melancholia.

Now Playing: Come Into My Head by Kimbra (you don't speak my language, you don't read my signs)

I spent the last two and a half days in a state of extremely depressing melancholia. The details of this I described here, but I...didn't really elaborate on how it affected me. I've been depressed before but before now it had always been a) largely unprovoked and completely unexplainable or b) caused by problems that had viable solutions. But that feeling that everything that is making you miserable has no end, has no solutions, that nothing you do or anyone else can do will make you feel better...it was really horrible. The past two days were some of the roughest of my life.

Walking around the most beautiful university campus in the country with your shoulders hunched and unable to look anyone in the eye and constantly fighting back tears is...is really hard and it reminded me exactly why, when I was younger, I just didn't do people. I spent a lot of time alone because...because I thought that made me happier, that pondering the world was a better use of my time than pondering the vanities and schemes of people. But I have been in the company of people for too long - between me and who I once was is a heart full of memories of being a friend, a sister, a lover and it makes my current loneliness harder and ever more painful.

And it is with people that people accuse me of being insincere. Perhaps when someone is totally alone, completely ostracised, it is hard to accuse them of the shallow frivolity that so plagues our society. Children...children have no secrets, but I am no child anymore - last year people made very sure of that. But with secrets come distortions and people see relationships as the world's greatest operas - for everyone to mock and exploit. And perhaps in my own shyness, my inability to speak in the trauma of the present that makes me silent, my total ineptness at sufficiently convincing others that I feel as all people feel, people are afraid, and try to cut me down, and to cut down the few precious souls I have who could ever claim to understand me - or if understanding is too great a thing to ask of people, then love. When people have gone to such extaordinary pains to make me alone it seems they cannot bear to see me in the arms of what little love I can inspire out of so few people.

For all of its faults and for all the pain we have caused each other my high school chums are family - and not in the romantic sense; we are a hard, cold, brutal family. We hate and love in equal measure, we have no shortage of venom and scandal, genuine affection and deceitful betrayal virtually indistinguishable from one another. And we don't know everybody as we should; we know some too well and some not at all and that is the reality of family, is it not? So don't hold that against me.

It is not my fault that, for the past year, there has been one friend who is always there when I break down. Sometimes we are the cause of each other's pain; sometimes we are just there for each other as friends ought to be - I think the rest of you have forgotten that that it is what it means to be friends. High school society demands transparency; there are no secrets, everyone knows everything and everyone is at liberty to judge anyone. But I had thought, somewhere between the chaos of graduation gowns and certificates, we had left such pettiness behind, that we were ready to dabble in the world of adult relationships, adult friendships, adult love - and adulthood cannot be nearly so transparent, if only because it is simply too hard and too meaningless to pry into the private lives of everyone. There are many things you do not understand, my dear high school chums, and I am one of them. If you do not care for me at all, that is fine; rest assured I do not care at all for you. But don't persecute those who show me a little love, especially if you own them for a friend. Because, I think, if you do...one of us will end up friendless and that person will not be me.