This bed is a ship

So, some candor, some reckoning:

I find myself deep in the belly of the worst depressive episode for some time. I cannot say in how long, the memory slimes out of me, I lose track of time, I cannot recognize the year of an event or the woman who has written so many of these words, I unravel, my body fumigates itself against the recollection of all this pain and the chronology gets muddled.

But here, I am. Up to my neck in thick, inky blood. Questioned, ceaselessly, to which I can only respond with a violent shaking of my throat, organs unhooking themselves from their stables and threatening to bolt. My eyes are crawling out my mouth. It is so, so dark, and this high keening tone will not leave me. 

My fat red heart beats sicker and sends its fuck-hungry tendrils out, desperate for a point of contact, the flesh to sink some anchor into, an unhaveable man to drag down in the mud with all my wallows. 

Each unturning head undoes a stitch in all my holding, foolish stupid. 

This has always been, and shall likely always be, a fight for my hand to raise a knife against. 

Loneliness like an ocean raging at each ear, sewn into my chest, rip tides shredding off the skin of my thighs. 

But stupid, stupid, to think that you are utterly alone, or to think that if the unending need inside you could somehow be satiated you would stop finding yourself here, alone with the pale wet underbelly of your thoughts, tragic weak weapon in hand.

This time last year, my thoughts and limbs bolstered up and tangled in his, all the many kindnesses– now I can hardly stand to speak with him through long-stretched wires, because to be reminded that someone so good once stood beside me and is now so far away is often more than I can bear.

And so again, and so again, I fight until this passes. Forgive me all my too-much speech, my desperate clings and ill-timed advances, give me what love you can spare and I will try to keep myself in forward motion. 

I imagine myself as a little girl, diving into the deep end of a swimming pool, no adults in sight and no swimmies on. I remember sinking, I remember sinking; but so too I remember standing back on land.