The best you can hope for

Maybe you’ll leave behind a good memory or two.

Maybe you’ll touch other people’s lives in some positive fashion. I don’t pretend to know who, or how. A day spent together, a night, weekends, months, I don’t know.

Maybe you’ll help when someone needs it – food when they’re hungry and can’t bear to admit it, a place to stay in a blizzard, maybe you’ll just sit and listen for an hour on a bus while they cry about trauma you can’t even remember. Maybe you’ll go on a blind date to help out a friend and end up with a story. Maybe you’ll meet the love of your life on the internet, and not even realize it for years afterwards.

Life is all about these small moments. It’s all about what happens during. We spend a lot of time thinking about the future, or the past, but the present is constant. And the best you can hope for is that you ease a little pain, make a smile, share with another.

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People talk about it

One of the things that has always bothered me is that I don’t seem to feel the way other people feel. I feel some of the same things – I love my wife, which seems to be a common emotion people express, for example. I’m not sure of this, because I have no real means of comparison. I can’t feel what anyone else feels, or in the manner they feel it. I am forced, as we all are as far as I know, to exist in this limited fashion and experience the world only through my own eyes.

So it is with what people call depression. I have something that seems similar to it. A pervasive sense of pointlessness, an enervation that seems all encompassing. Nothing seems to matter. There’s no reason to do anything, and all emotion is flattened.  Sometimes I physically hurt from this. It feels like I have been beaten. There’s an exhaustion to it, but it’s not the exhaustion of having worked hard but rather of having had to endure beyond my strength. My limbs feel shaky, my jaw twitches.