The 'bad' times

Goddammit, typical me. We finally get round to a topic based on happiness and joy and I fall into one of the deepest depressions of my life. This entire month I've just felt awful. That kind of lying in bed with incredible fear of the future awful, lying in bed telling yourself, 'It's okay, you're just tired, you don't have to think about your life right now, just get some sleep' and being unable to believe myself. I've always been a miserable bastard but usually my misery manifests itself in the form of a 'Nothing's worth doing or planning for' lazy attitude. Recently I've been feeling far more of the far scarier, 'I can't stand being alive' gut wrenching dread of each moment.

I doubt I'm going to off myself or anything. I'd say it's a pretty safe bet I'll be around this time next year and if that's the case I'd say it's a dead cert I'll still be bitching and moaning about my situation. The only thing that will have changed will be my opinion of this moment, this day, April 30th 2009.

At some point in the future I will look back on this time and smile. I'll feel a warmth in my heart when I think of the way life was. I'll feel a beautifully sad nostalgia, the same nostalgia I feel when I look back on my high school days from this moment now. I remember that I was fucking miserable and terrified every day of my school life, I remember that my mind was full of nothing but fear of the upcoming cross country run and Science class in which I would be once again forced to sit next to the violence prone kid with the ginger bowl haircut. This is all stored in my memory as factual information cross referenced with the horrible feelings I felt at the time. None of it matters to me now though.

I'm distant enough from any of the horrors of my past that I can look on them with a fuller and deeper understanding and appreciation. Remember that day I walked home thinking about all the shit that big Herman Munster looking kid was going to do to me when he found out I punched his little brother ?? Yeah, that was a beautiful sunny day ... aah, the old walk home from school, the horses in field I'd walk past on my way home, the nuns walking back to the monastery [edit - nunnery ... wait, is nunnery a word ??], the sunshine glistening off of the windows of freshly cleaned cars, ahhh, I remember that day.

Maybe I'm just too ignorant and forgetful to truly and fully remember how horrible those days were or maybe I have gained a deeper understanding of those moments since living them and leaving their horrors behind. Either way I see beauty every time I look back, a beauty I feel I missed while living it through my neurotic little closed mind. I couldn't see the beauty of those days through the blinkers of my fear driven mind but fuck it, I see the beauty of those days now even if I'm still blind to the beauty of this very moment.

I only hope when I die, it'll be slowly. That way I can hopefully look back at the whole damn thing and see it from the beautiful understanding perspective I see my youth from today.