Sad Times For No Reason

Hello again and welcome back to Stories That Must Not Die. Today I am honored to provide our very first post from someone outside of the core group that runs this site:

Quintn Parker.

Please spend some time visiting Quintn’s site when you get a moment, and show him a bit of the support and encouragement that is going to make this community one of the greatest in the blogosphere.

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Sometimes I think that human depression is caused from an unfortunate mixture of empathy and imagination. Empathy opens you up to dark feelings that aren’t even yours, and imagination makes these feelings real and able to hurt you.

Just to keep yourself safe, you start to close off any vulnerabilities you see in yourself. You patch them up so the feelings that follow can’t wriggle their way in and burrow inside you.

You feel proud of yourself for cleverly blocking off the hole in your chest. You don’t even mind the emptiness. The emptiness is safe. You care store all sorts of things in the emptiness. Usually some cash-money.

Everything seems to be going okay for a while. You’re lying to yourself, and you know you’re lying to yourself, but you don’t think it matters because everyone lies to themselves.

Material things do a good enough job filling the hole. You’d use something better if you had some idea of what that was, but you don’t. Maybe Jesus could fill the hole for you, but you don’t really trust him after two-thousand years of child crusades and inquisitions. Besides, you’ve visited too many museums to believe the earth is 6000 years old. So instead you just wait…

When you get like this you don’t ever want to leave your bed. You know when they’re this close it’s only a matter of time, so you hide to delay the inevitable. The only way you can manage any interaction is to become a quiet, lonely starchild who loves with the cold distance of a terrible ice demon or human father.

You let it in and the hole is filled. You feel a little less empty, but you can’t help but feel calloused, uncaring. You’re content with yourself but you don’t want anyone to see you. And you let it consume you, fearful of what may someday emerge from the void-egg around you.