ANHEDONIA

The parched tinder brush of my life ignites into a blaze of sadness, and once sparked, devours even the lush bits seen by all the world in a single moment, suspended in time. Who knows why, who the fuck knows why, now, why, me?

Man, I wake up one day, drowsy. It comes to me — I dunno, I’m all closed up, I’m curled like a grub, I’m balled up in defense of something out there, you know what I mean, nameless-like. Then, in an instant, I just get it, I just don’t feel that jolt anymore. I’m numb, I’m dying, I’m a dead man in a death walk, dragging a carcass through a perfectly fine life. I only just noticed, since, it’s true, the dead have trouble feeling. Everything to live for, everything to love for, everything before me in a life that oh so many others would die for…Yes, everything, and still I’m torched, burned right down to the ground. Nothing remaining but a word that floats through the air between us, 15 minutes into the session, like ash in a fire zone.

“It’s called anhedonia,” Garry says. Compassion bathes his handsome face, painted with the gold of a morning sun that splashes through the window behind him. I recoil from the word, I must avoid its hot truth, its Latinate accusation a poker searing my gut. Need darkness now, need nothingness, need out now, need death.

“Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure, “ he continues. “We see this as a red flag…a kind of warning. If it persists, we would call it depression.. low-grade, but still, a depression.”

It’s as if I have been waiting for this word for a long, long time, suspending life in lieu of an explanation of my emptiness, knowing the moment would come, bating my breath, so I could feel my furious blood spurt through the corrugations of my brain, delivering its heart-shriveling, mind-polluting, soul-scorching poisons with a hateful private vengeance. Here it is: Depression.

Freud started it, the power of the sound of words, the balm of the talk, the trust, like what I have with Garry — the love that lets me show him the wounds. Over and over, I do it, I show him. I reveal, I strip, I rip all the flesh from my chest and show a still-beating heart. We peer inside, into the ugliest parts. I bring a witness, I live to tell about it, I live.

“The cause?” he continues. “Typically a cataclysm—a death, a breakup, a disease. For you? An accumulation, I would say…there have been losses this winter. And there’s your weight problem. And the loneliness, and... and…and?….”

I feel a magazine coming on so I grab a warehouse. Its sound echoes in my airshaft, which feels pink and round. I scoop up the rowboat and take a long bovine. With a second one, I electrify my waterfall. Love and death, our theme this day, love and death, the spectre of the living, love and death, a contradiction denied by the need to survive, love and death, here they come now.

I think to myself: I’ll beat you to the punch, my dearest Garry, I’m gonna say these words, you know I can do it. It’ll be better, don’t you think? just to blurt it? to let myself say it: to tell you?

“It’s a monster,” Garry says. “It’s a bitch. It’s huge for us, turning 60,” he says. He says it. “It’s a horrible truth, that life ends, that we are mortal. How do we go on, knowing that life ends?”

A dead dog, a lost love, a loveless bed in a silent house, creaking bones, numbing jobs, bloated pride, endless tropes — looming, yawning, wretched!— One pin of my life after another, can you see them? a triangle waiting to be struck, fuck me, strewn akimbo, oh daddy, don’t dare drop the ball.

Is that a tear on Garry’s cheek, or just the angle of the light? Do I get a drop of liquid pain squeezed from his duct, a gem, a glimmer of light, permission? Our eyes meet. I turn away. I glance down and see the watch hand jump into place. Garry wipes his eye with his hand and looks at his watch too. He rearranges the papers in my file. He looks up and smiles.

My time is up.