Lines

Sometimes I don’t know how to deal or how to function. It usually hits me out of the blue and I don’t really have it calculated down to an exact science. I wish I knew what could trigger it. I wish I could know why lines are so important or why I crave them. Isn’t that weird? I guess it only needs to matter to me that I think lines of red are so beautiful. But I’m selfish in my thinking. I hate them on others and want to kiss them away. But red lines on myself? Quite promising.

I wrote the above paragraph while trying to make sense of my brain. I still have yet to discover the key to unlocking my mind’s clockworkings, and yet the above paragraph helps. Even if it’s just to me.

I really do wish I knew what started me feeling a certain way, or what made my feelings vanish all together. I remember when I first tried to explain to my parents what my depression looked like. To them, Nothingness isn’t an emotion. And they’re right. It isn’t an emotion because you don’t feel anything. It’s the lack of emotion; the lack of all feeling whatsoever.

My dad asked if it was like a nothing box.
No.
But nothing boxes have nothing in them, right? And that’s what you’re saying, right? That you don’t feel anything. Doesn’t that just mean you aren’t thinking about anything?
No. You aren’t listening. It’s not that I’m thinking nothing, it’s that I’m feeling Nothing.

It’s like when the sun is suddenly covered with a cloud even though there’s been a cloudless sky all day. Or when you drink your coffee and discover it’s ice cold even though you JUST pulled it out of the microwave. It’s like when there are less steps than you thought, and your foot comes to contact with the ground out of nowhere. Or when you reach for a hand that you expected to be there and it isn’t. It’s like talking to a loved one and then realizing they’ve been gone for a week now, and you’re left picking up the pieces all alone.

You could be sitting in traffic, thinking of nothing in particular when you suddenly seem to wake up to discover how alone in the car you are. How still the air is. How meaningless the radio is. You aren’t sad or lonely or angry or happy or tired or excited or bored or annoyed or hurt or forgotten or anything. Just Nothing. And the Nothingness scares you. And just like attempting to wake from a nightmare by jumping off a roof or laying down on railroad tracks, you draw lines. Somewhere that no one can see how scared you got. Because pain is better than the Nothing. Anything is better than the Nothing. In that moment, driving your car off a bridge is better than the Nothing.

I wish I knew what triggered it. But I don’t. It helps to talk about it with people, though. Later, when I can feel things again, like shame and sadness, I feel like I can talk about it. But by then, usually I’m much better. Back to normal, even. Sometimes the Nothing lasts 30 minutes. Other times the Nothing lasts for weeks. My friend Jacqueline was great at helping me hide my sharp things when the Nothingness lasted for weeks. She saved me from a lot of lines in college.

Chesh hasn’t really had to deal with it much, because for some beautiful reason, the Nothing doesn’t come around like it used to. I think it has to do with feeling safe with Cheshire. Nothing can’t hurt me when his arms are around me and everything smells like applesauce. He helps me feel less alone when I re-surface from my Nothing. He calms me down and helps me breathe. And I am so thankful I have him.

I don’t have a conclusion to this post because I haven’t found a conclusion to my Nothing. Just more lines and less alone.