Category Archives: music

You get to the point with the depres­sion where there’s a lift, almost a lurch in your stom­ach like when the air­plane you’re fly­ing in stut­ters off of the ground, and then, there, you feel like you’re more than no longer Earth­bound but no longer sub­ter­ranean any­more– you feel like Daedalus, flap­ping toward cruis­ing alti­tude, myth­i­cal and there­fore invin­ci­ble again, espe­cially since you built the wings from painstak­ing scratch– or at least able to keep your eyes on the hori­zon and not just on the ground.

Except you’re not in a plane, that sleek steel and land­ing gear there to pro­tect you from the thin air, or you’ve for­got­ten not to fly too close to the sun, or maybe your wing mus­cles are just out of shape and you stut­ter back to the ground and you return hard and fast toward the Earth, arms and legs and wings flail­ing as you try to brace yourself.

It’s not the fall that kills you. It might be the crash, the shock of it enough to make every­thing black. It might be the dis­ap­point­ment after you roll over from hit­ting the ground a lit­tle bit hard, and look­ing up to see just how far away the sky really still is, because the thought of hav­ing lifted off and not made it once is enough to make you think I’m sick of falling, stay­ing here is just easier.

I had a good job inter­view, the man­ager is going to call my ref­er­ences, and we’ll see what we’ll see. But a good pro­duc­tive week and a half was fol­lowed by yesterday’s sad­ness and feel­ings of bro­ken pin­ions and fatigued flight mus­cles in light of my best friend’s upcom­ing wed­ding this week­end and all the plan­ning and prep I haven’t been able to help her with despite the fact that I promised. But we’ll go to the wed­ding, despite my urge to ostrich my head again and admit my wings are just ves­tiges of an Ideal I’m not going to reach. And I’ll call the ther­a­pists whose names my shrink gave me this morn­ing, when she told me she was proud of me for the lit­tle I’ve done, and uttered her pro­fes­sional opin­ion that things could be worse and that I’d work through this.

The YouTube clip isn’t a non-sequitur, it’s just my other favorite band (viva Cake for­ever and ever) and while this isn’t my favorite song of theirs, it’s a “nice” encap­su­la­tion of the depres­sive mindset.

I’m feel­ing a bit like Icarus now. I’ll get over it. You, my dears, though– you’re gor­geous in your (metaphor­i­cal) evening gown(s).