"Once again, I find myself looking in a mirror, a reflection of my face grimly pushing its drying blue eyes into mine. I can't say I'm smiling. It's a chore to smile anymore. You force yourself to stay positive, to keep trying, but in the end, you find it difficult to get out of bed in the morning. You drag your feet, and your morning coffee is bland and tasteless. The effort you put into the outfit you have for the day is minimal, and the one thing you can say is "I'm fine, really, don't worry about me."
You just get this overwhelming sensation of... I don't know what you'd call it. Grief? Dread? Or maybe it's a lack of feeling. Emptiness. Entropy between the harshness of reality and you find yourself just... trying to find the courage to take in another stale breath. And eventually you wonder what the point is. And you lay awake at night, and like a kid you cup your ears to that realization you keep coming back to. "There is no point. You wake up and you live your life and you come home so you can go to bed." There are two infinities on either end of your life span, two forevers between your first and last breaths. Dying isn't the end, it's going back to normal.
I remember when my parents died. My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was seventeen. I remember her being in bed, everyone got to say goodbye and talk to her for a while. Everyone was quiet. And she looked like she was asleep. Not just asleep, but at rest. Was that death? A calm, beautiful sleep? No more pain, no more sadness, no more troubles or struggles or bad things. Your skin would rot and the scars of all the times you were hurt would go away. All of the muscles on your bones would evaporate, a monument to all of your wasted work. Your blood would dry, the only thing keeping you alive and tethered to this mortal coil, now just a black, sticky stain on the beautiful red velvet in your casket, never to be seen again. And all of thousands of years from now, the only true remains of you will be your bones, that look just the same as everyone else's.
I just find it hard. I find it hard to come up with a... an excuse. To keep going. I've lost my faith. I can't remember the last time I knew what the feeling of joy was. I can't even remember the last time I was sad. I just feel like my heart has stopped beating, and the rest of my body is just waiting for my brain to realize I've finally died."
I chuckle a bit, morbidly. The couch was a dark brown leather, and I can't help but think of the bus I took to get here. I look up at the doctor.
"Does that make sense at all?"
He pushes up his glasses and writes on his yellow note pad.
"I'm afraid that the only conclusion I've come to is nihilistic depression."
What does that mean? I rub the paper in my hands. I wrote that a month ago. Right before I stepped out in front of a subway train. Some lady pulled me out of the way before I made contact. I could actually feel the swift gust of wind beneath my feet as my legs gave out from under me when I was tackled to the ground.
"I figured as much."
"You find life meaningless. I think we all reach that place, sometime in our lives. We question the worth of mortality. You had an existential crisis."
Again, I feel my chest shake with a giggle.
"Doc, I hate to say it, but I think I've been in an existential crisis for a very long time."
"You said your parents died, but you only told me about your mother. What happened to your father?"
"He's no father of mine."
"But he did die?"
"He's dead to me."
He cleared his throat, awkwardly. I stood up and sat at the chair across from him at the desk despite him telling me to lay down.
"Listen, how do I keep from doing this again?"
He reads through his notes again, a few more times.
"Medication usually only works for people with clinical depression. Association with the lack of self worth, as opposed to nihilistic depression, a feeling of worthlessness among everyone and everything. At least, in my diagnosis."
"So no pills. What will work?"
"I suggest a girlfriend. A vacation. A walk in the park. Try to appreciate life as it is. Not for what it's worth."
"How can I appreciate something that's going to end and mean nothing?"
He opened his drawer, suddenly, and pulled a small, lumpy sock puppet out. It had two eyes made from marker, not parallel to each other, and a misshapen smile.
"My daughter made this for me. Out of a new Armani sock that I had bought just three days before."
"That's very sweet."
"Yes. She's thirty seven. She suffers from severe cerebral palsy. Bound to a chair. And she died last year after."
I didn't say that I was sorry.
"She made this for me, and it is special to me because it was the first gift she had ever given me. The first thing she had ever made. As she was my first and only child."
"It was a very expensive sock. But I didn't even notice it was my new sock until I couldn't find the other one. I wasn't mad that she had made a waste of money. I cried. She had made me a present with her own two hands. Hands that she couldn't even feel with. It is my most prized possession, the most valuable thing I own, and, in a way, since the sock is ruined, it's useless."
He tucked it away carefully in the drawer.
"I think you need something like my daughter's gift. Life, to you, is meaningless. So much so, you are not afraid to end it. Maybe you can't use life the way you're using it anymore. Maybe you need a pair of someone else's hands to turn it into something special."
I stand there, a little heart felt.
"Would you like a ride home?"
I shake his hand and my head. "No, thanks."
I leave the office and start thinking of anyone I could call to make plans with. I think my sister is in town. I reach for my phone, and the dial tone is louder than usual in my ear. But then I realize it's not the dial tone, and the people are running in the streets as the bomb siren gets louder and louder.
