this post is depressing

I have the next four hours blocked out to sit in a coffee shop to do my own work. To read and write on my dissertation, to drink coffee, and to not lesson plan or respond to student e-mails, etc. These four hours are a gift, but I am having trouble feeling that. Outside it is wet and gray and the atmosphere feels thick and heavy. I feel down, I feel weighed down.

My partner woke me up around one this morning, hugging me in tears, after waking up from a dream that he had lost me. Not just that he had lost me but that I had been murdered and the dream seemed to last for weeks, he tells me after awhile of holding each other in that early pre-dawn haze. We are both, I think, remembering to be amazed by each other's being here, by waking up to find that we are both still here.

We've talked about the reality of someday losing each other, not frequently, but we have thought and talked about it, usually with lots of tears. I know that depression changes for many of us our relationship to our own lives. I understood this better when coming out of my deepest period of depression. I think I was maybe more at peace with death then than now. Because I had spent so much time deciding the decision to continue living over and over, I could somehow see the possibility of death as a blessing. I no longer understand this truth as fully, and it is strange to remember crying so much about life and death for such different reasons.

I suppose that is a pretty obvious part of why I feel down today. The other part is that two unremarkable things happened this morning to remind me that outside our home, I feel fairly alone. I feel disconnected from the people in my life, in overt and in subtle ways. I have felt like this for awhile now, and I sometimes feel like I am not really here, like I died along time ago and am now just going through the motions, like a zombie. I know that this is probably another kind of depression, which v confirms. I just don't really know completely the way out of it. How to find my way back to my own body, to feel attached to, connected to, invested in, the life of this woman who is typing on a keyboard, tugging at her sleeves, pausing to lean on her fist, staring alternatively at the screen and out the window.

I feel the heaviness in my chest, and I smell the coffee coming out of my pores, so I know I must still be here. I cry when my partner and I talk about dying, so I know that I must still feel things. I don't remember if the heaviness was in my chest when I woke up this morning. I know the heaviness is not always here or it would not be remarkable. I know that I did not feel like this two days ago or the day before that but I remember feeling it around yesterday afternoon when I revisited the facebook page of someone who died in June.

This morning in the shower I ask my partner how I died, in his dream. And he says that someone shot me at  Bed, Beth, and Beyond. Like most real things, it is so strange and unusual and mundane and ordinary that I can see why it upset him so much.