Standing.

"Have you ever felt despair? Absolute hopelessness? Have you ever stood in the darkness and known, deep in your heart, in your spirit, that it was never, ever going to get better? That something had been lost, forever, and that it wasn't coming back?"

-Harry Dresden, Book One of the Dresden Files

You can stand to reason; you can stand firm, you can even stand alone…but I – I can do none of those things. There’s a kind of empty solace in my existence; a kind of blank peacefulness that comes about when a body is simply too tired to pick up its load and carry on. Once a dreamer, I am plagued by nightmares. Once a fighter, I find my knees both broken and I am on the floor unable to rise. What happened to me, you may ask. I can give you no answer. I don’t even have any questions.

Leave me alone.
Leave me alone, all of you.

I let this happen to myself. Oh, I cared at first. Hurried through my days, struggling to keep in line with the others at school, at church, at work…I did it all. The 4.0 perfect student (Member of every school club but yearbook. Couldn’t bear to chase after the pseudoyuppies of high school in hopes of a good shot.) An upstanding member of the congregation. Sang my damn lungs out in church and stood on street corners for hours preaching. (I do think that scarred me for life) I was a real comer at work, always pushing for that promotion, that golden banana of the monkeylike workforce they call ‘retail staff’. Were those things supposed to change me? Enlighten me unto the meaning of life? Because none, I repeat, NONE of them did any of those things.

Nonetheless, I fought like a demon to live, to love - to exist alongside the denizens of my world. Every day the sunrise was a little darker, every night lasted a little bit longer. I never saw it, never felt the changes tugging at the outskirts of my mind. I only knew I had to work harder, faster, keep pushing for the ultimate goal of humanity - to cripple myself into becoming like everyone else. Then call myself successful for it. In that I would find my salvation…wouldn’t I?

How I longed to be ‘normal’. I chose television over imagination, and rejoiced in the bright voices of the shining ones within. And then one voice became distinct, wrapping itself insidiously amongst my thoughts, peeling back the layers of my heart to seethe within like some malevolent serpent. “Thinner!” it said. Like the book, like the movie, like the women, like my dreams. I obeyed. Oh, how I obeyed. Pounds sloughed off even as my worries did, dreams were replaced by cobwebs; thoughts slipping away like rain. I mistook despondency for freedom, and the coldness of my body soon spread to my soul…

It’s a long story, how I got there and back again. It doesn’t bear repeating. Suffice it to say that I am still here; both more and less than I can say for some. I will say that I have love to thank for that, tainted as it was by guilt. It warmed my soul as nothing else could, and lifted me to heights I’d never known before. In it I found sanctuary from my dark memories; a haven from all my fears. But love fled, as it is wont to do; leaving me maimed and lost. At last, I was crippled as I’d ached to be so long ago. After all that I’d been through, all I’d done…it was love that broke me in the end. I remained on my knees where it had flung me and laughed.

This is not a written work of beauty and wit, meant to astound and enlighten the populace of my insight. This is a rather erratically contrived electronic journal, where grammar is given the proverbial finger and thoughts run amok. For that I am grateful, for no one who reads this will ever know me or should ever want to. And that’s fine by me.