mounting

Last winter’s depression never quite lifted.  Spring came and I observed it through a glass; a silent film of sun, life, and fear. 

(I know you don’t want to hear any of this.  But then again, it is only a blog.  Besides, if I was going to write without whining, I should have begun twenty-five years ago.)

By mid-July it was clear that this season’s depression ice cap would never entirely recede and I reduced my plans for joy to a somewhat cooler, more brief event that I hoped would occur in late summer.  But when that time arrived, the familiar glaciers that had never given up sight of me, were already advancing.  I pretended until October there would be joy. 

How does it happen at the end?  When all is said (and written) and done, do our lives become enough because that’s all they were?  Does anything and everything constitute an adequate response to the challenge we accepted by coming to life?  If so, what happens to what could have been?  What happens to the achievements unattained, the magnificent machinations of human heart and mind that were splintered beneath depression’s dumbing ice and cold?  And are these unfinished hopes proof for the logician that something more must come; an afterlife?  Reincarnation?  A chance to finish? 

(I know this is all just tedious, rhetorical BS.  But then again, it’s all I have.)

I have lost some weight.  For many months I have been host to a ferociously itchy rash.  Night sweats, once rare and negligible, have become frequent and extreme.  A long awaited illness is afoot, I fear that nevermore will the landscape of my health be flat and even.  I fear that I am upon the flanks of my last mountain.