I'm sitting here in my basement office, the tools of my trade ergonomically arranged on shelves and hooks for maximum productivity, and I can't work. I'm supposed to be working on the rewrite of a script but I can't focus enough to read it, much less make improvements. The tears that I never manage to cry are damned up behind my eyes, the ache is heavy like a lead blanket across my shoulders and chest, and it's all I can think about. The implosion of me.

All I can do is this. Writing more or less anonymously about my directionless, self-indulgent, completely irrational depression. I can do this because it requires no imagination. No projection of myself into the mind of an imaginary hero, villain, or hapless victim of my carefully constructed mouse traps. There's just no room in here for them today.

But I have to work. It's how I cope. It is, more precisely, how I avoid feeling this way.

And when I can't work my black mood swells and pulses like an open wound and my hatred for myself and the world that never wanted me bulges, ready to explode through the drywall and windows and tear through the streets with the surreal spectacle of a fire truck speeding off the edge of a cliff.

I want to roast marshmallows on the flaming wreckage when it lands. I want to thumb my nose at anything resembling a God. I want to make the stars fall and the oceans boil.

But the truth is, I can't do anything. I can't even write and I need to be able to work so I don't return to the same mental health online forum three times in the same day because I just can't write today.

And I have so many regrets about today. There were points. Moments. Where I could have gotten so much of this work out of the way and now I'd be reassuring myself with earlier accomplishments.

But no. I painted myself into a corner in the basement, staring at the screen, hating myself for the obsessive self-centered thoughts that I can't cut through with an arbitrary deadline.

I want to scream but, ya know, I'd wake the kids.

Cyran0