Bitterweed

I’m depressed.  It began with a return of the chronic fatigue syndrome.  I thought it was improving, but it feels like it’s just spread to my mind.  Now I haven’t the emotional energy to do anything, where my body was already reluctant.  I keep telling myself it’s hormonal, or neurotransmitter-related, and will pass, but apparently I’m not very convincing. 

It’s always disappointing how bitter things aren’t when I’m depressed.  For months the burdock tea sat undrunk in the pantry – it smelt like death.  Now I’ve brewed a cup and it tastes about as tragic as the death of a weed.  Or maybe it just tastes like a dead weed.  With milk.  Not bad, actually, but not a hundredth intense enough. 

If I had an art, as I’ve said many times before, this mood would be worth it.  I realised today I don’t have a friend to call.  None I’d feel quite comfortable calling, anyway.  Then again, who does?  Does anyone have a friend they could actually call up when they’re feeling completely melancholy and not at all entertaining company?  So I tell myself again, rightly or wrongly, that it’s not friendship I’m after here.  That’s just a craving, like one for bad food, or a drug, to make things feel better when they aren’t. 

I have a confession to make.  I keep thinking of Alex – not Alexander, my ex – Alex, the friend of Nick’s who came over and helped me with my buzzing computer speakers some months back.  Alex the atheist, who probably didn’t think much of my collection of astrology books, when he pored over my bookcase, though we seemed to get on surprisingly well, I thought.  I wonder if it’s too late to call and ask for my cake tin back… the cake tin I rather deliberately lent him to give him an excuse to call.  He rather pointedly offered to help me further with the speakers, but I soon realised they were a lost cause, so I didn’t call.  I think it’s got to look a bit silly calling two months later for a tin only worth a couple of dollars.  And maybe if he’d wanted a friendship he’d have called, anyway. 

I’m no good at this anymore.  I’m trying to remember how I coped with depression in my teens.  Not perfectly, I realise, looking down at the old white scars on my arm.  And I remember, deliberately, how unsatisfying that was. 

I wonder if this quasi-loneliness is analogous to the desperation for someone to help out when I have chronic physical pain.  A part of me wonders how much there is to be learnt in solitude.  Have I really not exhausted its usefulness yet?  Then again, I haven’t found an attractive alternative either.