New every morning

When I wake up this morning, I immediately roll over and try to go back to sleep, but I can't get comfortable again.

And then I know that I will never get comfortable again. I roll over.

Love changes, and we change in a way that tracks love. I think each time I meet someone new about how he relates to the ones before -- not quite a comparison, not quite a checklist of qualities, but an evaluation of myself. Have I chosen better this time? Does he have the same troubles, the same sensitivities as the last, as the one before that? Can I work through more, this time, than I was able to last time? What kind of person am I, judging by him?

Depression is always a novelty, always a surprise, always starts you from square one and always stops you dead like a brick wall materialized seconds before you hit it. However familiar it became those years when I lived under it every day, the soul-sick feeling hits me like a new flu. I forget, not that I lived through this before, but how I lived through it. I forget how to stay together, how to not unravel.

I forget that unraveling is alright, the secret cure.

I am infantilized. I learn to walk again, reinvent the wheel, berate myself for this again, again, again.

I remember with my brain that I have survived this before; my body grieves, unheeding.

I remind myself that it cleanses, this kind of grief, that it will clean out what I have hidden -- that it will distill the honor and care that I had for my friend, for all life -- but it is as Job's friends speaking nonsense. What is there to cherish. What is there to look forward to when everything is weight, weight, weight all around me, like water, like an ocean.

I used to go to swimming lessons at the YMCA, where one of our swimming instructors watched us during free swim. He bet us money for every minute we could stay in the "dead man's float." It would be good practice, he said, if we were ever stranded at sea. Our bodies would remember what to do.

I stopped at 4 minutes, 35 seconds. I remember it as difficult; we could have stopped anytime. The difficulty came from the decision -- to stay, voluntarily, or to stop.

He's wrong. My body doesn't remember what to do, can only remember the choice -- and now I have none. There is no practicing for this.

I can't stop this, but like a drowning person I forget and struggle against it. As though there would be a lifeguard to save me, I clutch at anything, at busywork, at logic, at talking and listening, at jokes and small talk. I forget to lie still, face-down and wait, to breathe as little as possible, to allow my senses to leave me. I forget to stare down into the water's space-like darkness and drift.

And then I remember: mei you banfa.

I am not able to save even myself.

This is not difficult. There are no decisions to make.

This is just hard.