Suicidal Dances

Happiness comes and goes, but never stays for long/ Just has time for a laugh or maybe a song// When joy comes knocking it has to go away/ There's no place in my heart for joy to stay// I look for love but it's something I never find/ it's scared away by the darkness in my mind// I'll never get joy to stay Lord knows how hard I've tried/ Soon my sorrow will be too big to hide// How I wish I could end all my misery/ but I'm afraid that's all that's left of me// That song came out of a severe depressive episode. I didn't intend to write a song, but the first two sentences I wrote happened to rhyme so I thought to myself that I should make a song out of it. I wrote it while I waited for someone to come on the internet's suicide hotline to chat with me, because my depression was so deep that I felt I had to reach out, so I listened to the blues (Muddy Waters, then Freddy King) and chatted and it seemed to help. It all started when a bill was $50 more than I expected, which I wouldn't usually want to kill myself over, but then I had that feeling. There's really no explaining it to anyone who never felt that, but when the counsellor asked me "Is there nothing to live for?" I answered "There's me to live for, and the world, and all the people who ever helped me." I couldn't ever kill myself, though I might feel like I should. After all the crap I've gone through, it would be wrong not to at least try to be rewarded for all my agony. So will the pain ever end? Do I clutch at brief pleasures like a man reaching for flotsam on an endless, raging sea?

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