It doesn't ask you for the truth, it doesn't ask for anything; it just takes over like a suffocating wet canvas draped over a form that appears ready to become a corpse; drowning in its own fear, lost in its own mis-comprehension of virtue, of faith, of the line between good and evil. It just takes hold as it tries to sweep the life out from under you and there is nothing you can do about it, even if it was self-created in the first place. It shadows your every moment, movement of the day, haunting you as you take a rare trip into the sunshine because the water needs to be turned off at the mains, because the leaking toilet cistern is adding to your nightmare. And you make your way back into your place of recluse through weeds that have grown taller than you; not through neglect, but because you are just not there lost in no-truth, with the truth of depression. It calls out to you when you think of the time you are losing with the only one who matters; a daughter, not even ten; eyes pleading up at you, "c'mon" she says and the guilt tries to rise but can't make it through the numbness. It disturbs you in your sleep, wakes you from the ghosts in a nightmare, lets you cry into your pillow; that silent partner that you fantasise as real, that holds you back giving you the smallest relief, making you hang on to the smallest weave fraying from the fabric of something they call madness, which for you is very real, and yet not true. It twists you into knots, makes you ponder the meaning of words like, nihilism, despair, craving, longing and love and death. Yet in the numbness there is also strange clarity; you see it mostly in the evil you've spent a lifetime denying. You rope yourself out of the hole, look around hoping to see a smile, a kind hand ready to drag you out, but you see nothing because in this state, even help is not true. Instead you read the actions of the encounters perceived through words of humans, they preach of ways that are the only way, like the evangelistic lie that there is only one answer, and that if you just did it this way then everything would be alright, like there was something wrong with you - and only you, not them - in the first place. And you want them to understand, you want them to accept you the way you are, but they won't because they think there is something wrong with you. They tell you once you're fixed you will be okay - love yourself or love will never come to you; like everyone who ever came to know love already had themselves perfectly composed or they could not possibly have received this gift, this miracle that is supposedly reserved for the "together." And you cry at the evil in the world because you forgotten how to turn the tap of tears into joy, because someone tried to save you again by telling you that you are naive to think of the world as beautiful. And you want to crawl back into the womb before realising that this is where you already are, you can still smell it, it's on your skin; the amniotic salve that has you floating in the only state you know that can save you - because you don't want to die just yet. You want to love, you want to wander into your garden, chop those weeds, feed your child, smile at the sunrise. You want to live. And so you wake one day and begin to pray; you don't know who you are praying to but you pray. You say please don't make it end, please lift the canvas, I'm suffocating but I want to live. I don't want love, I don't want shelter, I don't want money, I don't want anything. I just want no one to ever go through what I am feeling, and, I want to witness that. I want to live. And slowly the life comes back to you with each prayer till one night you wake with tears and realise that it has been six weeks since you last felt any torturous saddening. The choke in the stomach has gone, the grip on your throat has been released, you've asked for it to go but the truth is that you've given it away, you given away everything. You've even given up self pity. You wake, and you walk into the sunshine.