This is a more ambitious one-off that I hope you have the time and patience to read. If you're not so fussed about emotional investment, you can skip the first verse but I wouldn't recommend it. Enjoy!
*****
1
If I made a grand for every time I heard the phrase "somebody has it worse than you," I probably wouldn't be writing this. I'd be on an island somewhere with no internet and no arseholes and living like a king dressed like Robinson fucking Crusoe!
Yes, there are people who have it worse than I do, but there is nothing I can do for them when the destructive wave of my own mental illness sweeps me up and smashes my helpless mind against the eroding rocks of my ruined life. Think about that for a minute. As analogies go, that's almost like beating a homeless man to death with a suitcase full of money. That's actually not far from the current tone by which society sets its standards.
But it's not that the world depresses me. It does, but it's not the reason for my illness. Some people are just built wrong. Their biological contraptions aren't made to last or they suffer faulty wiring. I guess the latter is me and as a result I probably care more than I should when I have it in me to care. But depression for one isn't just about feeling bad. Most often I feel nothing at all other than a constant feeling like I'm being crushed slowly to death by gravity.
And the funny thing about living with anxiety and depression is that everything breaks all at once, both your brain and your body suffer the same aching sense of hopelessness and the longer you live with it, the harder it is for messages to get back and forth between the two. I'm a zombie.
I'm barely over thirty and I've lived with it since my final years in high school. Until recently there wasn't much that did work. Most of the time I felt like a warm corpse, wearing down the terrifying novelty of taking up so much of my mum's money, patience, time and space. And then on the better days I just felt like I was twenty to thirty years older before my time.
Just to give you an idea of what I've lived with since my mid-teens, I've been suicidal on and off; thankfully mostly off, in terms of urges. Some days your mind has a voice of its own and your feelings seem completely alien. If you don't do what that voice says, it'll try to find a way to act without your cooperation and that's a scary thing - especially when it shows you just how helpless you can be against it.
Then there are the passively suicidal days where it isn't an urge or a voice but more or less a sense of exhaustion so great that you don't even have the will to rationalise against the irrational. You just sort of shuffle about, accepting that it's not going to end well, and you let it eat at you because you haven't even the power to make choices. You could die and not give a damn and that would be no big loss.
Hearing about people who have it worse doesn't make me want to fucking smile. If you feel differently, then clearly the wrong guy got sick!
If this account of recent events seems disjointed or dispassionate, please let me assure you that this isn't my intention and it certainly isn't laziness. But I wanted to tell you about something that happened between me and my sister Eve.
Admittedly it's a bit of a weird one, but hey, that's Eve; my beautiful human being of a sister!
2
I could tell you about what made me this way. That might take a whole university study in itself in medicine and psychology, but as a result my immune system became dangerously close to non-existent as of late and hospital tests led to the discovery that the same went for most of my other hormones.
I could barely get it up for most of my twenties. All of the antidepressants made my behaviour pretty unpredictable and sometimes dangerous, so we had to try to find another route. Testosterone treatment made me violent too, so gradually I just slunk back into the same routine of living in a dark corner so not to drain anymore of mum's savings, whatever was left.
Eve didn't just hate to see me like this. She was terrified. Five years ago one of her closest friends, out of the blue, threw herself into oncoming traffic. That put Eve into a depression but the pills worked for her. I wasn't bitter at all. I was thankful that with the mourning process leading up to and coming away from the funeral, she was able to recover within a matter of months. But in all honesty knowing that she needed me close and actually being able to help her made me feel somewhere closer to normal for a while.
All my life I've only ever cared for Eve so much that I could tell her I love her and feel that it means something. I tell mum the same but - and this might seem odd considering - she's just mum. We've grown up with a routine of times and places when it was polite to say "love you, mum..."
With Eve, I tell her when I feel it and she does the same. We've always been close. Some believe we've always been closer than most siblings, despite the fact that we rarely hang out socially (I'm the antisocial one as you can probably imagine).
So I couldn't bear to see her so upset, knowing that there was nothing she could do. But being that I fought urges I didn't want and refused to accept, I had to be brutally honest with her at some point or another. Her friend might have been helpless against her own struggle, but for whatever the reason, she dropped the ball. Not that I called her selfish for it. But it wouldn't have been selfish to ask for help either. Eve owed her nothing.
What mattered to me then was that I be there for her where most other family would keep their distance and to wait for communication to happen rather than to guide her through her mourning. And part of me wondered, if a friend could have such impact, then what would I have done to her had I taken my own life?
We spent some three months leaning on each other, phasing in and out of consciousness through the dark days and bad weather. I let her cry on my shoulder until I was damp with saltwater, until the mourning itself became too much. Soon enough it was the right time to let go and to move on for her own sake.
But she wasn't happy about leaving me behind, as she put it. I agreed that it wasn't fair that she could recover so easily and I couldn't, but what could we do? We may have been peas in a pod but she was the perfect one. She said she would do anything for me.
I asked her to rob a bank. Putin let us down on those military supply drops we asked for. So I wasn't going to be a millionaire any time soon. I asked her to quit being so clever and go get a job at KFC so she could bring me chicken every night. To be honest, she wouldn't have suited the shirt and cap anyway, not after I've seen her in a teddy bear onesie.
Eve is five years younger than me and carries a few extra pounds, but in all the right ways. She's the best for cuddles, which I never got enough of, until I get to where this story's headed. She's well endowed (F cups I think) and kept her layer of puppy fat and made it work to her advantage.
She's a long-haired brunette, likes to wear her hair up and keeps a light tan throughout the year and she has the friendliest smile and pretty brown eyes which have never been off limits to me. I love her dearly and it's always hurt me all the more to know that they're wasted on this stupid illness.
I often feel like she has to do it for me, and worry that she's left feeling that she fails me when her out and proud love for me just doesn't do the trick. I'm a bad brother!
3
One evening not so long ago Eve walked into my room and asked what I was doing. I was writing my blog, which I'd taken to, trying to repair the fractured thoughts. Sometimes it's just so hard to piece a single thought together and I was struggling.
I told her "not much, nothing really," and asked in kind. I was in my fake leather swivel chair at the desk and leaned back at ease while she approached and sat on the bedside to put a thought across to me.
'I want to do something for you,' she pitched, and for a moment it did sound like she was selling something. I was a pushover for her anyway so I would have kidnapped Mickey from Disney World if she'd asked nicely enough. 'I don't know exactly what it is yet. But I was talking with someone who seemed to know their stuff today and from what they told me I started looking into some research.'
I was apprehensive, typically. Nothing worked for me. Maybe I'd outlive it eventually. Maybe chance would give me a break one day and I'd get the strength to fight it but, 'sis, come on, I appreciate you trying but nothing worked so far. What can you do that the doctors didn't?'
She wasn't even insulted by that. In fact I just made her more excited because she actually had an argument for me. 'Actually if you're willing to trust me on this one, I might be able to help,' she suggested. 'Look it's all very technical at this stage and I'm shit with big "sciencey" words but please just go along with this. Please?'
'What is it?' I begged.
'So I was talking to a guy at the gym. He was trying every trick in the book to woo me,' she recalled cynically and then laughed him off like a cheap joke. 'He was actually pretty cute, very fit-
'Get to the point!'
'Well he was a personal trainer, he has to be,' she trailed off.
'Get to the point, though,' I pleaded, uttering a frustrated sigh.
'Anyway he doesn't know the meaning of "NO" so he keeps reaching and then pulls up this little known fact that not only does human contact naturally raise the production of good health hormones-
'Very sciencey, Eve,' I jabbed.
'Shut up! Not only that but it also releases all of the feel-good chemicals that YOU NEED!'
'So?' I asked. 'All I need to do is find a woman to press myself up against? Or to drape myself over when I barely have it in me to breathe,' I added. Eve got frustrated at my attempt to be humorous.
'No,' she sighed. And then she sat forward, perched from the very edge of my mattress and took my hand in hers. 'Do you trust me?'
'With my life,' I admitted. And all of a sudden I could feel the sting of tears as I became more aware of how good her touch felt. I cried, ashamed of myself. 'But don't get your hopes up, you know?'
And I don't even know how she did it. I was a dead weight and I certainly didn't do it myself, but one moment I was sat there sniffling and struggling to meet her gaze, and the next I was on my knees, my head in her lap, blubbering like a baby.
4
A week passed. I couldn't say that I felt any better but every evening she came to my room and we more or less did the same. Either she held me one way or the other, or we hugged or held hands. Either we talked about how it made me feel - strange mostly - or we were happy not talking at all. That night I cried never repeated itself though, which was a shame because it led to the best night's sleep in years.
And Eve spent more and more time at her computer, looking into the science of feel-good hormones and how they came to be. Then one night she deviated from the routine and called me into her room. There she was, sat with her eyes almost squished up against the monitor, looking cute and snug in her baby blue pyjamas with the black and white teddy bear faces all over.
