I am gone. When I look in the mirror or at my familiar surroundings that have been imprinted with myself, I don’t see anyone. I don’t recognize the girl in the mirror every morning with the uncovered purple smudges under her lifeless eyes. Whose hands are these that lie so still, no longer fidgeting with excess energy? Those things which once defined me to myself are missing, peeled off like weathered paint or simply dropped from nerveless fingers. Who is this girl who no longer runs, who no longer seeks out the moon? This woman breathing and sleeping, hardly eating, in this empty house – who is she? Where did the familiar grin go, the unorchestrated undulations that used to curl through her at this thought or that sensation?
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I can’t imagine I have entered into the entire rest of my life, that this is how I will be now for the rest of my days. But I no longer comprehend the buzzing, nonsensical words “one day” or “surely” or “must” or “change.” I no longer look toward the future except when my present grips my chin and jerks my head in that direction. And even then my eyes slide away from the emotion that may spark.
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I am gone. I am a husk. I am dead and move only as I must. I have become a person not of small things but of necessity. I walk as needed, I respond to my students only as far as I must, I eat what I have to to take the edge of hunger away, I listen to music to fill the silence and not my hollow chest. I do what I must and only what I must.
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But a suspicion has begun to form in my mind. I wonder if I can truly keep distinguishing between numbness and depression. The whole point of the numbness was to stop feeling all the bad things – the despair, the rampant hopelessness, the anger, the frustration that iced over my pores till I couldn’t breathe. But am I settling into – not an emotional ice age – but a mere acceptance, embrace even, of those bad feelings? Some would argue that shutting off all feelings is depression, but I have a different view. I think there is a difference, but I don’t know if I’ve crossed it already. Maybe the numbness simply keeps those feelings quiet rather than keeping them away. I don’t really mind. After all, the numbness is still there in whatever state my mind is in, either calm serenity or depression, or both. It just keeps me from being able to see either way.
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You know, I understand why people cut themselves when they claim to have gone numb. Even without feeling any emotions, even with so much of your humanity stripped away with your sensibilities, there still is a heaviness there, and we none of us are Atlas. In the cutting, you push all your heaviness, all your despair, all your anger, into that swipe. Your eyes narrow and your lip quivers and curls before shifting into the sleeping line it took before you cut. You do it for release, a release of heaviness denied, of a frozen hopelessness and stilled despair.
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I wonder what would move God. What would pull him out of his orbit and pay attention? How far do you have to go before he says, “All right, I see you really do need me”? At what point would he see that you’re not being stubborn but that you truly have lost hope? That it’s not that you won’t move, but that you can’t? When does his eye sharpen on your still frame sprawled out on the endless sand and he sees that you do indeed need his help? Where is the place, the borderline, between “he helps those who help themselves” and “oops, sorry, thought you were just sleeping” where he sees that his help is the only way to change anything? I don’t know. Do I have to get to the point of drugging out to kill the stretching day and selling my body for the fix? Am I still too comfortably situated for him to validate my need? Is he prejudiced against the middle-class?
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He is still my God. I can’t change that. Even though I don’t really talk to him – as with anyone else, what’s the point? – there is still a moment each night in the dark when I squeeze out his name in a groaning, half-awake whisper. “God.” And hope he will hear all I cannot say, all that no longer fits into lifeless words.
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I am gone. I am taken away, with only my doppelganger to punch the clock. Where am I now? I have neither eyes, nor ears, nor skin to feel, to understand where I am now. I stumble blind and frozen, not knowing which way is up.
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Even if my mate actually was on Match.com, I can do nothing about that. I am broken and no one wants a defective toy. No one would want me now.
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