The Void; Draft Two

I suppose that my life can be summed up these simple words; “I’ll be just fine / Pretending I’m not / I’m far from lonely / and it’s all that I’ve got.” There are some days when I feel that even though I am surrounded by people, I am utterly alone. I can’t seem to imagine a life where I am happy because I have been depressed and lonely for so long. There are days when time just flies by, but I have no recollection of how I got where I was, or what I did that day. It takes real conscious effort to stay focused on the task at hand and not wander off into some dark corner of my mind to play with my imaginary friend who died years ago. 1

Have you ever noticed that there are some songs that reach out of your headphones or speakers and grab your heart with an iron fist just to squeeze for all they’ve got? There are very few bands that can do that for me, but one certain song by the Used just makes my breath catch in my throat every time I hear it. 2

“Small, simple, safe price3

Rise the wake and carry me with all of my regrets4

This is not a small cut that scabs, and dries, and flakes, and heals5

And I am not afraid to die6

I'm not afraid to bleed, and f*ck, and fight.7

I want the pain of payment8

What's left, but a section of pigmy size cuts9

Much like a slew of a thousand unwanted f*cks10

Would you be my little cut?11

Would you be my thousand f*cks?12

And make mark leaving space for the guilt to be liquid13

To fill, and spill, over and under my thoughts14

My sad, sorry, selfish cry out to the cutter15

I'm cutting trying to picture your black, broken heart16

Love is not like anything17

Especially a f*cking knife”18

This song speaks to me in ways that I cannot explain; it helps me to realize something about myself, and to know that I am not alone. But, some days, it takes effort just to open my eyes in the morning, and not slip back into oblivion and never come out. Some days, the only thing that can get my sorry ass out of bed is the knowledge that if I can just make it through the next thirteen hours, I can come home to crawl into bed again. 19

Depression is never easy to deal with, but having someone there who always knows when you are feeling upset, and always knows just what to say to help you come out of the black hole, is just the cure. But when that person is also dealing with the same crushing emptiness, it becomes very hard to hold on to ones sanity and remain among the living. When the one person that can make you feel loved is distant and cold, it is so easy to regress and let the void take you. 20

My best friend and I seem to share everything, right down to the manic depressive thoughts that rule our days. We each have our own ways of dealing with what comes our way, but his is just a little more self-destructive than mine. He cuts. There’s no easier way to say it. There are days when I feel that slicing every bad thing in the world into my skin will make it all go away, but it doesn’t mean that I do. I bleed enough as it is, thank-you-very-much. 21

I can never seem to beat it into my friends’ head that there are better ways of dealing with the pain of despair than carving it into your skin, but he doesn’t believe me. I can see that he understands me on an intellectual level, but when it comes down to those nights where we sit in our beds, crying out our pain, I reach for the computer and he reaches for the knife. I carve my words into cyberspace for all to read, and he carves his words into his skin for all to see. 22

We both write poetry to help deal with the anger and despair that come out of the everyday mess, but I feel that mine helps me much more than his does. The words usually come straight from my heart, helping to heal that wound and close it forever. Those are the poems that I cannot bear to read again, because I fear the emotions that I poured out, I fear that reading those simple angry words will push me back down and drown me. But other poems that I have written are like the hydrogen peroxide that you pour on a wound to help it heal. It stings while you are cleaning it, but it makes it heal faster, and you know that the pain is better than dealing with an infection. 23

Every time my friend tells me that the pain goes away when he cuts, I fear that he will never come back. I feel that he is slipping away from me and it’s all I can do to call softly to him that he is safe and will always have a place in my heart. I don’t know what I can do to help him. Every time I try he just tells me that I wouldn’t understand, that I haven’t gone through anything like this. But he doesn’t know about the times I cried myself to sleep at night because I had spent the last hour staring at a knife that he had given me to keep away from himself. He doesn’t know about the nights when I still cry myself to sleep because I don’t know that I will wake up in the morning and he will still be there; and he doesn’t know that I have also contemplated suicide, just to make it all go away. But he doesn’t know about the lists I made of all the good things in life versus all the bad things. He doesn’t know that the reason my room smells like burning paper is because when I am done writing these lists I burn them so no one can find them. And most of all he doesn’t know that I sit awake at night and wonder what it would feel like if I took that large four inch blade and sliced through my skin to the flesh underneath and watched the blood spill over my skin and drip to the floor. He doesn’t see my sketchbook with all of its bloody pictures and all of its dripping knives. But no one sees that. No one knows these things. And no one ever will, unless I decide one day that I cant hold it in any more and I need to tell someone. 24

As a child, I never would have guessed that the road that I travel would bring me here, to this place of hate and self-loathing. But here I am, and currently there’s no offshoot to this path, and I’m stuck here until I can muster up the courage to step off that plain and boring dirt road to wander the unknown wasteland beyond the carefully trimmed hedges. The unknown scares me, as it scares us all, and until the day when I grow past my youthful dissonance with the world I will never know what lies just beyond my front door. I can’t seem to wrap my mind around the fact that, given time, everything in my life can and will change; for good or worse, I cannot tell. 25

My depression is mine to deal with, and nothing and no one can help me move past it until the day comes when I am ready to let it all go, to let it all just fall away. I am the only one that can help myself, and at this point in time I am not ready to accept that fact. So I wallow here at the bottom of this void, staring up at the light and cringing, wondering when and where I will find the courage to drag myself up and close those doors behind me forever.26

Life can sometimes be summed up by just one word. Today that word is “pain.” Tomorrow, I doubt it will change, but at the very least it will have taken on a new meaning. 27