I Am Absent From Myself

Like a vine that has twisted its way though the years around the oak tree, twisted like so that it smothered the tree where it was hard to find where the tree left off and the wine began.

I empathized with that tree. My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak; it had been a sucking thing that has wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I. It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiates all of my life out of me. I have moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression, as surely as the leaves on the tree’s high branches belong to the vine.

I feel as if my mind is immured, I can’t expand it in any direction. I knew that the sun rises and sets, but little of the light ever touches me. I fel myself sagging under what is much stronger than I; I fall because my ankles turn, my knees are uncontrollable, my shoulders turn in, and in the end I am compacted and fetal, depleted by this thing that is crushing me without holding me. Its tendrils threaten to pulverize my mind and my courage and my stomach, and desiccate my body. It goes on glutting inside of me when there seems that there is nothing left to feed it.

I am not strong enough to stop breathing. I cannot kill this vine that wraps itself so tightly around me. My energy is gone, and I just want it to let me die. Every second since I have been awake today has hurt me. My mouth is parched, and my tears are all dry. I had thought that when you feel your worst your tears flood, but the very worst pain is the arid pain of total violation that comes after the tears are all used up, the pain that stops up every space through which I once metered the world, or the world, me.

I am absent from myself.