22

I wake to the dream I’m in a world of broken glass.

It’s everywhere: glittering slivers wafting in the air I breathe; jagged shards cobbled in the path I stand upon; serrated flakes that are tiled in glimmering fields, before rising into precariously stacked mountains; and a sky that might be a shattered mirror.

I’m twenty-five and going through my second serious bout of depression, struggling to find functionality and purpose in a life that feels like it’s irreparably breaking.

It’s not surprising to be here. Part of me, I think, abides here, and it’s a case of just how present I am.

Now I am wholly here.

Every step I take is a torment. The glass cuts through me. But it’s worse in my head because, in this world, the physical’s not as important. This is where I run although my right leg’s no longer capable of running, and that won’t be an issue for another twenty years. Here, there is no chronology. There is no time. Definition is amorphous. The only constant is consciousness. And that’s rooted in agony, like it’s been torn and torn and torn again, and flutters now in tatters, trying to main some semblance of self, and in trying to maintain that semblance.

Keep moving.

That’s what I tell myself, but that elicits an irreconcilable juxtaposition: the pain. If I stand still, I can bear through, however impossibly, but that means I’m never getting out of here.

And, if I stay here, I don’t know what ultimately happens to me. Even standing still, I’m still breathing in tiny flecks that cut through my breathing, shred my chest, and circulate like balls of spikes tearing through my body.

I am only temporarily safe, and while that realization invites a speck of hope, it also awakens me to the bigger truth: I’m dying here.

We’re all dying, always one breath closer to our eventual final breath, but in the world outside we generally don’t think about that. In the world outside we’re born to live, to experience, to deny that reality for as long as possible.

Here I am alive and dead at the same time, both battling for dominance, death the more attractive proposition because it would suggest an end to all this, a peacefulness that I’ve never, ever known, and will likely never know.

The option is to cast myself into the field, land in the smashed glass, and hope that’s it, although it’s not with any certainty that it will be an end to everything. It might just increase the growing hopelessness. And even if I was successful, even if I welcomed some comforting finality, I don’t know what comes next.

Because I’m sure there is a next.

People often talk about God’s plan, or spiritual pathways, or the Universe being some enlightened educator that plots our course, but the flip of that is while we believe in benevolence, while we aspire to something good and rewarding, there is so much that goes wrong.

Abuse, rape, murder, cancer, poverty, starvation, mass shootings, etc. – how could any benevolent entity deliver these? How could anybody believe there is some plan that’s designed to benefit them while all this is allowed to run rampant?

I could believe in random chance, but if I dismiss that, and continue to believe in something more, the alternative is scarier: if there is some blueprint trying to build something positive and gratifying and enriching, then maybe, just maybe, there’s an opposing force doing the opposite, which would then explain all the bad.

And if I surrender here, maybe I surrender myself to something that is merciless and which revels in resignation and suffering, which wants me to give in, and which feeds from it.

So the only choice is to keep moving.

My head’s worse than ever now – weighted down with increasing dread, raw with uncertainty, and too small to contain all the hurting that’s funneling through.

I pivot back and forth, and back again, trying to find a way out, but every direction is equally impossible.

Once, I would’ve thought there were so many ways out, but now I know most of pathways are mirages. I’m sure I’ve followed them countless times over the years and yet I’m still here. These pathways don’t lead out. They just keep leading back in.

There must be something more, though.

Not more as in a greater power, but just more to this life.

I’ve always believed that but whereas once that belief was a bottomless ocean, now it’s just a shallow and muddy lakebed.

Yet as futilely as I do hold onto it, I hold onto it all the same.

I will get out of this.

But I also know that, inevitably, I’ll be back again.