I’ve heard self-righteous sinners call depression a self-pity party. They congregate and pray and sing away their need to swim in gallons of jack Daniel’s: in words and in songs they congratulate themselves because in a blink of an eye they are saved from their inevitable and eventual drowning.

But then, one day, they look in a mirror and see their lives as Hollywood movie set: All pretty to look at, but nothing behind the façade. They collapse and relapse and backslide into the reality they tried to ignore behind an all too thi

prayer-veil.

But I can’t ignore an all too real nineteen year old I knew who bought a belt-ticket to travel timelessly without pain: A soul that fades from black to the moment when it’s time to go doesn’t have the privilege to sip sweet self-pity nectar.

The black grows from a mustard seed ripple to a wave that rises and engulfs and overwhelms a soul from inside out: it covers a body until it just can’t move:

limp limbs

locked joints

empty mind that begins to crave permanent nothing…

Many times I’ve god-wished that life could be like a kaleidoscope: if I didn’t like the black nothing in front of my eyes, I could turn the lens and see something new, maybe better, maybe worse, either way, don’t matter: I could turn the lens until I found the image I wanted to see.

Don’t happen outta the blue: ain’t no kaleidoscope to life’s lens; now is built on all that was and what is to come is built on now. No turning lens changes what was done. The shapes and colors of here and now are knots of there and then.

Those knots cannot be untied.