Read an Excerpt
Daybreak already: the sun’s brazen rays pierce the curtain and caress the walls as if they were soft. I catch their tenderness, día tras día, on full display, as my barely open eyes declares war on the world, starting with the concrete ceiling. The battle will be a hard one, I tell myself, la lucha será. La lucha is shipping out to the front lying down, muzzled, la garganta llena de polvo, throat full of tangling tongues, words on repeat, día tras día, like a square looming over the eyes, la garganta llena de yesterday’s phrases, simple, incomplete, the battle will be. The rays reach me rough, overbearing. The ceiling, triumphant: every day, every morning, the world has me.
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TO WRITE ESSAYS NOT ONLY ABOUT DEPRESSION but first and foremost about a process of research and creation in order to avoid recounting the depressive episode and the months-long leave of absence — depression is a trip that can’t be recounted without calling up memories, impressions, reflections, theories, sciences and works one by one; the story of the hurt then turns into study, chronicle, analysis, inquiry, notebooks, journal, fragments. Depression quietly metamorphoses in front of you, by you, into a hybrid and malleable thing outside of yourself, a thing you move, paragraph by paragraph, alongside everything you can conjure up so that the past, the experiences, and the ideas converse. Without these conversations, memory, so splintered by the shockwaves of depression, remains mute. Trauma memory has no narration. Stories always take place in time. And depressive time is a time that fails like language fails you, like words fail you. It’s not altogether possible, then, to recount depression (I don’t discuss it much with those I’m close to because, among other reasons, the feeling of inexactitude that accompanies such discussions is unbearable — I always think that’s not quite it, I’m making things up here, I’m obscuring things there), that is, to align the different times the depression has isolated to make a single one, that of the story. Better to make visible the borders, the ruptures, the divides between excruciatingly fragmented times, along with the efforts deployed to give them meaning and distance without denying, without dissapearing, the suffering they provoke. To do it in the construction — you could call it fiction: pictures, poems, stories, essays.
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I wordlessly bang my head on the frame, I lose count, se me olvidan las palabras — my syntax fails me like sleep. So I attempt a bit of light. At the window, I place my reflection beneath the floodlights, but the same darkness crops up before me: the night outside, my sunken eyes, my opaque body. So I attempt a bit of clarity: with the tip of my finger on the pane of glass, I draw out my outline, go over the edge a bit. It makes up new streams and a new path, an ersatz of night, of endless promises for words and images for tomorrow. I tremble at the thought of it, with an ailing joy that’ll keep me awake for hours; it’s terror and ecstasy, this convulsive delight leading me to the end of the road — ¿noche enterna o madrugada? I attempt a bit of hope, I say let’s see tomorrow if the battle will be.
