by Jonathon Joyce

Created on: January 18, 2010

Fairytales and pixie dust…

He was not born to be a happy man. It was through no fault of his own, really. It was a chemical imbalance. It wasn’t his doing, it was simply his destiny, one of which he would much rather have chosen to disbelieve than accept. It had been seventeen days since he last smiled. The sunlight outside his window told him it was day and that’s all the purpose it served. It was not another chance for a new beginning or time to walk a dog he didn’t own, it was just another layer added to his guilt. The disappointment was crushing. It felt as though he had swallowed a lead balloon that was supposed to be smuggled across the border of some shame-filled Nietzsche-esque nation state to ensure that its citizens would remain encased in a government-ordered seasonal affect state of depression.

On a makeshift nightstand next to his mattress that sat on a matted carpeted floor was a three inch section of fast food straw with various chemicals caked to its innards. It was the only remnant of the various powders he had inhaled the night before. He stared down at his pale feet that peaked out from the lone blanket covering the rest of his body. The feet were the color of a dead man and all that was missing was the toe tag. One of these days he would not wake up and it would be sooner than later at this rate, that much even he could comprehend. He could not be sure how all this had happened; he just knew he didn’t know how to escape.

It wasn’t depression necessarily-it was something more self-destructive, deeper and darker that was fueling his behavior. There was something that had slowly been growing inside his head, wrapping tentacles of hatred and confusion around his self-assurance. It was a debilitating and crippling process and one that felt out of his control. An animal, a creature, a monster the caliber of children’s tales was taking up occupancy without paying rent. Rather it was charging a toll.

Of course he was depressed. How could he not be? The world was so empty and cruel. It had beaten him down in the prime of his life. There was no way he stood a fighting chance if one more thing broke wrong.  But it wasn’t true depression because if it was all the doctors would have fixed it by now, right? The Zoloft, Effexor, Paxil, Prozac, Welbutrin, Celexa, Xanex, and Ativan would have absorbed it, absolving him from this ever encompassing dull pain.

A pain that had been his only companion for

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