A Regular Within The Streets of Mania- A Richey Edwards inspired short story

Part Two

Just over three weeks ago on January 23rd, a Japanese reporter called Midori Tsukagoshi visited me in my own home. It was nice, I had no telephone in my home and visitors were rare, especially considering the crippling spells of loneliness I have been getting recently. Midori asked me about my alcohol addiction, self-harm, the time last year where I was hospitalised because I felt too low to even cope with the idea of waking up.

Replying to him hopelessly, I can remember telling him nothing had changed. I told him I had felt lost. Alone. Weak. I didn't tell him every detail. Like how the inescapable spiral left me in a pit of darkness and self-hatred. A supermassive black hole that could not be penetrated by any means of help. Whenever I'd look in the mirror I wouldn't recognise my reflection, my appearance was so far from the 'real me' that I had been brainwashed into believing was this hard punk-rock legend that I quite frankly wasn't comfortable with the truth. I was no longer depressed, I was my depression. Not only did I feel isolated from others, but the melancholia that had manifested in my mind, destructing it and eating away at my memories like maggots to a corpse, had isolated me from who I once was. Pleasure had long gone, I knew that the insufferable pain I had been feeling was never to be vanquished and the fire that was beginning to fuel it was getting stronger. What I said wasn't sugar-coating it in any way, nothing had changed and the psychiatric doctors did nothing for me. They tried, and they tried so hard. All of the doctors I met were lovely. But it wasn't enough. Things kept going wrong; I felt colour-blind as my eyes seemed to become more and more immune to the vibrancy of life that everyone else seemed to see. I saw grey. Bleak, thick, smoke clouds of grey that choked my oesophagus, trapping my lungs and making breathing unbearable. And that, I didn't mind.

Oh, and he asked me about Snoopy, my dog who I had had all my life that died two weeks prior to the interview. The same day of the interview, with a mind engulfed in other areas, I visited my mum and dad for the first time in weeks and also the last.

My mum said I was unrecognisable. Last April I started my battle with anorexia nervosa. I had stopped eating anything except for chocolate, and this along with the self-harm was destructing my physical state almost as much as it was destructing me mentally. I sat in front of my mother clutching a cup of tea that I could barely hold, and she burnt holes into my skin with those eyes that shook with nerves, causing my heart to soften slightly to the pain I was causing her. No idea why, but my dog was more of a catalyst to these events than her pain whenever she looked at me. It made me feel bad for her having to look at the remains of her almost dead son. It made me want to take myself away so that she would never have to look at me again.

Emaciated, one look at myself in the mirror would show exactly what I was going through without saying a single word. More than slender, my bones jutted out at every angle as the skin I had once worn so freely was left tight and pale. I felt and looked hollow, like a tree that was ready to blossom but had just given up a few weeks before spring, dropping my twig-like arms and my leaves around me and not giving a single damn who tripped over them. Soon, I would rot further and further into a state of ugliness that would leave children pointing at me and asking their parents, 'mummy, why don't they just chop that one down?' without knowing that it would eventually be the owner who would give up on itself. Mossy veins eventually would become more present, easy to get rid of if necessary, and one look at myself would cause an automatic reaction of repulse. It wasn't the public's fault for their reaction, it was mine. I looked like a dead man walking. In some cases, I was. In others, I longed to be a dead man lying.

A few days later, on January 31st, I decided that the best way to say my goodbyes was over the phone. Mum begged me to come and see her, but I insisted I was too busy. The Manics and I were heading out on our American headline tour to promote our latest album in two days, and I had to travel down to London with James to stay in a hotel tonight. I told mum that I wasn't looking forward to going to America, and she said she could tell. Said the way I acted last week made her uneasy. As if something terrible was about to happen. In an attempt to calm her nerves, I replied that it was simply her strong maternal instincts. Giving my love to dad and Rachel, my younger sister, I hung up.