The Mind, The Battle and The Fantasy.
An album story about depression.
Samuel Robert Blakeledge
Mind.
I stand at this decrepit and horrid bus stop.
I try to look up at the sky but my mind, my internal vision blocks all sense and hope that I may find joy in its grandeur. Instead I am met by a constant passionless static that screams at me from above.
Turning I see now that small black creature, following me around like some crazed lover. Its eyes red and its fur darker than night, such things I have grown so used to; I am no longer shocked by its appearance.
When the bus pulls into the stop, the sound of gas releasing from its brakes, I slip past the driver trying to be unnoticeable. It’s quite difficult when a lumbering black mass of fur grows in size and weighs half the bus down. All eyes looking at me.
Staring straight ahead, I should be looking at an advertisement for safer travel during a pandemic, but I feel nothing for it. I haven’t left my cave of an apartment for weeks. It has been like this for a while. Such a long while.
My mind however, that is the cave that I reside in. A cave of perpetual darkness and for it, I believe I will never leave.
I still stand at this decrepit bus stop; the black creature says it already left me in the dust.
Soldier.
Hiraeth.
In a small hole within the few months inside, I was granted freedom.
I walk amongst the flowers and the sullen grey pathways of a local park; there I am met with an army. So many men fighting, killing and falling into the soil at which children play.
I look down into my clutched right hand and I do not see a weapon of death, instead I see a prescription bag with the word “Cipramil” wrought on the bleak, societal and inhuman white of its label.
Once more in a long time, I cast my gaze to the sky above and now a flicker of hope is on the horizon. The return to normality, freedom and life pushes me to be amongst the blank, faceless and alien creatures that inhabit this battlefield.
Is it not for me to decide who wins in the end?
The creature who beckons on the miserable hills of old or my own life?
Amongst this, I am greeted by a soldier in white. Nothing more than a mere statue holding up the names of the fallen. I know now that I must take arms against my own mind. I know now that I must return to the cave of my mind and burn it, seal it and never return.
I am now off my medication. The lockdown is nearly over. Life I feel can now begin, again. The bells beckon me from the distance.
I stand at the precipice of a green sea of grass, a wooden fence and a few inches of shrubbery preventing me from running into the wild like a wild dog. I look up once again at the great sky above me and for once, I am grateful, content with the way things are.
Looking into the horizon is a great mountain. I imagine what it would be like to stand on that mountain. Nevertheless, the cave that was once my mind is now under that mountain and standing gloriously on top is a great castle with a sprawling kingdom laid at its stone archways and stern towers.
That is my kingdom. That is the place I know I am eternally happy and one day, one day I will walk its streets. I will talk to its people and they will know me. Not for fame or fortune but for happiness.
Now, the cave is gone, and the kingdom takes its place on top the marble pedestal of my fragile mind.
I laugh you see; the kingdom lays dormant waiting for my embrace and the cave is crushed under its weight, but I do not laugh this.
I laugh because I realise, I was the same distance from the cave as I am now to the kingdom, the true power lies in the control I grant each place, not my entering or leaving of them, neither my yearning for the sickening walls of the cave or the blissful sun-soaked streets of the kingdom, but my willingness to allow them the helm.
I laugh you see; the kingdom is forever out of my reach and the cave will be toiled under its weight. In this, I find I am content.
