Hieroglyphics

I’m writing to you from the deepest point of the ocean, so far down in the terrible icy blue it remains one of the last unexplored regions. You can’t hear me calling from the furthest dungeon in a remote castle in a forgotten land. No one has passed by this place in years. They don’t even know it exists. There is no bird-song, sunset or twilight. Someone has taken down the stars. There’s a tangle of cobwebs where thoughts used to be. I’ve become a ventriloquist’s doll that no one has taken out of the box. Moths are eating my mind. I’m a blank message in a bottle; an S.O.S on an unread telegram from 1910 and lost property that will never be reclaimed. The beautiful paintings have gone from their frames and words in books have become harder to understand than hieroglyphics. I need a translator to get through the day. The nights last forever but sleep plays tricks, as elusive as meaning. I’ve gone awry, amiss and though you may think I am here, the present is past, tomorrow without formula, a meaningful life a script that has been handed to others more worthy, able to keep pace with the directions that I can no longer follow. My road is going the wrong way, far down a track called clinical depression and all who wander here are lost. Sadness is like the rain when you are indoors at night, a delicate sorrowing encapsulating tenderness and loss. Melancholia is the watercolour of emotions or a sweet, poignant song that carries memories like a last dance before the affair ended. Depression however, is the ice breaking underneath you, gradually slipping into the abyss. The websites tell you to reach out to family, the assumption of social collateral when you’re as lonesome as a twig in winter. And there’s no second layer of skin but just the fact that I’ve written this is something of a triumph, a sign on the road that might lead back to where I was supposed to be going.