There is a pernicious thought I have.
Credit card statement lands – I’m nearly maxed out. Maybe time I stop putting things on credit, but I’ve no income.
I think about the debt I’m in – been plunged into in the space of six months. Fucking bipolar. Fucking illness. Fucking me. Continue reading
I’m re-discovering food.
Most people with serious depression stop eating when they’re ill, but I have the fattening version. I turn into a fun mashup stereotype of ‘gay man eating his feelings with ice cream’ and ‘batchelor surrounded by pizza’. Neither of these are stereotypes I aspire to but here we are.
I’m rushing.
I’m rushing and it’s beautiful.
Beautiful like fire and lashing rain and thunder and howling howling wind, I’m rushing and it’s beautiful and it’s taking my breath away.
Thank Christ at last I’m rushing and it’s beautiful, rather than hell.
Ideas whip into my head and hardly settle before being picked up spun around, turned about; impatient with myself and the world, plans that come to half a page of scribbled lines. And it feels good it feels good, you have no idea.
I want to just stay dancing in this whirlwind and laugh, and enjoy the storm.
“It always seems to be spring, with you”
Dad had stopped slicing potatoes for dinner and looked at me, old eyes wary and full of care. We don’t often talk like this – about this – but today it’s inescapable. Sent home from work, nearly to A&E. Out of a job, again. Bedraggled in trousers and a creased blue shirt, work lanyard still hanging from my collar. It had all been going so well.
“You’re right”
I’d been thinking the same. Past few years, it’s hit or accelerated in spring.
“Ever since you were 14”
Jesus. I’d not thought back that far.
Costa do good business from me at the moment.
After a stretch of unemployment and life on benefits, you appreciate the luxury of being able to go out for a coffee.
“You do have a job”, said the clinical psych the other day. “I know that right now that doesn’t seem to count for much, but it does.
Just having a job means you’re doing well”
It’s a dangerous thing, when the rapids of hypomania crash against the granite of depression. The fury can tear a life to shreds, break a man’s bones and leave him bloody and maybe then bloodless.
It’s a dangerous thing, when you’re wild and carefree and cruel.
I’m not getting too bad again, I’m not. I’m not I’m not I’m not. I’m fine. I’m not. I’m fine.
I’m sat in Costa with a flat white and a laptop and Spotify. I’ve even got a job – a job! – so I can afford to sit in Costa with a flat white. I earn barely a whisper above minimum wage and I’m working far beyond my pay grade but I’m appreciated and get on with my colleagues which is the important thing really isn’t it? Aren’t I doing well? Aren’t I just doing fucking well?
Last year I was getting angry letters from the bank and attitude from the Job Centre. Last week I spent £500 on lightbulbs and speakers and now I can paint my rooms like springtime or twilight or heartbreak, and I can summon orchestras with words and the music is silk and crystal, the sigh of the ocean on sandy shores.
I’m fine.
I’m 36 and I’ve tried so hard I’ve tried so fucking hard to overcome this shitty screaming petulant demon in my head and yet it has slashed and burned and salted every fucking thing every single fucking thing I have ever tried to do or achieve and I’m just tired now you see, I’m just tired of fighting and tired of pretending it’s fine and tired of putting on a fucking smile and shrugging my shoulders and saying c’est la vie and now just give me the fucking petrol and I will burn this fucking world to the ground I will burn myself to dry white ash and I will laugh and I will laugh while I burn.
I’m sat in Costa drinking their ‘Old Paradise Street’ blend, named after the London street where the beans are roasted. I used to work by there, used to live by there, remember the coffee smell and the branded lorries. Old Paradise Street, one of those quaint urban euphemisms for ‘here be whores’. It’s in Vauxhall.
And I’ve got a job – a job! So I can afford to purchase kitchenware and throw cushions and mass produced prints allowing me to style a home as unique as I am. I want a two-cup teapot – traditional style – and have spied some espresso cups that are so me, although I would of course have to start drinking espresso. Yesterday I ordered a couple of table lamps which fit in perfectly with the naturalistic theme that’s developing in the front room. Last week I went online and gambled away a fierce number of zeros because fuck it it all amounts to nothing in the end and it’s not as if I’ll make it long enough to worry about the debts.
Sometimes I think it will be a pity to not see the girls grow up.
Sometimes it scares me that I think that.
It’s a dangerous thing, when the rapids of hypomania crash against the granite of depression. The fury can tear a life to shreds, break a man’s bones and leave him bloody then bloodless.
I hope I’m not about to get as ill as once I was.
I’m not. I’m fine. I’m not.
I’m not doing great. The world’s a scary place and right now I keep thinking of the kids, keep getting scared for them, for the future, their future.
Being scared don’t do anything, does it? Silly Phil.
Nor does ignoring it all. But at least ignoring it all you get to live a happy life. Get to live a life.
And I think too much about these things, get to thinking what’s the point, get to thinking those same old dark dark thoughts. Who wants to watch the world burn, after all?
I shouldn’t think those dark dark thoughts, I’m told.
How is it life can be so brutally real yet so rice paper thin?
In the terrible dawn of grief you see the world stripped bare of stories, stripped bare of distractions and you want to laugh, or scream, or beat your fists against the chests of other humans and howl that it’s all dust and whispers and all these lives we build up and tear down and worry and fear and hope over are just stories we tell ourselves to distract from the gaping truth that we’re all just words spoken briefly by the world then lost with breath on the wind.
The world at once so brutally real yet rice paper thin.
I worry over things I can’t change, I’ll never be able to change, watching a humanity careening closer and closer to environmental ruin and social destruction and I worry, I worry over the future my future, their future. Silly Phil.
Sometimes I can blot it out, it takes effort and a few magic tricks but sometimes I can, but not right now. Not as the world looks set to burn.
I’m not doing great. The world’s a scary place right now and I’m not doing great.
I’m going to be 40 soon.
Well, I’m not. A few steps into 2017, I’ll be 36. I’m going to be 40 in 2021, God willing and with a following breeze and assuming I don’t have another little moment. 2021 is over 4 years away.
Which is soon, isn’t it? Eventually, 4 years becomes no time at all.
Phil wakes up.
His body lies in bed a while, eyes gazing at the door, the crumple of the pillow partly obscuring their view. The door is white. The pillowcase is white.
Phil wakes up.
His body lies in bed a while, breathing, eyes gently weeping. The breath is black. The tears are black.
Phil wakes up. Every morning.
Every morning Phil wishes he hadn’t.
Back up, back up.
Even my own glasses can be rose tinted, at times. Human nature, self-preservation, mental masochism – whatever the reason, I’m just as prone as anyone else to imagining a past more perfect than the present. It probably does me no good.
Explosions in Slow Motion 