A brief note: I'd like to include this in a portfolio at some point. Therefore, I need REALLY GOOD COMMENTS ON IT KTHXBAI. I aim at a sense of quiet desperation... and a new look at depression. I feel that it's a bit scattered and I'd like some help with cohesiveness.

Words and Phantoms


Depression has always been about the language. Whatever you'd call it-- brain imbalance, teenage angst, apathy-- nothing ever had the right scope. Was it a brain imbalance? That's what the doctors said, but they were always so much more complicated than they needed to be. They thought they could define emotion through neurobiology.

Was it teen angst? No, not that-- I laughed at myself every time I turned a page of mathematics and began to sob. The self-hatred always left my mouth tasting like iron. And apathy just wasn't enough, because doesn't apathy imply that you'd get somewhere if you tried?

But I knew this: Whatever it was, whatever I called it, it was the same. Waking up and taking a shower like it could wash the germs off my skin. Reading the news, desperate for another horseman, another plague. Cutting my hair too short and getting it all lopped off. Trembling hands. Raised-lip glares.

I was always a vocally challenged individual (please, forgive me if I ramble; the words come spontaneously)-- I'd make friends who understood that not everything has the right words. They filled in the blanks when my tongue grasped for half-formed ideas that simply didn't have verbal equivalents. I told someone I loved him and the words left my mouth shortly after I called him brother. He knew I loved him as more-but-same. See? There isn't a word.

Some people thought I was stupid because I kept looking for a language that didn't exist. My aunt whispered that I was retarded. I searched the sentences in Huckleberry Finn for some clue that I wasn't a halfwit.

I enrolled in language courses. Japanese gave me words for a few things. Ishin denshin means never having to say I love you, or any other words; you just think and exchange a look and your mate understands.

I never said thank you again, just nodded and smiled to everyone. It wasn't supposed to work with people you didn't love, but I still tried with fingers quivering in my pockets.

I knew it wasn't enough when I opened my Japanese homework and wanted to die, when my hands shook so bad I couldn't write the character for "cheap". Cheap.

One December, I decided sex was a language everyone speaks. I told my friend I'd sleep with him if he found a secure place. He stared at me for a good long while. Didn't take me up on it.

I read 1984 and felt like a victim of NewSpeak. NewSpeak doesn't conform to the falsities of Sapir-whorf. It's not meant to stop you from thinking; it's meant to stop you from communicating your ideals.

"Is English Newspeak?" I asked myself. Frantic, I ran a mile to the library and checked out every book on foreign languages I could find. I looked through Romanian, Croatian, Chinese... none seemed palatable.

My eyes set upon Basque. A simple book. Beginner's Basque.

The first thing I learned is that there are two verbs for "to be". One is permanent, one is temporary. The first thing I said in Basque was "I am sad". Which verb did I use? It's obvious, but liberating.

I went outside and I shouted it to the world. The people passing by stared at me, edged away, held their children close.

At some point, I learned to write. The urge seized me.

For a time, I was whole. Perhaps I even enjoyed living, when I looked out the window and saw similes and metaphors drifting by-- birds streaking across the sky with their miniature contrails, the night congealing in the amber streetlights. I wrote everything I thought of. Everything.

Then... maybe it came back when I woke up and the sky was cloudy. The clouds didn't clot, they didn't sit on our collective heads. They just were.

I watched the trees pass by, and that was all they did. They didn't claw at the firmament. They didn't struggle to unfurl leaves.

I stared at my friends frolicking and wished they'd just shut up and be normal for once, not taking off their shirts and not prancing around acting like preschoolers on crack.

A woman danced in my mind in a flickering firelight. She had danced before, and it had led to a fight over her honor.

I sat down, took my laptop onto my lap. I started typing.

The last time I watched Lura dance, it had ended in a fight over her honor, in the mud and dirt of the training grounds. She had... I stopped. How do you describe someone dancing? Hips shimmy. But that isn't good enough. There had to be a metaphor somewhere.

It went dry.

I let it go for a week and the absence of metaphors turned my tongue to a bitter lash.

"If you can't be civil, go up to your room and stay there." My mother said.

I did. I curled up with a book. It was a bad one-- some cheesy fantasy, I think-- but somehow I couldn't stop reading until the words on the page all blurred and twisted, writhing as my fingertips tried to pin them down. Writhing like my gaze was red-hot steel.

I just cried; no tears slithered down my face. But maybe they would, someday, and I'd have wet serpents traced down my body.

When my mother asked what was wrong, I told her, "I'll be alright." There just weren't any other words. And sometimes, as I beat foreign syllables into submission, I know there may never be better words.

It doesn't keep me from looking.