Thursday 3/12/20
Today is my father's birthday. He would have been seventy-three. I am unable to rouse myself to anything. My fight is flagging. I have had this happen before and it has come back to some degree--sometimes lesser, sometimes greater--but I am showing all of the signs of this time last year when the nervous breakdown occurred. I am not out of anything. I have been in the breakdown state now for thirteen months. I've had no hope--and what I feel is the certainty that this is it; this, and worse--for so long now, most of a decade. I've known people who don't understand that there's a difference between going through all of this once, for a while, and going through it ceaselessly for years and years. There comes a point. A number. A tipping point. A line crossed. Eventually you come apart, all of your stitching comes out in the rain and blows away in the gusts. You chase it down, maybe, if you can get back on your feet and not tuck yourself into the fetal position in your gutter, but it goes so far away, in so many different directions. If you gather it all up, stuff it back into you, your skin doesn't hold like it used to, you've stitched it up so many times that it's like you're moving a needle through dust or dirt. It's not even skin anymore. That's where I'm at. I'm not functioning. I'm not facing anything. I'm unable to, even when I tell myself to. And I also don't want to because I don't see a point. I could do anything. I could cure the world of pandemics--I'm giving an example, not anything literal--and I don't think it would help my cause and what I'm trying to do. I think I'd be more disliked. I think too much--and too many people--would still be against me. I didn't enjoy Facebook sending me a photo yesterday that Molly took on that day eight years ago, which was the last day I saw her before she put her intricate plan in motion on March 19. The photos was one she took of me on a beach in Swampscott. My face is in shadow. I look hulking in it. I was bigger then.
