Thoughts on Writing and Depression When “Slightly” Depressed Part 3

I get sick in my stomach with myself for believing that I will never be remembered once everyone I know dies, just as I will die. And if I am not remembered then why write? Why store my ideas for the future when in the that same future these ideas will be unnecessary? I am so scared of these thoughts, and of wasting this time. I am so scared of writing in the chance that it will not matter, that I in turn will not matter. I am in awe of the grandiosity of the universe and its things like time and science and life but in a way that makes me nervous or anxious or worrisome. I am all of these things just from thinking about writing. And on other days I am none of these things while I write, instead of thinking about it. I am also a manic depressive, and I am scared that this being so has a lot to do with how I feel. It has a lot to do with what I write.

Thoughts on Writing and Depression When “Slightly” Depressed Part 2

I become distracted with ideas of failure and the many times I have been told I do not fulfil my own potential or the expectations of others. Why should I write when I don’t feel like I am living to my fullest? I have no idea what living to the fullest even means, as I expect no one does until they die, but I continue to conjure up fantasies of exotic places and people that are “better” than the places and people I know, that are “better” than myself and in turn will transform me. I become drunk with the indulgence of forgetting where I am or what I care for and feel like I am stumbling through time, quickly jerking on a missed step here or slowly sinking into an old piece of furniture there. I am afraid of time and it always being turned on, and that I can only be in the present and never truly re-experience the past and that when the future comes, it will too only be the present and this feeling I have now will then be the past. I am scared that writing will not allow me to live the way I want because I will always be writing of what has happened and not what is happening. I cannot write myself into what I want to happen.

Thoughts on Writing and Depression When “Slightly” Depressed Part 1

I find myself being scared of writing sometimes. There are days when I am merely lazy, or I trick myself into believing I am preoccupied with talking to a girl or a friend or with a new hobby or with worrying about how I fit in the world and all its people, but more often then not I don’t write because I get scared. After writing, when reviewing, I become disappointed in what I have written or I can’t remember the purpose of why I began to write in the first place. I doubt my words and what I meant when I jotted them down in a notebook near my bed, or on the computer near my bed. I convince myself that what I have written was a waste of good time, time I could spend doing something else, as if to say something else were going to be more important or fulfilling. Even now as I write this down, and reread the sentence before this, I am not sure of why I write it or what it will mean to anyone else or even me in the future, and I am convinced of its lack in depth or continuity with what I am feeling in the present.

Abbey and The Watching Tree

 

The Abbey of Gethsemani in Trappist Kentucky

 

From the Watching Tree

Abbey is warm for summer greens.

Abandoned, though, she holds her sun and tower

in the same chord. She

keeps pure and far from home; she

keeps an empty courtyard.

Cumberland Mountain

Thatch and branch fence

lay the open gate and leaning mountain.

Entrapped by rooftops and closed forest,

the spot on Brush Moutain, Cumberland Mountain,

is recovered to a log and grail,

restored to an early mountain-photo op.

Internation Book Program, Lexington KY

Saul and Tod, the Outgoing and Incoming Volunteer Managers, tell us which box where, and how many books we can fit into that one, and where to find tape guns or newspaper. The back warehouse is musty with book dust and moldy pages. There are no windows and only a few fluorescent lights that cast shadows on words like “judicial” “expedited” and “corporation.” Saul says Albania needs law books, big “what a page turner” law books. They are all marroon or navy and have thick gold imprint on the covers that say thick English words. 487 law books for Albania.

The bookstore in the front of the building is much cooler and the air is lighter in the nostrils, mouth, and lungs but remains crowded with the quick pickings of the students around me. Kentucky is the first label to catch my wandering but there are too many books of horses and poverty, and the poverty I cannot relate to. Around the corner on the left is African American. I read a few pages of Jazz by Toni Morrison and fall in love with the character Violet and her birds and I tuck Toni under my right arm to take her home later. I remember carrying books through the halls of my middle school under my arm like this. Next is the introduction to Urban Blues By Charles Keil, and before I can even reach Chapter 1: Afro American Music I am lost in his world. I am in his music, his passion for equality, his intelligence, and all of the words of this author I have never heard of until this shelf in this warehouse bookstore in this Lexington showed him to me. He accompanies Toni next to my ribs with their spines parallel to floor. Finally, stood up against a stack of encyclopedias on a small wooden pedestal between History and Literature, I see him staring at me with his bright white text on a matte black finish: William Blake A Reading of the Shorter Poems. I flip through torn edges of crisp white paper and forgotten book marks of ancient library patrons. He is tattered like someone loved him and used him and refused to keep him with other pretty things and instead held him tight between an always almost filled notebook and a case of Ticonderoga’s. Each short poem is followed by an explanation of its symbolisms and grammar and references and I smile wide as the covers and shelves and rows that embrace me.

I wish I could’ve snuck back to the hot dry dusted gray air of the back room, ripped open a box I had just packed, and replaced three of those mechanical polished law books with the three I had just bought. They were only nine dollars. I say Albania deserves at least nine dollars of culture, nine dollars of truth, nine dollars of humanity, and nine dollars of real Writing.

The Tunnel

A few summers ago

Charlie and Dylan

showed me “The Tunnel”

for the first time.

After school, we made it

our day to rub raw

our palms on tree limbs,

and bloody our heels

on rocks hiding under

the undertow.

 

“watch my feet…”

“watch my hands…”

And I watched them lead me

to where the sun broke

through the green translucent  scales

hanging above us

and made the water

greener.

 

We all watched it die

the night before,

sitting behind windows

with the dark and the rain outside,

but it was alive now.

 

All fresh broken and dripping,

it covered us with long days,

and longer nights,

with floodflash,

and wood smoke stained clothes,

and thin crisp air

that fueled our thoughts

like efficient clean gasoline

and made us speak older and deeper

than the woods we were living in.

 

“watch your head…”

“watch me jump…”

Watch how the water is alive

enough to climb up

our already rolled jeans

and soak our bones.

 

When we slept in “The Tunnel”,

huddled under the echo

of coal trains and the fog

between us and the reinforced concrete

thirty feet above,

Charlie would say

“watch the thunder role toward us…”

I felt electricity

in that thin fuel air,

mixed with the fog.

I felt it like five years old

touching an outlet with metal

because I haven’t been told not to yet.

My hair stood on my skin,

and my toes pinched

the water raising under me.

It all just lifted me

into the fog,

out of myself,

and I watched it all.

 

“watch my feet…”

“watch my hands…”

Watch it all breathe

around me.

Just Sayin’ Hello!

Thought I’d say hello to the world and introduce myself.

I’m Adrian.

Hello there world!