infer that I haven't been well. I've been unwell. For a while. It must've started around September last year. That's when I think I burnt down those trees. I have no idea what triggered it all. Maybe it was the slouch of winter lurching close, and the dimness of the sky. I have a poem I wrote by hand from then:

Frost sets in upon my hair,
as it powders morning grass,
and ice creeps in beneath my nails,
as it thinly adorns the surfaces of lakes,
Winter rumbles closer now,
as it does every year.

It looks like I fucked up the metre on that fourth line. I can't remember if there was a reason for that, or no reason at all.

Or maybe it was just the stress of university work. Weird how stress can corner you into a dark recess or alcove where you never thought you'd end up, a place where you find some strange sickly shell that you never knew was part of you.

I've seen it take a lot of my friends. Well, not a lot. One or two, a long time ago. And maybe that's just what it is. The fact that I didn't or don't exactly have a real relationship with anyone. Because being alone for a long time can fuck you up too. So much nothingness around you. Like being in a vacuum. Eventually you just give in to the emptiness and the outside enters and your within withall becomes a gaping without, until all of you amounts to the opposite of all.[-and you]

So about that time something really rotten began to fester in me, and every insecurity I had suddenly flickered from being fears to beliefs, and every whim or flitting thought I came across just unravelled and it was like I was drunk, I just couldn't stop myself from doing the things I did, thinking the thoughts I thought. I saw a lot of things that scared me.

It's actually kinda funny how much my posts started to imitate of Leaves, but then, that was all I could think about at times. I suppose it took Johnny's own madness to make me recognise what was happening to me. Maybe that's the secret of why this book has had such an effect on me, even before I knew. Narcissus gazing into a pool that ripples answers even I couldn't extrapolate into a message of vanity.

I don't think I'll delete those posts though. If anything, I'm kind of glad I wrote them. It's like a timeline or a track to see what was happening at those times. I don't remember all of it. I forgot a lot, almost like a dream, where there's only fragments, and you know there's some (unconscious?) thread connecting all the scenes together, but watch as you must, you still cannot locate the absent memories. But then, how could you ever locate nothing? Maybe if it was surrounded by something, but if not. If my very own nothing is surrounded by a much more space of nothing.

I should stop thinking that hard. It's probably part of what got me in such a state to begin with. I always thought the advantage of depression, any mood or psychotic disorder, was being forced into a sort of introspection, a meta-cognisance that others simply never consider, might not even want to. But after all that, what am I really left with? I don't know what I know or what I don't know. It's not worth the cost. And is there even a cost? Is there ever an exchange? So it's just vanus.
And all that isolation, yes it makes you focus on what's here (you, only ever you, and even then that you is faltering, uncertain, uncanny) but that isn't necessarily a good thing. After long enough it just starts to corrode you. All the thoughts and counter-thoughts and reels of flickering frames of emotions being shattered and shards of glass rake the inside of your skull. Extending so far and long. I wanted it to stop. I had to make it stop.

Once I realised that, it might have even been a relief had not my mind been in the same state that triggered the urge, all my doubts and re-doubts and certainties and opinions and hates. That was around the time I wrote my last few posts. I honestly don't remember where I got a lot of the stuff there. Some of it was in quotation marks, but I couldn't find sources for all of the things I said, and a lot of it sounds too much like my own voice. I think the Greek is a passage on Socrates, and there's quite a few quotes from Danielewski lying about, naturally. Figure the rest out yourself if you want. I can't explain it and the best explanation is probably that, or perhaps what I wrote itself.

Looking at the posts just now actually, I recognise all the square brackets. Well, at least, I think I know what inspired me to use such a plethora of them - last summer I was reading translations of Sappho's poetry; Anne Carson wrote an amazing translation of her fragments that is scattered with brackets, she used them to signify where the manuscripts were illegible, torn, missing, or destroyed.  "When translating texts read from papyri, I have used a single square bracket to give an impression of missing matter, so that ] or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite legible somewhere in the line."

I'm off track. At some point in the night, once I wrote the post of the 12th of March, I swallowed a month's worth of halopleridol and aripiprazole and when I couldn't stand waiting I reached into the draw by my bed, took out the noose I had tied weeks earlier and hung myself off the rail by my window.
Through all the windows I only see infinity.
I don't remember the paramedics who carried me out, but later I learnt it was my girlfriend who cut me loose and called them. Ex-girlfriend, I guess. I'm not exactly sure when things broke off, but when I started to have all those thoughts about her I pretty much cut off all our contact. Strange. That night was the first time she decided to try visiting my apartment. It was late, more like morning, but at the hospital she told me how apparently she'd had a "bad feeling" about me out of the blue. I don't know any more, she won't talk to me now, and I don't blame her. The urge to delete all those posts is back. Some of the things I said are just so strange. I think so. All that spite and suspicion and fear had to have come from somewhere. Some source to some smoke poisoning.

I spent three weeks sectioned while my medication was changed and dosage was fixed and therapist called. I tried a few more times to end it while I was there, but I did not not and I never let anyone know, so I got released fairly soon. I have to see my therapist twice a week now, and my doctor three times a month. I feel about as crap as ever, but at least my thoughts don't stray, and I can step outside of my room without a panic attack. I've spoken with some people at the university and with a note from my psychiatrist I managed to keep my place on the course.

That's about all. I think I'll keep updating the blog, and if things get bad again I might stop. I told my therapist about it - not giving the blog's name of course - and she said it seemed like a good idea. An outlet. Once I thought that the whole idea of repression, of locking away feelings, being stoic, was fine (how English); that it was a myth that the habit only hurt you, only hardened the sediment of anxious habit, only endlessly reiterated the dismay that creeps. But the water-blurred edges of a few breakdowns several years ago fixed that. It's better to talk. Even alone. Even to yourself. To myself. Quiet but for my own [g]rasping. That's easier. Maybe it will even be better.