To Hell and Back

When fraught with gloom and mental pain, I all alone bemoan my fate, as one who sinks too low again into despair which hurts his state. Disconsolate beyond midnight, I trouble dear God with my cries as I bear this bipolar plight with burning, red, tear-laden eyes. The night is long?—?I am distraught; I long for rest to help forget this sorrow’s trap which has me wrought like passengers in a crashing jet! Inside, I feel the Reaper’s scythe as I think out my suicide: a razor or a kitchen knife, or pills to end this terrible “ride”? Or, like Sylvia Plath, I can shove my head in a gas oven; it’d be painless?—?sure! (But why plan a death so trite and pedestrian?) I think, too, of Virginia Woolf, how she drowned herself in a lake; I, too, feel swallowed in a gulf of swirling despair that could take me to my death! Why do I feel so unloved and alone now? Am I so hopeless? Why do I feel so empty and worthless? How am I to know?—?(that) if I kill myself?—? whether my loved ones won’t miss me? “Don’t do it!” I think: so I will myself to live (as if the saints graced me)! So, I then find solace in this: that family and God do care, and if I had died I would be missed; so I resist the deep despair. And then, Hope comes. And I feel peace… And in the morn, I wake arising?—? Joy breaks in, and I receive new lease. And then my state I cease despising!