Do you know what it means to hit bottom? That feeling you get when gravity finally yields and you hit the ground and then miraculously you float. Not much: 2 to 3 inches of bounce if you have enough padding or enough strength left in you. There is that moment of floating where it doesn’t seem quite real–not quite like the end. But then gravity catches up and then the pain catches up to you. Some people call it dead cat bounce.
After that you’re pretty sure what is real and what is fiction and what is going to be and what never will. You might be right. You might be wrong. Above all else you are certain that the pain is just too much to endure. Usually you’re right about that.
At the end of the day you’re still a man, with problems for sure, but the globe is still spinning and people are still living their lives, and children are still laughing, and work still needs to be done.
So you keep going.
You tie a smile to your lips. You let your eyes focus. You watch people. You do everything that you need to and at the end of the day you close your door and you weep. And then you sleep. And then you wake up. And then you do it all over again because that is all you can do. That is all you ever want to do until you really do wake up.
Or you start that hard climb from the pit of your own making to the top lip of the earth where maybe you’ll be greeted by green grass and trees and sunlight of life and love or where it might just be a waste land where there is nothing left but what you thought there was. There’s no knowing without the climbing. But you don’t want to climb you don’t want to hurt in all new and magical ways. You don’t want to feel at all. You just want to sleep and sleep has always moved things along.
So you say why continue? Just sleep. Then you look at the people you love and think about how they would feel, how they would hurt, because your kids and your lover’s feelings matter and you say that’s why.
But it isn’t.
Because you still feel and you still love and down there in the black there are moments like a regular flashes of light–brief but powerful–in the mourning and in the eternity of those moments you feel that everything is right and you feel whole and you feel loved and you feel…
And you feel.
And then the black creeps over you and then it’s a pain worse than dying because dying is instant and then nothing. This this is lasting and strong. This is fire-forged, poisen tinged and sharp. It digs into your gut and digs into your heart and makes you recognize that there is a soul and the soul is capable of hurting so fucking much or loving so fucking much and maybe those two things are the same.
Or maybe it all is just a game.