the ghost inside my head

It’s been a long time since I posted here. I thought I had recovered – gone into “remission”, as they say. Now… I’m not sure I ever will. The ghost inside my head, it never sleeps, just rearranges thoughts and leaves me numb for weeks. Months. Years.

I’ve been trying to sleep for a while now, but my Ghost has his quirks. I can never sleep when I’m depressed. It’s not mania, because I don’t want to do a thing… (I am the anti-productive; last year when I went mad, I did absolutely nothing. I sat on staircases and didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t talk, didn’t resume. Instead, I did a lot of crying and planning various suicides. I have the scars on my thin little pianist’s hands to prove it.) But it feels odd to simply call it “depression” – depression suggests a lack of feeling entirely, but this old pull, this old dread and restlessness… it’s all too familiar.

Last summer the boy I loved left me, and I spent all summer in bed, crying, dying, drinking – driving through the winding forest roads of Loganton fast as a deathwish. That kind of familiar.

Around midnight, I gave up trying to sleep. I crept downstairs with my bare feet and loose-trailing hair – snagged my oversized peacoat on the way – and had a smoke on the grey, wooden boards of my back porch. The sky was unsettlingly bright and glowed white, like milk dried to the bottom of the glass. There’s snow everywhere this time of year.

When I was lying in bed beforehand, a cigarette seemed like just the cure. Get outside, breathe some air, slow down and think. Maybe by the time you’re done smoking it, you’ll have remembered what you wanted to live for.

But here’s the kicker: I didn’t.