I think I may be smoking too much. And the moment I write this, I think of how I want a cigarette, and now one’s in my mouth. I’ve been chain-smoking for four days, reaching for one whenever I want to mimic interaction with my environment. I can’t clean the dirty dishes, brush off the ash that’s fallen on my bed, find my trash bags to clean my living room floor. But I can slowly fill my apartment with smoke filtered in my lungs.
My remedies to problems have always been the problems I hope to remedy. (Is that the structure of addiction?)

I know three or four types of depression, often as different from one another as classmates with the same name. There’s depression which simply blocks action, like a finger pressing flat a vibrating string. The brain demands a bodily movement, and the signal buzzes, live, from neuron to neuron but dies before it reaches where it needs to go. I can feel action about to happen, my body preparing itself to move— but it’s just a body jumping up and falling back down on the stretcher when electricity is applied to its heart. The body moves but it’s not revived.
Then, there’s a more emotional and dark depression, which has some of the qualities of mania: I’m constantly thinking, and easily return to my old habits of reading and writing. But reading and writing now feels like a defensive gesture. Suddenly the world is unlike me, and I have to protect my personality with the authority of language. People seem vulgar and slow. Sunlight hurts, like my mood’s vulnerabilities have made me photo-sensitive (or, I can easily see: photo-receptive. The trees’ shadows on my arms turn permanent; the side of my face in the sun will now always be brighter).
My reserves are drying, and empathy, usually exapansive, shrinks under the sun into shrewd defensiveness, craggy as a raisin. I haven’t felt defensive (competitive, elitist, so alone) in a long time, and I don’t like myself this way. But, I’m reading and writing again: trying to build a moat with sentences, a palace with paragraphs.