Distant Suns

Rebecca and I broke up about a year ago, give or take a week. A month and a half later, I was having unfulfilling casual sex with a dental assistant. A month after that started, I began to cut myself again and, not wanting said dental assistant to see the fresh scars, I stopped seeing her. Then another month on, I went crazy.

This is a sequential list of events. It doesn’t imply that later events were caused by previous ones. My memory of this time is somewhat hazy, so I’ve reconstructed it from emails and such.

I was already on my way down when Rebecca and I split up. I was so tired all the time that it was impossible to feel sad or angry about it. It was impossible to feel anything at all. The subsequent year hasn’t been filled with much of any value. The dental assistant certainly wasn’t. It was just sex, and deeply uninteresting sex at that.

Last night Rob turned up at 11pm because he was bored. We drove around the city for a while. Our conversations almost take the form of improvised comedy. When we got back here, we talked for a while about what’s happening with me.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. “You can’t live like this forever.”

“I know,” I said.

“You’ve been depressed as long as I’ve known you. What are you depressed about?”

“Well, there’s a lot of things,” I said, “But depression isn’t really about things being shit. I mean, lots of things in my life are quite shit, but when you’re not depressed you can deal with that. It’s about not being able to function properly. Up until this week I’d spent the last couple of weeks so down that I couldn’t concentrate on anything at all. I couldn’t even read a book. I’d get to the next page and wouldn’t be able to remember what the last page said.”

“I don’t really understand depression, because I’ve never really been through it,” he said. “When I feel down I look out the door and there’s all this life around to live.”

“Being depressed means you can’t even get to the door to look out of it.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe medication will help. Who knows?”

Last time my sister called, she was trying to think of a hobby for me. Something to get me out of my flat, meeting people. Because I don’t meet people these days. Sometimes that’s because I don’t have any desire to meet anyone, sometimes it’s because my sleep/wake schedule is so fucked. A lot of it is probably because life slips through your fingers when you’re down and it’s difficult to get hold of anything again.

I don’t know if I want a relationship. It’s definitely not a path to salvation or redemption. But the unfulfilling, deeply uninteresting, casual sex seems attractive at some points when I’m feeling OK. And even the unfulfilling, deeply uninteresting, casual sex is probably out of reach at the moment. My scars don’t bother me, until I think about how other people will see them. They’re an advertisement of my screwed-up-ness. And though there are undoubtedly women out there who won’t mind them, or take them as evidence that I’m potentially dangerous (ah, you’re mental, therefore you’re probably an axe murderer), it definitely limits the field. Casual sex pretty much excludes in-depth discussions of your mental health, and my scars speak of my craziness whether I want them to or not.

I’m used to being alone. I’m not really bothered by my mostly solitary existence. It’s the physical loneliness that gets to me sometimes; the knowledge that nobody’s touched me in a long time. Not for nearly a year now. Even the most casual of casual sex, free from emotion and meaning takes away the desperate feeling of separation. I’m not afraid of being alone or lonely, I’m afraid of the disconnection between me and the world of people, this sensation of floating far away in deep space, with the warmth of the sun a distant memory.