Kind of blue
Sometimes my most profound (or so they seem at the time) lines come late at night, after my brain has been stretched in ten different directions by the day, by sunlight and twilight and stacks of children’s books.
Last night I thought about the area around my eyes, salt-cured by post-dinner tears, the skin made pale with deposits left by sadness. I couldn’t tell you now what those tears were about. When I told my husband about them, he asked if I was just feeling emotional or if it was a reaction to something, I had to say it’s the same thing I’ve been feeling for a long time now: Sad. Sad. Sad.
My father called a few days ago and we had a long conversation. It’s been going that way more these days, the long conversations, which I like, though I don’t always feel like I can share everything about my life at the moment. He asked me how I was doing. “Eh. Not so good.” And then he started – politely, not like a proselytizer – talking up antidepressants as a way to clear out some of the darkness.
When comedians go blue, they talk dirty. When people feel blue, they are sad. It goes beyond blues for me, it’s true, but I am functional. I feel, I move around, I do what I need to do. When I take those depression quizzes (online, in my therapist’s office), I am on the borderline. I just don’t feel depressed enough to go pharmaceutical.
Still, I imagine not existing, imagine the pain of being human wiped away. It’s not that life isn’t worth living – it is, it’s the only thing we’ve got – but I am not enjoying it and am having a hard time imagining it being joyful again. If I could take the darkness of my blues, the midnight pitch, and lighten it, make it more like the dawn sky, well, that would be the trick.
My past obscures the rest of me like a heavy blanket or a stage curtain. Or maybe it’s my present: I don’t know. Take action, people tell me. Get moving. But I am muffled by all of this, I move slowly – though I do move – and I can’t see the path clearly. I distract myself with emotional candy and I soothe my brain with wine. Instead, I need to take a clear-cutter to the forest, to the vines, I need to machete through the curtain. I need to rip off the blanket. Maybe it will take drugs, but I’m not ready to go there yet.
From the prompt "Blue."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by shiftingpixel.com
Joe Lencioni, shiftingpixel.com