oh i have found the underwater cave where my love is

i get depressed, sometimes (often) — sometimes it is ice, but sometimes it is cold black water, a quick and turbulent river at head height against whose flow i must hold my position if i am to do anything at all

it is effort, tremendous effort to write an e-mail, read a book, make music of any kind in any way. and i can push against it sometimes, do the things that absolutely need doing lest my life come apart at the seams, but sometimes it's easier to stop fighting,...

...to let the current take me, and flow out with it down broad channels and unknown meanders out and out into the depths of the sea, let the waters fold over my head and take me, down to where it is quiet and still

and there is a cave down there that i wind up in sometimes, drifting insensate with the abyssal currents, the weight of the water all around me, there is a cave down there and it is full of light. anglerfish, cnidaria, glowworms, squid — creatures that science has no name for,...

...but all emitting ripples, cascades, pinpricks of light

and the light is love: impersonal, directionless, unbearable in its beautiful intensity. (this is what i mean when i say i am queer.) it's a love that doesn't need anything, want anything, expect anything. it just is

it isn't even a love *for* anything, really, or maybe it's the opposite of that, maybe it's a love for everything, equally, without discrimination. it floods me, overwhelms me, consumes me, demanding nothing, but holding each moment suspended in infinite precious fragility

it's too much, much too much for me to bear, but it's not there for me any more than a sunset is. it's not there for anyone. it's just there, a blunt, stochastic fact of the world: that there is so much love in it, in every second that slips thru us to be lost forever in the past

and i dissolve in it, i unbecome — i unbecome me, and become the water, the rocks, the earth. and i see all my friends — up, up, safe on the dry land — i see them all as from a passing wind, and then this love begins to need, begins to need desperately, in fact:

it needs to tell each of them how much they are loved. "do you know? can you feel it? from the trees, the buildings, the streets, the air: you are putting good into the world even if you do not see it. you are so so infinitely precious. you are so past-speaking loved

"do you know this? do you know? it is very important that you know"

and this desperation, this need to shout, to make doubly sure that things already known are really actually known for triply sure, feels so rooted in precarity,...

...in a sense that this is the last chance i will have to speak, to act, to communicate anything at all, and i want to be sure, with my final vibration, before i slip thru the cracks and fall out of the world, become the echo of the memory of a forgotten thing,...

...that at least i will have conveyed one message of import, at least one vital truth; i want to be sure i leave with a blessing:

"i bless you with the blessing of water and stone, ocean and chasm; with the blessing of tree and fire, cloud and sky, i bless you. i bless you with the blessing of orbit and atom; i bless you with the blessing of soil and fungus; i bless you with the blessing of fish and fowl

"with the blessing of star and mountain, moon and glacier i bless you. with the blessing of years and seasons, harvests and bounties i bless you. with the blessing of tides and berries and grasses and flowers i bless you:

"live, and be well, and make better this beautiful world. you are precious. you are loved. you cannot be replaced"

and this is where i remind you that i am Mentally Ill and that i Know i am mentally ill and that my mental illness Dials Up the intensity of this experience A Lot

and so i don't just barge into my friends' DMs and drop this on them b/c Holy Shit that would be Way Too Intense, Like, Can You Even Imagine? (tbh even writing this out in this thread feels dicey!) one or two very close friends have helped me thru these paralyzing ecstasies...

...but in general i do my best to keep them to myself. not because i don't love my friends — i do, with every fiber of my little queer heart — but because i would like to, you know, keep having friends and not make them all wildly uncomfortable...

...with Inappropriate and Kind Of Creepy hyperbolic mental illness outbursts

and normally that's all fine, but sometimes i do wind up in a cave at the bottom of the ocean pinned in place by the dizzying impossibility of the intensity of the feeling

and, you know, whatever. the waters will recede. i will walk on land again. my brain's been pulling this exact same bullshit for over a decade at this point, i am getting better all the time at Handling It, but one of the Shiny New Ways i'm working on handling it is by...

...maybe actually acknowledging what's going on from time to time instead of just joking, repressing, or dissociating from it, so here we are. i am made of electrical fire but i am slowly coming to ground. i'll be ok

i'll be ok

i'll be ok