Each day is like a hole that you fall into. A pit of unmotivation and laziness, some of them easier to climb out of, some of them harder but there is always daylight to be seen at the top, there is always something expecting you at the end.
Except when there isn’t.
You stare at the ceiling, your expression so perfectly lifeless that even Bear Grylls would have trouble surviving on it as you think of the happiness that filled your soul when you had first met Cyanide. It was raining outside and she’d been knocking on the apartment doors, politely asking for food and shelter only to be turned down by your neighbors and their neighbors as well.
When she came around to your apartment, you just couldn’t close the door on her.
You couldn’t close the door on such a cute little innocent fluffy soul that was bearing such a beggingly heartbreaking expression, painted on by the rain and the months of feral life.
She also had the most beautiful cyan coat you had ever seen which only got prettier as you bathed her, removing all the mud and dirt that had been caked to even the thickest, deepest parts of her fluff.
During the first few days, Cyanide had been excited beyond control. She explored your entire apartment multiple times, asking you what various appliances are for and she had almost shit herself when you had bought her a bunch of toys from FluffyMart, asking if they were all for her.
From then on, life had settled into fixed routines for both of you, repeating day after day.
In the morning Cyanide usually wakes you up at about 11 am and you give her breakfast while making your own as well. The rest of your day remains mostly unchanged save for the fact that you let her watch TV with you in the afternoon. Every now and then you also read her a story, something you would never dream of doing on your own. (Reading, that is)
You find that reading a story to Cyanide is oddly calming. It gets you away from all the everyday stress and Cyanide enjoys it too, literally begging for a goodnight story sometimes.
She also loves to sleep in her house of wooden building blocks, giggling when you tap on one of the blocks and say “Ding Dong!”
Cyanide’s favorite food (apart from spaghetti of course) is fish fingers and Cyanide had almost swiped your entire dinner on the day you found that out, declaring the ‘nummie stickies’ as ‘bestest nummies’.
It takes a gargantuan anount of effort to roll over enough to see the digital display of your alarm clock and a strained grunt accompanies the realization that you’ve been sleeping for 14 hours.
It’s 7 am.
Cyanide should come in about 4 hours so until then, you decide to lie in bed, hoping to avoid the mental rainclouds as you stare up at the white, featureless ceiling in the bedroom of your 3-room apartment.
Luck, like most days, isn’t on your side however and even though you’ve only been awake for about 20 minutes, you can feel your head growing heavy and you drop it onto your pillowcase.
Because, the problem with depression is, it isn’t made up of concrete thoughts or bad emotions but rather a big, overwhelming sludge of not necessarily sadness but usually just a complete lack of emotion. Sure, reasonless sadness has its place too but usually sadness only sets in when there is something to think about, something to chew on that’s rolling around in your head, spinning around like a hamster wheel.
There is one thought however, one emotion that surfaces much more regularly than other emotions, more regularly than sadness even.
Rage.
Rage directed at yourself.
Rage at all the bad decisions you have made in your pathetic life that brought you to where you are now, living in a tiny apartment and working the weekend shift as a stock boy at the nearest shopping center.
The worst part about all of it is the fact that you weren’t even given a bad start to begin with.
On the contrary actually, when you still lived with your parents, your life couldn’t have been better. Your parents were both hard working and you had lived in a big, three-floor house with a basement, an attic and a yard that started at the front and stretched around the side into a big patch of lawn at the back.
You went on family holidays almost every year and there was never even a hint of a financial problem to be found anywhere ever.
You even had your own bathroom!
But that didn’t last because nothing good ever does and eventually, you absolutely flunked out of school, struggling for a job until you came across the job you have now.
So, you worked there, living with your unbelievably disappointed parents, until you could afford the rent for your new apartment, which you promptly moved into.
And since then, apart from Cyanide of course, life hasn’t changed a bit for you as you slowly started drowning in the gaping black void known as ‘depression’.
You hate that word because you always thought it conveys the message in a wrong way, like that someone with depression just had all the life sucked out and that that someone could just be reinflated.
In reality though, depression is a last stop for most people. They start driving themselves insane over problems that don’t actually exist, spiralling closer and closer to the drain, to the hole that swallows them up forever and doesn’t give them back.
It’s sort of like a boat on a river that’s drifting towards a waterfall. At first, the boat is very slow but it suddenly gets faster and faster as it spins out of control, exceeding the point where it could reasonably be brought to a stop. The riverbank flies by, soon turning into a blur as the boat careens down the river until eventually…
…it goes down the waterfall.
THE END of Part 2