Tough As New Boots

I can't tell if this feeling is that I have something still that I need to do, or that I am trying to find something to do to leave behind. Tonight is the first night in a while I have genuinely felt the darkness, felt like it was so close beyond nothing more than a veil, a comfortable mystery, a great adventure. Telling my husband how often I felt that way was maybe the last night until tonight that death felt close, either just under the floor or over my shoulder. As I say that the wall starts creaking, and a momentary fear makes me cling back into life. As much as the heaviness inside me wants to deny it sometimes, I do cling, I have some amorphous feeling of desire to be, just as vague a mist as any other feeling I have, and just as concrete. I don't think it's any desire to justify my not-being-dead, more of just trying to find any kind of point or something to show for it. In my opinion, there is no justifying my existence against what I go through to maintain it. My continued living has not felt for my own enjoyment, but if it has not benefited anyone else, then it truly was an exercise in futility, in torturing myself. If there was some art, or some thought, some image I could leave that would bring any modicum of joy or comfort that would last longer than any awkwardness, pain or resentment I will inevitably leave in my wake.

It feels really sick to feel both relieved and resentful that my husband isn't bothered to know that his wife detests living. Oftentimes I regret marrying; it's something I've often wondered if I'd ever do it at all. Because he seemed unbothered by my troubles, maybe I felt like I wasn't so inflicted on him. Like most other things, I could wash over him and leave no trace. But then I realize how alone I feel. How un-cared for. And the perversion of how nice that feels sometimes.

Somebody once asked why I keep living. Why? Why? My answer was the thoroughly depressing, "Why not?" Usually meant in an encouraging way... why not stop for ice cream? Why not get the red instead of the blue? Why not take a few days off? You have the vacation days saved up! No. Why not stay alive? Nothing actively drawing away, because I know leaving abruptly will accomplish nothing. The lasting impression would be sadness, tragedy, unrequited longing for a purpose. Perhaps that is mostly why I long to leave something behind... not to justify the pain I am going through, or to explain it or attempt to make sense of it, but to make some kind of positivity out of it. I don't think I'm so special that my attempt would be any good, but it would feel better to be hit by a bus or blown up at a time when I had something going, something I was reaching for, something that people could look at and know I really was enjoying myself here and there, and that I wanted them to know I was okay.