Friday, June 27, 2008

Into the Night

Blackness.

Or, as I usually think of it, just black. I haven't discussed the blackness before, to anyone. When it comes it's a plane of empty light-sucking darkness that starts somewhere above my head, pierces my head and body, and extends an unknown distance down past my feet. Anyway, that's how I imagine it.

I've only felt it a few times in my life. When it comes there is an overpowering hopelessness, a feeling I can only describe as pure anguish, a dispair I can't adequately convey. All I can tell you is this: I know what Hell is; I've had a preview.

Luckily, I suppose, it has never lasted over a few minutes, maybe thirty minutes or an hour at most. It's hard to tell, though: it's easy to lose track of time when you're being tortured by the Almighty.

I had several spells of black in the past several months; they're one of the main reasons I decided to (finally) seek treatment. It was getting impossible to pull myself out of depression, and I couldn't face the prospect of being caught in the pit. That, and I felt the black getting wider, almost as wide as my body. During my 20's there were a few black episodes; the blackness was at that time about a wide as my head.

During the year I first became aware of my condition, during my 7th school year, I had one episode, a few weeks after one of my conversations with God. I thought He was punishing me for giving Him an argument. That black was about a hand's-width.

Now some other things I've never discussed, never, with anyone:

When I was five I had two black events. I was just a kid, I didn't know anguish; to me it was just pain and anger. And in pain and anger I strangled our pet rabbit. It wasn't hate, just uncontrollable pain, and I took it out on that poor little bunny.

Several memories remain of my life at two years old. In my earliest recollection of my mother, she was chasing me around the dining room table. That's all, just running around that table. But I have other, fragmented memories of pain and anger, and a black thread piercing my head and body, as I systematically and methodically killed all our goldfish. Mom never knew, she would puzzle about it her whole life, mentioning it over and over again, until just a few weeks before her death: "Well, we just never had any luck with fish and aquariums, ever since all our fish died that time in Oklahoma City..." I could never tell her, and I'm so sorry for that.

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