Today, she realized she was probably depressed. It happened when she started crying while doing the dishes. Not that crying had been particularly rare for her these days. Actually, she had likely been depressed for months; it had just become more apparent over the past few weeks. She’d been calling it stress. Isn’t that what it was? Stress?

Why did it have to come to this? Months deep into the hole before she even realized? Shouldn’t her Fitbit send a notification?

Alert: Seems like you’re getting depressed. Here’s an article with 10 quick and easy tips to stop depression dead in its tracks.

And her husband says that’s how the worst wounds always go: you’re always the last to know.

Actually, what he said was:

“When I was shot, I thought it was just a piece of metal that hit me. Haha. Guess it was. But I was worried about the guys around me. Wouldn’t have fathomed I was the one hit. Didn’t feel anything but a hard pinch. Even the blood, I figured it was Bobby’s. Wasn’t till after my shirt was removed and I saw the hole in my own chest, and Bobby’s hands covering it, that I felt the pain. Same time I was stabbed, too. Saw the knife go in and still didn’t believe it was true.”

To which she replied, “That’s different.”

“Ah, so you think you have more than one brain, and the one that feels pain is so different from the one that feels sad?”

today we would have been married 14 years

Made this placehilder weeks ago...

For the poem I would write...

For what would have been our 14 year wedding anniversary...

But now, day of, I still cannot think of a thing to say...

Maybe that's closure.

more reward than punishment

 

sleepwalker

Sometimes, after finally falling asleep when I couldn’t before, I dream that I can’t sleep. While I’m resting, my Fitbit tells me so; while I’m in REM, my body is still, yet my mind plays out what feels like a memory of complete restlessness.

I have everything I wanted and needed—sleep—yet my brain tricks me into feeling as though I got none of it all night.

And that’s kind of where I’m at with my life right now. Everything is good, fine. Objectively, I have everything I want and need. Yet somehow, I keep envisioning holes and empty spaces—all those places of lack that don’t even exist.

I’m getting all the rest my body needs, but my mind is wandering again.

I am nostalgic for a time that never existed.

stendhal syndrome

Instagram now advertises an AI boyfriend app and a mail-order husband app dressed up as an international dating app. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve marked both “Show less of,” “Not interested,” and “See too much of.”

It doesn’t do any good. I’m almost certain it’s a waste of time to mark them as unwanted—they just keep coming.

It occurred to me that something about the way I doomscroll somehow seems to scream *lonely*. So I tried to fix the algorithm, searching and clicking on all kinds of different content.

Yet again, I get an ad of a woman saying her husband hasn’t asked her about her day in weeks, but her AI boyfriend does every night. And in pain management, they always say to stay ahead of the pain. Treat it before you feel it.

And so, I just have to get off social media. At least for a while. Because I’m too scared I’m one bad day, one difficult week, away from using up clean water so a data center can ask me about my day—and I can repeat the same shit I did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.

Besides, I know what I’m craving now. I figured out what I want, and it isn’t there. It isn’t in a phone or an app. It definitely has nothing to do with AI. No one has ever come down with Stendhal syndrome over these things.

Yeah. That’s what I’m wanting, what I’m craving: shit so pretty I faint, go a little crazy, fall into a stupor, can’t speak. And I’m pretty sure that will come from within.

am I really going to let this soft-ass life get to me?