Craving Nothingness

Can your personal devil also be your protector?

How much time have you stolen from me?
Days?
Years?
Decades?

Whenever you arrive at my doorstep,
like inevitable doom,
I brace myself with all the armor
I’ve amassed over the years.
But you undress me right away,
with the slight raise of an eyebrow,
as if to say, how could you even think
you could defeat me?

I let you take me then.
What choice do I have?
For a couple hours, days, weeks.
I never know how long
until one day I wake
and you are gone.

But till that time,
I’ve learned there’s no point resisting you.
I surrender to your whims,
the way you whip tears out of my eyes
like I was a pregnant cloud that needed birthing,
or how you steal the energy from my legs,
forcing me to lie down and surrender.
How you enter my mind and twist my neural circuitry
like you’re a cat playing roughly with a ball of yarn.
Thoughtlessly,
you pump me full of poison.
The self-hate is sweetest.
It always goes down smooth.
Followed by the drizzle of worthlessness
I savor like an addict who’s been starved.
Why is it so easy,
so very natural,
to accept my nothingness,
almost like I crave it?

Why do I dream of being the mud on your shoe,
or the one who cleans it,
rather than someone like you,
who doesn’t give a shit about appearances?
Why do I prefer paralysis and inaction,
to a life of success and pride?
Why did you choose me,
so young,
to mold in your likeness,
so that all I see now,
when standing in front of the mirror,
is nothing but you?
The black hole that you are,
sucking the weak of this world
into your magnetic embrace.
My lifelong enemy.
Depression.

And yet.

And yet, there have been times, more recently,
when I have fallen into my bubble of self-absorption,
as does happen when you arrive,
thinking,
God, but I needed this.
The world was just too much for me.
I needed this space, this selfishness.
I needed this brain fog, to quiet the voices in my head.
I needed this separation from reality,
this liminal space,
to just be.
I feel like shit, of course.
I hate it.
You’re more prison guard than pampering parent.
But in some twisted way,
maybe I needed you?

Maybe you’re protecting me
from my own self
when you break me open,
tear me down,
bitch-slap my like the powerless child I am,
spitting on my face for good measure.
When you smash my carefully constructed mask
onto the floor, revealing how fragile it really was,
you’re showing me the worthlessness of the mask,
not me.

It’s hard to make sense of you entirely,
with this brain fog, fatigue, and despair,
but somewhere in the mix,
I glimpse another side of you.
Maybe you aren’t my enemy, after all?
Maybe you’re trying to show me,
you see through the mask,
and it’s time to get rid of it for good.
It’s time to be real,
no matter how rare my real is,
no matter how misfit or misunderstood.
Being real will hurt,
but the pleasure that comes from it
will surely be better than any illusion
I could ever dream up.

That’s the problem with being an illusionist,
a daydreamer,
a teller of tales,
even if only to myself.
I never know which one of my characters is me.
I often get lost among the milieu,
a chameleon who’s lost sight of her self.
Maybe that is why you arrive at my doorstep.
To remind me of who I am not,
and who I could be.
When nothing stares back at me in the mirror,
I must remember,
nothing can also be a blank slate
of possibility,
a space swept clean
for remembrance,
an unfilled journal
waiting to be filled
with the truth: I am.

Maybe you’re the only one who understands
how much I crave the taste of my own bitter depths,
how much I need to learn how to revel in the relief
and reality of my nothingness.