Twenty-Four
The very first melancholy episode I can remember experiencing occurred when I was ten. It was a simple moment of darkness, of feeling inexplicably down. Given it arrived with little surprise, things must’ve been happening earlier that normalised this for me, although I don’t recall anything specific. These episodes got worse through my teens, along with periods of agitation, punctuated by the occasional manic burst of energy. But I learned to mask it all as best as I could, although that wasn’t always easy. These things made it hard to fit in, hard to connect, hard to be like everybody else. Everything was an act. I looked like one of…
Eight
Lying in bed at night, I think about the things I never want to hear again. I never want to hear one of IDIOT FRIEND’s bullshit excuses for why he hasn’t done work assigned to him (he once told me he hadn’t take pictures I required for a pitch deck because he couldn’t hold the camera straight due to our thirty-second earthquake), any of his mindless (and unsubstantiated) attacks, or any of his remorseful but shitty, provisional apologies. Sometimes, you offer perfunctory acceptance in return because it’s just too much effort to extract yourself from a mire of shit, stupidity, and idiocy. That’s why so many people persevere with terrible…