Good Grief 320

I write this on Saturday morning.
Another week done. I even managed to get caught up on the backlog in my cell yesterday.
I had some unexpected time to catch up and plugged myself into Bach and persevered. There was a flash of light that seared in momentarily. I realised how little I understood of the world and struggled to know the difference, genuinely, between electric light and bright natural sunlight. Light and energy. A sudden momentary realisation of shocking ignorance but what I noticed, and what I felt, was that lightening bolt in the darkness that blazed through like a comet on a mission to elsewhere.

After work I went to the pictures with my friend, her husband and one of her daughter's that's back home for a bit. We had a quick drink afterwards and the music and sky sports stuff was deafening. My propensity for alienation is fertile enough.

It is always there but it had confronted me again earlier in the week when I had gone back to the office at my old base and my friend and another good friend were both there. As we were chatting in the kitchen making a brew I realised I hadn't really seen anyone outside of work for about two weeks and then it had been to an evening talk with my friend and before that I wasn't sure how long it was. I gave them both a hug. But the distance is huge.

As I parted from the pictures last night, it is a real 'damned if you do, damned if you don't'.

Going back to my thoughts of the whole DSM thing, diagnostics and treatment, it is a very real conundrum. Socially and politically it is very much in the mix as with Jo Cox Foundation, Silverline, etc. Much of the work of CBT would be on getting active and re-engaging, which all makes perfect sense at one level.

I'm not here, in this place, though, to go into my head with that. It is to to try and stick with what it's like.

By the time I was in the car, and then home, and in the bath, and closing my eyes to sleep, I was crying. 'Damned' ... easier not to ... better alone. Seeing people comes with such a toll I'm not sure it's worth it. I can pootle alone pretty well. Deeply learnt and embedded in childhood.

The loss of the loved is too high a price. It is too much. Too painful. Too enduring.

And afterwards, after the realisation, there is the visitation.
The darkness that pervades.

There's a book and YouTube clip of The Black Dog.
It's too friendly.
It is the black holes of the universe made manifest in our internal galaxies.
The sunless place. The place of no light or energy, or only dark energy. Sound (back to the hearing thing) distorted, muffled, and then lost. Consuming.
The dark blotting ink spot spreading across the page.