surface

We went on a date yesterday, partly to make someone else cook for us, and partly to distract me from the difficulty of transitioning antidepressants. Again. There's a dangerous vulnerability in allowing too much time for thinking in between meds. There's a fine line between my thoughts and the depressed thoughts. My thoughts are the ones that know it'll be okay, that I'm fine, I'm fine, it just takes a little while to adjust to these things. But the depressed thoughts tell me it's not the medicine; it's you, you're the problem. I have to defend myself, so I seek out the most upbeat, silly things I can. I'm glad that there are shows like Futurama that are ridiculous, witty, and hilarious the entire way through. I'm protected. I'm safe.

On the way to pick up some food, we listened to Greg Laswell, an artist we hadn't heard for a while, since we hadn't updated our iPod for so long. While listening, I had this strange moment where the whole world lit up with energy and color. I simultaneously felt like I had never heard music before, yet remembered exactly how his music used to make me feel. I remembered the weak brown of his guitar mixed with a blur of color in Take Everything; the lush dark blues and purples sweeping softly through Take A Bow with the twinkling pinpricks of white. But the fullness of the music caught me off guard, as if I had been half-mindedly listening to it play, muffled, from an adjacent room, and a door had suddenly been opened.

Sometimes I have these moments that pull me above the surface and I remember. Like the unexpected parting of dark clouds in a storm, letting the warm light stream through. A sun shower. It's still raining; the ground is still wet. But I stare up at the sky in wonder as the raindrops hit my cheeks, and I feel like I've never seen anything so amazing or beautiful. Rain and sun at the same time.

Moments when I surface, moments when I remember and see and feel with sharpness and clarity, they are what gently pull me toward the future. A future of filling my house with the sound of my voice in song. A future of walking outside in the sunshine and seeing the colors and smiling, because I feel my body and spirit in harmony, neither my thoughts nor my body imprisoning me. A future of feeling like myself with all the energy of my soul, from my head to my toes.

A future of breaking free of the surface and staying.