despair

I thought today was going pretty well - I actually got out of bed when my alarm went off, meaning I got to work at 9.15am, then I discovered that the soul-sucking heinousness of pipetting was mostly a result of the stupid pipette I've been using and happily used a different one to do twice as many plates as yesterday, marvelling each time at the ease with which the disposable parts attached and detached. The winter solstice party was today too, so I had cookies for lunch and I posted my second last batch of presents and cards home.
doesn't take much to tip me back to despair, though. Perhaps it was one of my housemates talking about a slack grad student who only comes in 3 days a week and is constantly surfing the internet and another responding that she thought a slack grad student was someone who only works 5 days a week or maybe it's the usual stuck feelings that come around right before I have an 8am therapy appointment...
I reread Neil Gaiman's "15 Portraits of Despair" from Endless Nights last night (Despair is one of the seven immortal Endless from the Sandman series). When I went to a book signing for the book this is from, he said he'd been planning to do something like 25 portraits, but he didn't want people killing themselves after reading it. He read the portraits aloud and when I read them now I still hear his intonation and my heart breaks yet again for the characters. When I went looking for them online to post examples, I was dismayed by the callous wikipedia descriptions, in particular one "about an unemployed man who's feeding cats, only to have them all die on him when he goes on an extended leave for work." Whoever wrote that can't have been visited by Despair themselves, I think. It's not the fact that the cats "die on him", it's that the proliferation of cats and their needs is slowly weighing him down, and then when someone, as a favour, finds him a job that may be his last chance of a life, the only way he can leave is to convince himself they'll be fine, all the while knowing that they won't be.
Maybe I shouldn't be reading them while I feel like I'm living in a portrait of Despair (one where a huge part of the despair is that there is nothing really wrong with my life), but recognising the feeling is somewhat comforting and it's just so perfectly captured.

1.

Her eyes are grey.

Her hair is straggly and wet.

Her fingers are stubby.

The nails are chewed and broken.

Her teeth are crooked, jagged things.

Her sigil is the hooked ring.

One day her hook will catch your heart.

Describing her, we articulate what she is and why she is: when hope is past, she is there.

She is in a thousand thousand waiting rooms and empty streets, in grey comcrete buildings and anonymous hotels.

She is on the other side of every mirror.

When the eyes that look back at you know you too well, and no longer care for what they see, they are her eyes.

She stands and waits, and in her posture the pain no longer tells you to live, and in her presence joy is unimaginable.

3.

She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy.

She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper.

Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else.

Eventually it begins to get dark.

14.

She had waited until her husband and children were far away, and had driven into the snowy woods, and ended it. Just let it all go.

She had wanted the pain to stop. The heart-hurt. She slept her way into death, only waking when the Highway Patrol found her body.

She was cold, rigid, frozen, when they found her.

Someone like that, said the patrolwoman. You'd think she'd have everything to live for.

She tried to speak, to tell them that that was what made the pain unbearable but, like someone caught in a bad dream, she could not make herself heard. She screamed and no sound came out. She watched as they took her body away.

She sat by the side of the road, in the snow, all bodiless and afraid, waiting for the happiness to start.