brick soia I first tasted depression some time back in early elementary school. When my dad would have one of his episodes: wake up to hear screaming, hear things break, wake up the next to find out what. oh except for the time his fist came through the wall above my bed- I was pretty sure about that one already. Then I'd go back to school the next day. I'd wonder if that happened to other people, I'd wonder if it was my fault. I'd sit and watch them play during recess. In the beginning they'd ask what was wrong and I'd always say nothing. After awhile they expected it as much as I did. After a week or so they knew I'd get over it. 010307 ... soia It came back when I found out that he was dying. Unfortunately I was so in denial, so used to repressing my feelings, that it took me quite awhile to figure out that I was depressed. Around when I was 8 I once told my mom "I wish I'd never been born", but it wasn't until I was 13 that I first question what life was all about and why I should bother with it is it involves so much pain. So to make a long story short, I became a generalized junkie. I never became too particularly attached to any drug, just to being high. Curiously I never tried heroin though, which may be why I'm still alive today. (curious because it would be offered to me and I'd be like "uh, I haven't slept for a week because of meth, but I have to stay away from heroin- it's dangerous! right.") 010307 ... soia So fast forward to about 16, when I first started realizing that even though I was planning on going to college, I was on the verge of flunking out of school, so I probably needed to do something about that. I seperated from my hippy crew and started a relationship with danny (cf almost every blather in which I say "he"), who was always concerned about my drug use. Overall, I was just tired of being this sad broken doll whose life was going nowhere. So I cleaned up. Becoming undepressed was not quite so easy. 010307 ... soia Being apart from danny, now a major source of happiness in my life, and being with my mom, then a major souce of hating myself in my life, was not too conducive to healing. Sometime around thanksgiving I was ready to commit suicide (actually this was one of the last times, not nearly the first). If it hadn't been for him talking me out of it, once again, I probably wouldn't be here. And that is the beginning on my total and overburdening dependence on him for my well being. It ended just last friday. 010307 ... soia Sometime during that time something in my head switched over from "if things get bad enough, suicide is an option" to "if things get bad enough, I will keep living, albeit not happily". Also during this time was my relentless search for "the meaning of life". To some extent, I'm still working on that. But in a way, it is over, because thinking about it that way is totally ineffectual and self torturing. Our lives are our lives. Period. No god, no grand purpose. But why was I looking for this? Because I was unhappy? Why was I unhappy, because I hated myself. I had hated myself for as long as I can remember. No self esteem, no self confidence. I learned that I deserved abuse. When it things didn't go bad on their own I made them go bad. When I wasn't abused I pretended that I was. You couldn't have told me that before. I wouldn't have believed you. In my mind, things were happening to me. In reality, I was making them happen. So that is where I am now. Trying to break old habits. Knowing I can be happy. Knowing I deserve to be happy. 010307 ... rollins In my dream i die and come back as a brick. Yes, a brick. The brick that i come back as is lodged in a wall that was built in 1951. The exposed side of the brick faces the window of a woman who i love but who turned me away years before. Day after day i stare into her room, into her life. I watch her come and go. I see her with different men. I cannot call out, i cannot move. I am embedded in cement. I can do nothing but silently and motionlessly watch. I see her alone. I watch her cry and hold her head in her hands. I am forced to watch relentlessly. Sometimes she stares out the windo wand looks right at me. It is excruciating to look directionly into her eyes and know she does not see me, she only sees a wall. She leaves for weeks at a time, and i wonder where she is. Who she's with. i wait. All the other bricks are just bricks, they don not speak, the don't know anything at all. it is only my discontent that makes me believe that i am alive at all. i have no arms or legs. i feel neither hot or cold. i do not sleep. i do not hunger or thirst. my face is a small rectangle of smooth red clay, anonymous. sometimes i think i am a man merely dreaming of being a brick, but the days pass and i can see enough to know that i am indeed a brick in a large wall. one day she moves away. days turn into months, and soon the first year of her absense arrives. in this time i have done nothing but think and make up every possiblity of her return, to my view a potential reality. five years pass. my mind has begun to drift. i watch the squirrels and birds in the tree to my left. i watch a few families move in and out. see a few traffic accidents, a robbery. i watch the leaves explode into colors and fall off the branches. but at night when everythng is quiet i think of her. she is somewhere. i am here. always here. not waiting, just here. please do not le tme live my life untouched and tormented. please help me escape the tragedy of myself. i envision my face: contorted and agonized whild eyed my mouth frozen in midscream. Never able to say the truth. forever trapped, suspended inside solid black eternity. embedded, silent, identical to the hundreds of others symmetrically stacked around me. 010907 what's it to you? who go blather from