I am so, so sorry. I am sorry that I cannot help you.  I’m sorry that I’m finally choosing to share my world with the world I live in. It’s dark. And it’s quiet. I am hollow, because being full is overwhelming. I have rarely felt a powerful emotion in the last six months, and when I do, it’s almost always sorrow. I am sorrowful. Full of sorrow.

I am full of blood. Bad blood. So I cut my wrists and bite my tongue and what pours out is a mess of booze, tobacco, and THC and it lands on my keyboard and you have this amalgamation of broken sentences. But this is my life, my depression, my hyperactive brain finally breaking out of sleepless nights and ghoulish days of daze where I, as the zombie I pretend to be, tell you “I’m fine,”

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I AM NOT FINE.

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I have spent a majority of my life as an avid reader, an explorer of words. I spent thousands of dollars to study words, their power, and their uselessness. In all my studying, speaking and living, I have never learned the meaning of a particular phrase, “at ease.”

I have never been at ease.

At ease? At ease with what?! The fact that my wife truly loves me? That my parents believe in me and Jensen looks up to me? Sure, I have some hope, love and strength. I love so many things, and so many people.

Here’s a nifty list of those wonderful, gracious things that I do not deserve.

I love my tiny cat, and the wife that raises her, and video games, and long hair, and Jensen, and trees, and music, and the smell of warm rain in Alabama, and the way my friend Bryce looks at me when I tell him that I’m mentally unstable and always one step from fucking ending it all but then he looks at me and cries and tells me that I can’t do that.

I love muscle cars and the sound they make when they are tuned correctly, and red meat, and the ferocious clicks my keyboard is making right now because I strike swift and hard, like a ninja, which I also love, like how I love Scott, and Maya and new pens and the way I think I look in my head, and naps, and my wife, and my friends, who maybe love me the way that I love the gift of free thinking and opinions and sun tans and beer and bread, even though those things will kill me.

But I cannot enjoy those things, maybe because of the chemical imbalance in my head, maybe because I do not understand what love means, but more likely it’s because the things I love are so heavily overshadowed by the things that I despise.

This is my world. A world where a soldier is going to most certainly die for a cause I do not believe in and leave behind a son who loves playing soccer but has no dad sitting in the stands cheering him on. A world where I can’t call my grandpa more than once a month because what the fuck am I doing? There is a child who wants to dance, or play music, or do math, and someone will tell her no. There are countless hungry people that will die because food and water don’t fall from the sky while I work in a fancy restaurant with people who regularly eat multiple times a day. A lost dog. A kitten in the pound.

There is a 21 year old, just like all my friends who are maturing and figuring out life and experiencing the world, who doesn’t want to get fucked right now, but is getting fucked right now while I FUCKING TYPE ON A KEYBOARD THAT MY WIFE BOUGHT ME BECAUSE SHE HAS A NICE JOB.

There is a high schooler out there, who tweets twice in one day, the first “It’s cold” and the second “I’m sorry” and they found him dead that night. And I know that happens because it happened and I didn’t see the tweets!

The world is shit. There is no god of this city looking out for us. There is no kind matriarch pushing us in the right direction and there sure is hell not a president with our best interests in mind.

My brain is like a radio, constantly blaring, and I want it to stop, so I drink, and I smoke, and I read, and I drink more, and it almost helps. This is what is constantly playing in my brain while I work out, and fuck, and swim on sunny days when no one else has a care in the world. I am not that lucky. I am not at ease.