via sleeping tigers

A new day, feat. Maru in spots

Here is a cat (Maru!) in a cape, because this morning is better.

Yesterday was tiring. So today I’m going to be kind to myself.

The lift

It is the strangest feeling when the pall lifts. Of course, there was a time when it simply didn’t, when the idea of eventually passing beyond the black into a space that might be bearable (let alone happy) figured as an impossibility, or simply failed to figure at all. These days I have my down-days, but they are discrete, delicate things that catch me in the morning when I’m weak with sleep and last only as long as the daylight.

Today was different in its severity.

I learned the difference between sadness and depression when I was away. When I am sad, I can pin the thing down. I can hold the sadness, find its point, press it. My sadnesses are responsive to things that happen around me, and I know this.

Depression is something entirely different. It is still, immoveable, pervasive. It has nothing to do with what might be going on outside me, but grows like a mould, expansive and unresponsive. Unlike sadness, depression is an emptiness of emotion, a loss of centre, a total reduction of place. People, things, become indefinite, remote. Hope becomes redundant, and with it, any appreciation of future or the passing of time. The worst thing about depression though, is that it is inarticulate.

I haven’t felt what I felt today in a long time. I don’t know where it came from; I don’t know where it goes. I don’t know how much of it is me and how much of it is my medication. All I know is that today was awful, and that after twelve and a half hours, my mind finally balanced around 10pm. That is, something lifted, and it is the most curious thing. You can almost feel the blankness, the hard bleakness fall away, like an old, pitted skin. Or rather, it doesn’t fall away as it falls up, lifts, leaves, fucks the hell off, thank god.

Mum says that she can see my face change, and knows when it has gone away.

My eyes are still swollen into little fists that hurt when I lie down. I’m frightened when I think of the possibility of having to deal with this dark little mould of mine indefinitely. But for now I’m just so pleased to be awake and alive and through with today.

I feel a bit guilty for the sudden and explicit change in blog-tone, but I needed a record that might remind me of this for next time. See Lucy, how it passes. How it is not endless. Because it is not you.

Lessons

The low creeps with an awful calmness, like this morning.
I feel blunted, reduced. But it will pass.

The only thing is to keep moving.
I’ve learned that much, even if it is hard.

The ash leaves lay across the road.

“[October] 20th, Monday. …When we came home the fire was out. We ate our supper in the dark, and went to bed immediately. William was disturbed in the night by the rain coming in to his room, for it was a very rainy night. The ash leaves lay across the road.”

Dorothy Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere: Extracts from the Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth and from the Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Colette Clark, London: Penguin, 1986: 83.

To keep in mind when dancing

And,

Which is unfortunate. I do love dancing lepidopterologously.

 

via etiquettehell: 1950s Dance Etiquette

Running in the rain

.Untitled, by Mentalitätsbestie.

New Year, and the amassing of absences

Snowshoe to Otter Creek

I’m mapping this new year’s vanishings:
lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces.
This is not a story of return.
There are times I wish I could erase
the mind’s lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays,
my fervor to be touched
by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body
back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods
with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes
the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek
where I stand like a stranger to my life.
There is no single moment of loss, there is
an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle
in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard.
Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out
with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?

Stacie Cassarino, Zero at the Bone (2009)/here.

Oh, I am happy though. It’s a strange confluence of things.

Some Nice Things I would graciously accept for Christmas

This cape situation, I like it. Less so the shoes though, ew.

This is apparently a swan, but I think it looks a bit like a goose, which makes it that much more relevant to my interests.

This first American edition Tagore would please me.

Oh Nichole de Carle, why are you so incorrigibly desirable. The above doesn’t seem to be available anymore which vexes me, but I could be persuaded to settle for something else instead.

And I know it’s technically a Man Smell, but Penhaligon’s Endymion is all citrus, spices and leather, which is mmmm.

Finally, these Bonny Dot tights would be a Nice Thing, i.e., I wouldn’t complain if they suddenly came into my festive possession.

Oh, and post-finally, anything from here, especially the things that are a cat and a bus, because they are a cat. And a bus.

“‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I am only your superior in this: I am awake, whereas you are only half-awake, and at times your whole life is a dream.’”

 

Hermann Hesse, Narziss and Goldmund, trans. Geoffrey Dunlop, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985: 45.