”I long to hold you
in my arms and sway
kiss and ride
on the CTA
I need to see you tonight
in those bright lights
oh I know it’s right
deep in my heart
I know it’s right...”
Depression sinks its teeth in and marks you up deep yet again. Trapped, needing to move, but nowhere to go, not without the requisite dough. On top of everything else, you can’t do shit in this country, in this world, I suppose, without a fistful of dollars. Doesn’t matter what you believe in; you either got the bucks to bust a move, or you sit down, shut the fuck up, and sit in place.
&&&
Depression comes and goes. Oddly enough, some of your past depressions look pretty now, swaddled in the haze of years gone by and the memories of having crawled out. There’s one on your mind these days, way back in 2003. You, living in the house you swore you’d die in, with a woman you loved, still do, I suppose, and the little boy you were raising.
The boy is not so little any more, somehow the woman died and the boy kept growing, and now he’s bigger than you and heading out to college in a few months. You liked it better then, when he was little and you were younger.
There was a springtime, back then, 2003, when the depression had gotten the best of you for the umpteenth time. An aunt, your grandmother’s sister, had died. At the funeral, at the cemetery, you and your sisters and your brother stepped into the back of a limo and hugged your beloved grandmother, and oh, her eyes, the sadness, you’d already been skating on the edge, but those eyes sent you over. Your grandmother was old, and now all of her sisters and brothers, and her husband, and one of her children, had died. You thought, you either go too young, or you watch everyone else go before you.
A few days later, after you’d done little more than stare off into space, that woman you loved talked you into getting some assistance. And then you had a party, on a Saturday, the first Saturday in May. People came over and you cooked for them and you drank yourself silly, and you all watched the Kentucky Derby on the television. The kids ran around a yard you loved. One of your sisters made her husband go bet a horse named Funny Cide, because he was made in New York and some local folks owned him. You can still see your sister jumping up and down in your living room, the late afternoon sun falling through those casement windows you loved, and everyone yelling at the television as Funny Cide won the race. Later, after everyone left, after that woman you loved and that little boy went to bed, you reached into a cooler in the garage, found one more cold one, and walked out to the back corner of the yard. You sipped that beer, shivering a little, smoking a cigarette, looking up at the night sky, still in your thirties, with your whole life ahead of you it seemed.
&&&
April 17th. Some years it seems to pass without notice, but not this year. April 17th, 1995. That woman you loved came to your homeland to live with you once and for all. You hadn’t seen her since the previous July. You got married in her homeland, and the rules said you had to go home and wait for her while all the paperwork cleared. Neither of you expected it to take eight and a half months. Those were some long months. That was back in the Stone Ages, after all. No email. No cell phones. A simple phone call was a major investment, staying on the line for two hours even in the middle of the night on a weekend could set you back a hundred dollars, and back then a hundred dollars was a lot of money to you. Sometimes, even now, it still is.
She flew out here on April 17th, 1995. Your mother hired a limousine to pick her up. And the past few days, you find yourself playing it over and over and over again in your mind. The ride down to JFK, sipping coffee and reading the sports sections of the NYC papers to distract yourself; you were jumping out of your skin, knowing that all the months of absence would disappear in a matter of hours, then minutes.
Her flight landed, everyone other than her came through. She had to jump through one last hoop with the immigration and customs folks. And she jumped through it, and there she was, the most beautiful woman in the whole wide world, walking with her luggage, and you threw your arms around one another and you thought you had died and gone to heaven.
&&&
You’ve been down for awhile. There’s four kids now, and relentless money problems: you are always broke. Always, always, always fucking broke. And there’s not much to cut. You don’t even have a cell phone. People look at you funny when you tell them you don’t have a phone, but fuck ‘em. Fuck them and their funny looks. Not having a cell phone is the least of your problems.
If your bank didn’t give you overdraft you and yours would starve, seriously. But the overdraft comes with a price, of course: thirty bucks a pop. It adds up. You’ve paid close to a grand in overdraft fees since the New Year. It’s a never-ending ride on the treadmill.
&&&
You walk on your lunch hour. You remember an autumn Saturday afternoon in 1996, listening to “Far, Far Away” with that woman you loved, on a blue and white striped couch her grandmother had bought you. You remember how it felt to throw your arms around her at JFK. You remember going on a second honeymoon with her, to Maine. You walk on your lunch hour and, contemplating your current state, think, god I wish I could go back to that week.
Then you think of what happened that week, the radical Christian white-boy terrorism of Oklahoma City, and you debate with yourself, is it moral to wish you could go back to that week? To sentence the victims to reliving that week? You know how bad grief is, especially at the beginning. Would you sentence the survivors to relive that, just so you could relive throwing your arms around your own now-dead love?
&&&
And you come back to the present, as you walk along. Would you go back? You hate the present. The forces of evil emerged victorious in the election, and you bought the wrong house. The neighbor hangs Voldemort signs in his windows and stalks and harasses your new wife, and you know if you do what you want to do to that skinny-legged, pumpkin-headed piece of shit, you’re going to wind up in jail, and yet you can’t rule it out: you know yourself, and you know what you are capable of, you know what you have done, you know what you have gotten away with.
And you are stuck here. In this place, in this moment. You think of how many fellow travelers feel the same way, right in this moment. And none of us with the slightest idea of what to do next.
&&&
Edited To Add:
Left this up until it disappeared from the recents, then unpublished. I am assuming, and hoping, that when you republish you don’t go back to the head of the line. Thought maybe it the whole thing was a bit whiny. Said we bought the wrong house but I know how lucky we are to have bought a place at all.
Talked to my wife about how I’ve been feeling and came to mutual decision I need to go back on the so-called happy pills. They worked for me in ‘01 and then again in ‘03 (right after the Funny Cide incident) and stayed on until the beginning of 2007, when I decided to deal with the massive weight gain that had occurred. Lost 110 pounds over the course of a couple of years, helped along by the grief diet. Gained about 40 of that back and then have stabilized for years. Hoping not to gain more but if I do can deal with it. Many years ago, back in ‘01, a professional told me I was prone to “episodic depression.” Feels like I am back in an episode...hopefully the pills work as they did in the past...