this is the glitch

“When they talk about the tortured genius, somebody always brings up Van Gogh— how he swallowed yellow paint because he wanted to put the sunshine inside himself. How his psychosis was probably the result of lead poisoning. They call him a miracle, but what I see is a man who was so sad, he found a beautiful way to kill himself. They say, “it’s awful isn’t it?” They say, “It’s always the talented ones who go before their time.” And me, a nine year old kid who’s always been told they were so talented wonders when I am going to die. We study them in school, the tortured artists. Look at all the poets who killed themselves what would their work have been without their depression? It’s it beautiful, isn’t it sad? As if depression is a parlor trick— pull it out at parties, impress all your friends. As if depression isn’t seeing how long you can go between showers before somebody notices or pizza rolls for dinner three nights in a row and then nothing the night after, because going to the store is an impossibility that you have not yet gathered the courage to conquer. It is the least beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and we call it the mark of an artist to stand in the center of an ocean and see nothing but desert. To be seated at a feast, but still swallowing sand. Depression is the yellow paint, the yellow paint, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT— Art is a coping mechanism. Van Gogh is good because when he had nothing, he had paint. When he was empty, he had paint. When the world was awful, he had paint. When he hated himself, he didn’t hate the paint. He whitewashed over his own masterpieces, because it was never about being famous, it was about doing the one thing that made sense when everything else didn’t. And they say, “without his illness, we never would have gotten all—this.” because they value his art more than his sanity because god forbid you lead a happy life and leave nothing to remember you by.”

(it is no longer possible to be both human and alive):

“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.”

“I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.”

“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”

“Joy is a decision, a really brave one, about how you’re going to respond to life.”

“I couldn’t get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed.”

“Unknowingly, I have been a witness to the gradual wasting away of my life, to the slow shipwreck of everything I ever wanted to be. I can say, with the truth that requires no wreaths to remind it of its own demise, that there is not one thing I have wanted or in which I have even for a moment placed my momentary dream that has not fallen and shattered beneath my window and lain like the dusty remains of a clump of soil fallen from a flowerpot on a balcony high above the street.”

I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

“Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

“More and more frequently the edges of me dissolve and I become a wish to assimilate the world, including you, if possible through the skin like a cool plant’s tricks with oxygen and live by a harmless green burning.”