Loud Silence (A depression story)

Chapter Eight

It's amusing, how you can experience the same thing in so many ways. Humans are so simple, and so complex, all at the same time. We are but one single being, but we have so many faces. Each one veiling the world before them with a different filter. We can all see these different worlds; be it through love, or sadness, or hatred, or any other emotion. I always imagined it like a room surrounded with glass windows, and while there are so many different things out each pane of glass, we stubbornly get caught up staring out only one, ignoring the light pouring in from the others, attempting to show us not just one truth, but all of them.

That night, it was like someone had wrenched me away from my window of cold desperation, hurt and denial, and shoved me up against another. Leaving me to face the foreign light burning the skin it touched. Leaving me to discern what to do with that sort of pain. 

Alcohol was my first attempt at coping. I couldn't understand when I was in my right mind, so perhaps I needed to be out of my mind. I thought drinking for fun always felt light and warm, so perhaps that's how I wished this painful heat would evolve. Drinking when I was depressed, feeling the poison trickle hotly down your throat--raw from crying--filled me with a lethargy like no other, allowing me to focus on it's toxic comfort rather than the pain radiating in my chest, beckoning for more cries. Perhaps I hoped evoking more sadness would lead me back to my comfortable cold window where I didn't have to face unsightly truths.

I wasn't happy though, nor was I depressed for once. All I felt was anger; anger and explainable hatred. It had no direction, it simply was. Drinking out of anger, was an entirely new experience which both excited and terrified me.

The bitter taste, the way the liquor burns the throat before sloshing into the stomach like acid, but it's heat was nothing like that which coiled in my chest like a scorching hot snake. I drank and drank as though it could possibly douse the fire lit by the rage, but it only allowed the flames to grow. It fed the hatred, all while subtly taking away my sense of reason and rationality. Drinking while fuelled by wrath allowed me to become a version of myself I never knew existed.

I wasn't sure where I was, or how far I'd walked since storming out of that apartment. In a blind rage I had taken a half empty bottle of vodka and stumbled out onto the streets. I couldn't go home, but I couldn't possibly stay there either. So, with a bottle to my lips, I simply let my feet carry me forward, truly not giving a single damn where they brought me. There was no place for me anymore. Home wasn't home without Skyy, school was nothing but a reminder of how weak and despicable I was. What did it matter where I went now? That's what I thought. I didn't have value, I didn't have purpose, and I didn't have anyone who cared enough to worry about where I was and what could happen to me. So, I would just keep moving.

I mean, where was one to go when no one was waiting for you? When no one would come looking, and no one missed your presence. This wasn't some sad case where the poor soul just couldn't see that there were people who cared if only they looked hard enough; looked beyond their selfish sadness. Thing was, I did have that in one person and one person only. Yet, no one tells you what yoy do when they die and you take their place as black sheep.

Perhaps I deserved to feel this way. Maybe my bastard brother left so I could taste what he'd lived with for so long. Perhaps it was spite that drove him go abandon me. Perhaps that final misleading goodbye, that smile was because he was glad. He knew what was coming to me and he--

I let out a gut wrenching scream battering my fists bloody against a chain link fence. How could I think this way? How could I be so cruel and think so horribly of my dead brother!? My brother who killed himself to escape his pain.

Even if it were out of spite, could I tell him he was wrong? That I didn't deserve it? I let him suffer this way in silence, simply so that I could keep pretending I was okay, because as long as I didn't reach that rock bottom, things would somehow work out right? How selfish. How absolutelt dispicble.