The Black Dog

on nurturing unwanted thoughts and feelings

It’s been a long time since I’ve been depressed, the kind of misery where you lay in bed for weeks and try to sleep your way into oblivion. Awake, you pray to nobody and ask for the house to collapse on you, anything to end your irrelevance and forget you’re not you. You have no “I”. Even the imposter who’s supposed to move your limbs and lips has departed, leaving you weak and malnourished. Whether you do or don’t get out of bed won’t change the insignificance of your existence or alter your inevitable fate. The only reason you don’t take your life is because you don’t have the energy to move, let alone make a plan and follow through with it. You’ve stayed in the same spot for so long that your muscles have atrophied. While vacantly staring at a blank wall between naps, you envision Christina’s World, Andrew Wyeth’s painting. You’re there, alone in a field, frozen in time, receding in the background. One hand hangs limply off the bed and appears to reach. For what? You could waste away and die of starvation on a mattress saturated in sweat and piss, and the only difference between dying now and thirty years later would be the total of your debts. “You need a purpose,” a friend tells you on the phone one day. You end the call without saying bye and think—“a purpose”—humans are a blight on the earth. All we do is create problems. If only a few persist, we invent more. We’re fish searching for water.