6. Depression

6. Depression

I do remember the closing-in times when the doors of hope seem bolted shut and the other human beings are apparitions, mere decorations that happen to have opinions and faces and, in theory, lives and problems of their own.

I do remember the feeling that, no, there is no quibbling with the solid presence of experience, the sheer weight of It All, the all-aroundness of life, but also the feeling that weight and ubiquity do not purpose or pleasure make, and the head aches in some kind of existential, symbolic way, a cerebral emblem, a psychic bruise, a cranially enclosed fed-up-edness.

I do remember how the red velvety, thickly perfumatic rose once meant nothing in this circumstance, was a kind of old beauty-joke, a cheap Shakespearian souvenir, a trite thing on a stem, a waste of everybody’s time and certainly nothing to do with me.

You have to hand it to depression. It is professional, and it means business, and it thinks of everything, including a rose named Mister Lincoln, including Mister Lincoln, who knew depression, who called it the blue-devils.