It was these:
"And soon enough he's laughing at Phil's utter lack of rhythm. Phil tells him to shut up, which of course makes him lose his place in the song, and Dan just keeps chuckling. Because this is the truth of depression: it doesn't stop you laughing. It doesn't stop you smiling. It just stops you laughing whole-heartedly, truly feeling happy. Laughter is physical; depression is mental. The one is brief, the other becomes your constant. And it tugs at you, nags you: this laughter doesn't last, it tells you. Laughter never lasts."
(closest anything's ever come to describing how I feel).
"And the last thing: I'm not being fair to you. Everything you do for me, listening to these existential spiels, distracting me, waiting for me... I feel so selfish, making you do all that. And arrogant, like I believe that all my petty problems are worth hearing, and that I'm worth waiting for."
(How I feel about my friends, when I worry how long they can last before they give up on me)
"I should be crying, Dan thinks.
He doesn’t."
(A harsh reality)
“I get what you said, now, about acting yourself,” Phil says. “How do you do that?”
Dan shrugs. “Had to. Got used to doing it at uni. Just haven’t done it to you before. Not like that.” He frowns. “Was it really that weird? I mean, you’ve seen me doing videos.”
“Yeah, but that was for the camera,” says Phil. “Yesterday, it was for PJ, and he didn’t have a clue. And I just... I don’t know if I would’ve known, if I hadn’t...”
“I’m a fucking good actor,” Dan says, his voice flat. He sighs. “I think you’d’ve guessed. I hope you’d’ve guessed. We spend too much time together. And... I don’t feel it, you know? I can smile and laugh and all that shit, but I don’t feel the emotions that are supposed to go with it. So it’s sort of like pasting the appropriate expression on your face, like picking out faces from your list of available smiles.”
“All the time?” Phil asks quietly, and Dan knows what he’s thinking. He’s thinking of all the times that Dan’s been smiling around him over the past month or two, all the times Dan has laughed with him, at him, and wondering if it was all a lie.
“Not- not entirely,” he hedges.
“But mostly.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
(This is what happens. What I've learned to do).
Something catches in Dan’s throat, and he realises that for the first time in months, in years, he is crying.
He’s not sad. Well, he is, but it’s not that. He’s sad, and he’s angry, and he’s awed, and he’s so in love. It’s just overwhelming, a sudden surge of emotion like a floodlight in a darkened room. He’s overflowing with it, on fire with it, completely suffused with it.
He cannot remember feeling like this before.
And he’s crying, he’s crying so hard. There are hot tears running down his face and probably dripping onto Phil’s shirt, and his breath keeps catching in his throat, like he’s struggling towards something, be that proper respiration or his own death by asphyxiation - it doesn’t much matter, because it’s release either way. He’s clinging onto Phil, his fingernails probably digging into Phil’s forearms, and Phil’s telling him shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay, but it’s not, and perhaps that’s the point: for months, he’s never gone above okay, he’s never felt anything more than okay - he’s felt worse, less, but never better or more - but now... Oh, this is so much more than okay. This is devastation and ecstasy, all wrapped into one. This is... this is being set free. This is...
It won’t last. But this is feeling alive.
(I don't even know how to say what I feel about this).
and then I'm in class, trying to hold it together, because I just felt my own depression bitchslap me in the face. I imagine it in slow motion, some anime protagonist hitting me upside the head and me falling back in slow motion.
I stopped working and just put my head down on my desk and listened to music
I didn't want to move. But I had to, and then I'm home and lying on my bed curled into a ball with my face mashed into the mattress and I don't know what to do. I want to cry.
I didn't.
I teared up a bit, not nothing would come out properly.
I went downstairs and made myself hot chocolate. (Hot milk with three spoons of nutilla stirred in).
I have work I need to be doing. Due tomorrow. Math. But I'm just sitting here.
Dammit.
