Pretensions

"Trouble he will find you no matter where you go, oh oh
No matter if you're fast, no matter if you're slow, oh oh
The eye of the storm or the cry in the mourn, oh oh
You're fine for a while but you start to lose control"

Trouble Is a Friend (2008) by Lenka

Today, I was suddenly reminded of the words of one of my oldest buddies who fought the demons of cocaine addiction. He called his personal poison his "New Found Friend," referencing a catchy little ditty we used to sing around campfires and meets back when we were highschoolers. I didn't get it at first but then he sang a verse to me, laughing mirthlessly as he did so. It went like this:

"We walk to the left
And we walk to the right
And we walk and we walk
And we walk all night"

Those lines, so innocuously innocent, have never sounded so sinister. It conjures up images of everlasting faerie balls in which storybook characters so often get themselves caught in; lost timelessly in grandiose halls decorated plutocratically without taste and dancing ceaselessly to music without tune. There's a metaphor for life in that somewhere, I always thought.

My sleep-wake cycle is becoming erratic these days - more so than usual. I keep getting these rambling, feverish, Sisyphean dreams which make me feel tired the moment I wake up, thinking I should go right back to bed. My brain feels soft. I am chronically distracted, and if my face isn't already projecting a glassy mask, it certainly feels that way to me. There's a pervasive sensation of soreness and fatigue in body parts which do not strictly exist. I am preoccupied with the certainty that I can no longer function and I fear that it's fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nightly, a little child - or something which outwardly resembles one - peeks at me from the foot end of my bed. I fancy that it wanted to reach out and touch my toes or stroke my soles, but its tiny fingers never ever made contact. That's just one of the peculiar Ideas which somehow got a stranglehold on my consciousness. It's one of the reasons why I'm losing sleep - I kept having to check that there isn't actually a creepy kid at my feet. A few years ago, the Idea was a girl called Kate who sits in the passenger seat of my car when I go out wandering at three in the morning alone. She was cute.

I have lost the will to live and I've felt this way before. That's why I thought of my friend's dark little song, because I can no longer restrain my mind from going to dark places. It's ironic that about the same time last year, I put in writing that I had been feeling persistently happy and contented for two whole years - because these are the sort of milestones in one's life worthy of record. There's no sense denying that I am now decidedly un-happy. I have noticed it and the girlfriend definitely does too. Where I'm standing this instance, it seems that I have always been this way in a sort steady-state depressive limbo - as if I have never left it - and I'm glad to have black-and-white proof on hand to remind me that that's not true. That's a hope spot right there.

But why am I feeling like I'm falling apart? I either don't know or don't want to know. I like to see how I can rationalise my way out of it. How's that for a coping mechanism?

"Pretend you're happy when you're blue/It isn't very hard to do." That's nice, Nathaniel.

Sucker.



Spiralling,
k0k s3n w4i