My Renaissance

I have realised that since emerging from the deepest pit of my depression, I’ve become a walking paradox. The journey’s made me a grown-up child, made me take stock of my life. I write essays on dictatorships and French art movements, then I read ‘What Katy Did’ while brushing my teeth, and think that ‘Kikeri’ actually sounds like a pretty fun game to play, no matter what Aunt Izzie said. I have lustful, unashamed, panting and screaming sex with my legs somewhere up my by ears (making the most of the fact that the people I share the house with aren’t back yet) and then we- I’m not alone in some of my childishness- go rumpled and wobbly-legged into the kitchen and make carrot-cake men in a gingerbread mould. I’m progressing and regressing. Often digressing. But that’s alright; I’m a detective, hunting for fragments of my former self among the material debris of that happy little child-life; I’m awakening from an enchanted sleep, walking around the dusty palace on tiptoe, fortress of familiarity in all that’s new and strange.

The accessories of existence- work, age, holiday- are hurling themselves at me like so many well-meaning grenades; I keep them compact in little lumps of imagination while I live the dreary exam-time before them. Sometimes I sneak them out of my pocket and look at them, as motivation. I’m going to Paris with my boyfriend in the intersemester break, then I’m going to be out of my teens and embark on my twentyhood, and I’ve just been accepted to do a ten-month teaching internship in Berlin, my favourite city in all the world (so far). I keep logging in and out of my emails to check I haven’t dreamed the whole thing. It still stuns me as much as a plague of little green Keats-quoting aliens emerging from a student-sized pile of dirty laundry would. It feels like life has suddenly become enormous, and is spilling out from all sorts of unexpected places; tumbling irrepressibly off of shelves, unfurling in bright banners from newly-opened drawers. This is my life, and I’m back in the driver’s seat because I chose to be, stood staring out at the wintery garden and said, “This year I will be happy.” This is my year, my awakening, my renaissance. Everything has been cold and dark and sleeping under snow for long enough. Now is the growing season- I stretch out and all around me the ice cracks like pistol shots, fissures running right to the melting edge.

Fine, so a little of my cheer may be manufactured. I’m on a new antidepressant. So what? It’s been helping me. Not in the way of a fairweather friend, like the last one, feeding me what I thought was happiness until it galled me like a sugar rush, abandoning me drunken and vulnerable on the darkest ice to sober up and sink into despair’s jet waters; more like a largely-ignored sidekick in an adventure novel. I go my own way, savouring the thrills and narrowly avoiding the spills, and just about remembering to pay my bills, etc., and Monsieur Mirtzapine is there in the background, shadowing his ebullient Holmes like any pleasant Watson, glancing idly at his pocket-watch, twirling his moustache with an indolent air, ready to take my arm should I need support, but never intruding.

My words have been asleep too, during this long dark time, the Great Freeze, my private ice age. Now a key has turned in a hidden lock, and they flow, they float, they fly, taking wing; my fingers do a merry dance.

Like every time, I’m aware that happiness is not a constant. I’ve been the mourner, believing I would never set eyes upon its bright face again- I’ve been the tracker, watching from the corners of my eyes how people found, bought or built their happiness, jealously gleaning all I could from others- now I am not sure what I am. Perhaps I don’t have to hunt it any more.
Maybe, just maybe, I can be the creator.