he demographics of my nook are simple. There is me and my depression. Me, you can see a mile away. You know the type: Slight, white, glasses, midway between the small and medium on a scale of skin to bone.
My depression is different. Very. It nests. Today it wants to be a rabbit. Tomorrow it could be goat. Sometimes it’s a duck.
It’s an anthropomorphic jokester.
Frequently it dozes, bored by everything around it. Depression has an abundance of hobbies it can’t help but suggesting. It likes playing host. Or hide-and-seek. You are what’s hidden. It finds you and cheers.
Sometimes depression takes me hunting. We rise — though arguments over just when to do so can turn bitter, leaving us both in bed. Typical. But if we do rise, we prowl for dust. Sometimes we do it twice.
Sometimes depression wants to be a housewife. It cleans diligently, incessantly, and awaits approval. I say nothing.
Tomorrow, it says, I’ll be so acute you won’t even move. Or want to. And it is, and I don’t.
We make out all day in the nook, me and my depression.
Advice: Speak gently to depression. It hears everything, speaks Spanish, French, knows German declension. It can seduce drugs, influence weather, undo the natural course of things.
Say you think you see blood in the sink. You don’t. It’s depression. Say others say you’re looking good. But that’s not your grin.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. “Hopelessly eclectic,” boasts depression’s literature, which it wrote. Loves groups. Medium children. Slavish pets.
Take marriage.
You can see it a mile away, a man and his depression, maybe wearing a wife. You know the type: bearish, drunken, diligently silent.
Today depression is a truck.
Tomorrow it might be hammer.
The next day a fang.
Whatever won’t quit it takes more of.
There’s a drug. Call it Waxyn.
Waxyn has gigabytes of encouraged ocosis, an anti-depressive antigen produced by virginity, virility and doubt that’s subsequently filtered, sugared, peddled, sucked. No one knows how it works. Maybe you’ll think you feel better.
Depression laughs. It’s an addict.
There’s a joke depression tells, usually after hours of drinking and popping pills designed to make it leave.
What, it grins, do you give a man who won’t change his mind about a promising future?
A lifetime.
