Fiction: Waking up as a Depressed Person

What I had to discover first was that my life was going to a series of disappointments. People you looked up to, ideals, things you thought in childhood: they go away. That’s when the real bottom falls out. You tumble and halt and then fall again. There are false bottoms everywhere.

I’m laying in my bed in the morning. It’s a typical scene. I read my phone before I get the energy to get up and face the lousy realization that it’s another Tuesday in my life and I have to work a 9-5 job that has nothing to do with with anything except for helping this depressing globe turn around. That’s the case for all of us.  You are a little bit more dead inside each day because of it. I try to keep myself alive with this phone checking. The people on the other end of my texts are real. They have interests. They have families they care about and are passionate about things I’ve long given up on like pets and aesthetics and the Minnesota Vikings.

I like being alone in the morning. I lay diagonally to take up the whole bed. There are girls in my life I wish were here, but in reality I’m glad they aren’t. I like my space. It’s some kind of flaw in the universe that I can’t bring myself to care enough about anyone despite the passing interest I have in them. I know they deserve more, I can picture it in my head. But who am I? Not the person the fates have plucked out of the woodwork to do that job.

When I work I act like the person I feel like I am. I work alone. There’s like, people around me and some team verbage thrown around by my boss but I’m driving my own vehicle at this point.  People treat me like an adult here, they don’t ask me about my family, they don’t inquire about all the things I will not share with them. Work and I, we get each other.

There are things I would tell you, if I could take a break from living like this. It takes a lot of effort to speak clearly. To cut away at the superlatives, superfluous and discern your meaning. My meaning. Our meaning. We don’t get a happy ending, we don’t get to ride off into the sunset. We fall before it’s our time.

We get to narrate our lives however we wish, though. This is our coping mechanism. This is what we get.