If honesty is what writing is about, though, then there is no other way to re-enter this blog but to tell the truth. My absence has been largely due to the fact that over the last few weeks, I've been suffering relatively badly from what I have called - since very young childhood - an episode of The Blacks. For me, it always feels like there is a thin, pale grey smoke running through the middle of me and out into my toes and fingertips, and a lot of the time it's almost backlit and shiny: a little like the dry ice in Stars In Their Eyes. Which is great: when it's like that, I feel fantastic. I can write. I can go to the pub. I can steal the remote control and fight over Scrubs versus Simpsons (Scrubs, obviously). Sometimes it darkens, like bad weather, and goes a little darker in colour, and a little denser, and then I might go to bed a little early, or snap a few more times for a few less reasons, or decide that my hair is crap and probably always will be. But, again, I can still function. Which is - you could say - all you really need to do in life: just get on with it.
Very occasionally, though, the smoke in the middle of me turns into something else. It peels away from my fingertips and toes, and shrinks back - a kind of smoggy implosion - and turns into something hard and black in the middle of my chest. And, then, when it gets really bad, it'll become spiky as well, and I can actually feel it: pointing out like a dark star in the centre of me. Which - as you can imagine - hurts. A lot. So much so that nothing else matters, and everything becomes slightly irrelevant, because everything - and I mean everything - comes second to it. Job. Boyfriend. Family. Food. Laughing. The only thing that doesn't come second to it is sleeping, because that's the only way to escape it.
I've had The Blacks since I was very tiny: I remember one when I was about six or seven years old, which is probably when I dubbed it with such an unimaginative name (Holly Golightly called it The Mean Reds, which sounds far friendlier). So I know when it's coming, now. I know the symptoms. The first thing to go is my sense of humour: both appreciation of, and ability to tell, witty anecdotes. I find that I'm not laughing when I should be; in fact, I'm not laughing at all. Second is a sense of perspective: I start to feel very distant, as if I'm in a big glass case and I can't really see or hear or understand the rest of the world properly, and they can't really see or hear me. Thirdly, I try to imagine what could make me happy again - black cherry cake, for instance, or love - and the only thing I can think of is: my bed.
The things is: everyone can see it. No matter how hard I try, no matter how genuinely I try to laugh at a sitcom, or engage in somebody's conversation, I'm not really there and people can tell. And the more they ask me if you're okay, the more I want to go to bed.
It doesn't last forever, of course: nothing does. Inevitably, sooner or later - sooner, usually, especially now that I am better equipped to deal with it (it used to terrify me as a child) - I wake up one morning, and it's gone. It can be a few days, it can be a few weeks. For one terrifying period, it was nearly four months, and it almost killed me. But I always, always come out the other end absolutely unscathed: The Blacks disperse again into a light mist, and I can see again. I can write again, drink beer again, love again, try and switch over to Scrubs when The Simpsons is on. Which is all I really want from life, of course: to just get on with it.
The fog hasn't quite lifted yet. It's still a dark grey, and I still feel numb and detached: as if the thread that ties me to the world is thin and stretched out. But - in being honest, and forcing myself to write again - I'm hoping that it might be a way back. I'm hoping that - in opening the curtains - it might just be a way of letting a little light back in again.
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