Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

1014 Operation Spirit

Operation Spirit

Here's one of the things about depression. I don't–unlike some people we know–get suicidal thoughts. Not according to my therapist, anyway. What I do get are one step over from that, which is big picture thoughts like... what is the meaning of life anyway?

Like, why are we here? How does anything I do make any difference to the universe? What's the point of human beings and everything they do? Families, relationships, art, music, jobs, money... it all seems meaningless.

I guess it's a short jump from there to wanting to erase yourself, but it's not a jump I usually make, I guess. Usually.

The water tower was a little bit of erasure, I guess. The whole thinking I could hide until everyone just went away without me... crazy, right? Like me disappearing wasn't going to matter to everyone and set off a massive manhunt. My therapist and I had talked about it a bunch. No question I hadn't been in my right mind, but I had wanted to escape, not die. And I'd convinced myself it would be okay to disappear–that it made sense to disappear–just because that's how badly I needed to get away. What I did was crazy, but I was doing it to preserve my sanity.

I know Ziggy blames Claire for the sudden move, and that blaming her was a quick fix on the rift between him and me, but there were moments when I was standing in the trees alone, trying to find my center, trying to figure out where depression ended and Daron began, when I kind of thought maybe I did do it on purpose. Maybe I was trying to do something to save myself. Or my soul.

Or maybe I was just running away.

One day I left Ziggy meditating on the rock by the water and walked back to the bungalow myself. Flip and Chief had taken the RV for a tune-up and I walked around the little house in the scrub grass to look for my frog friend. The front window was open.

I could hear Claire crying. She was sitting at the portable piano. I found myself pressed against the side of the house next to the window so she couldn't see me. The sniffling slowed down and I heard her breathe like she was getting herself together. And then she played a couple of chords and tried to sing. Her voice cracked on the very first note and she burst out sobbing like... well, like a woman who's lost something and is grieving over it.

After that we both avoided the vicinity of the keyboard. Flip didn't seem to notice that and left it where it was.

That night, after Chief grilled a couple of pounds of chicken legs and we sat around eating them with cole slaw, Claire took a Snack-Pak chocolate pudding out of the fridge and stood there eating it solemnly with a spoon. She cleared her throat delicately.

"You need something, Miz Silver?" Flip asked, as he was setting up the bong.

"I do wish that dairy, chocolate, and smoke were not so very rough,"–she said the word almost like a cough– "on my throat."

I had a sudden flashback to how Roger refused to drink Yoo-Hoo. He acted like it would be worse than Drain-O for his singing voice.

Come to think of it, what was probably wrecking Claire's voice wasn't smoking and eating chocolate, it was all the puking. But I knew better than to say that.

Flip stood up though, one of those expressions on his face like he just had a flash of inspiration. "Well, this won't cut down the chocolate, but have you tried hash brownies?"

Oh, of course. Calories and pot all in one. Why didn't we think of this before?

Next thing you know, Chief and Flip and Claire are all making a batch of brownies from scratch. They didn't have a recipe so they were kind of making it up as they went along. Ziggy and I sat on the back porch where we could listen to the debate but where we were out of the way and not required to weigh in.