the rule

The day burns down until all that is left is night. Sirens and screen flickers and the piano swinging through the solo. Porch lights and lit windows staring out to the street. All the stars flickering through the tidal atmosphere, unseen ripples revealed in botched optics and the opacity of tendered clouds for currency. The hours spent below ceilings and between walls, warmth and shelter to mitigate the season. Recorded music and electric light and the shelves loaded with all that you long to share. The lonesome room with no exceptions. The gifted sorrow, the gaffed noose.

Lately sorrow comes a calling without bothering with an antecedent. One moment holding the course, the next crashing and burning. The cycling has accelerated, the depression deepened, the isolation all but complete. It’s how it is in the later stages of the sickness, the brain so beaten down that the receptors barely work, each day staring at that dread barrel until it seems the only answer. Relief doesn’t come, little respite and performative pleasure rule the day, until only the brief extinction of sleep provides any succor at all. The heart’s fondest longings only serve to harm. The night is cold and uncaring, the daytime brutal and cruel. Cry all night, rail against heaven and hell, do as you please: the bone birthed sadness is the only companion you have.

As madness consumes you, the company thins out. The awful that you carry, the monster that you are wears away at human endurance. People find better ways to spend the day than waiting on your better angels. People find people that don’t make them feel like murder every single day. What help there is isn’t there to help. Incurious philosophers and de facto pharmacists are about the best you can hope for. The ones you love, if you are luckiest of the lucky, will dutifully tolerate you. But to love you is a labor, and you will see how hard they have to work at it. All the never mores pile on top of your litany of sins, and the rules of compañero and kinship quickly become everyone for themselves. All your tender loves hopefully save themselves as you bide your time in dull torment, a little less each day until you find your punctuation. Full stop, dead bang done.