The world is just too big, today, and it's still growing. I can't get my hands around it, can't yell loud enough too inform some passing stranger, here am I; it's me; I live, because I am just a vapor, and the only real proof of my existence is the slight blur in the space where I stand, and my chemical compounds.

Do you know what I'm doing right this very second? I'm degenerating. I'm falling apart, and nobody can stop it. I'm dying. We all are, but I think I feel it more than most, because I'm trying to deteriorate. At this moment, my eyes are slowly sinking back into my head, the bones of my body crumbling inside the dry husk of soon-to-wrinkle skin that encases them.

It really isn't very healthy to think like this. But these thoughts frequent my brain like a disheveled alcoholic who licks leftover wine from thrown-out bottles of Merlot. They're sucking out anything that could make me delirious enough to think of other things.

A lot of people would probably say that I'm doing this to myself. I'm sucking out my own happiness. I'm making myself sad. It's a cop-out -- I enjoy being bitter and overwhelmed and unhappy and lonely.

Maybe it is. But I don't enjoy it. I don't enjoy lying in bed until over half the day is gone, watching the numbers change on my bedside table, glowing red like the eyes of H.P. Lovecraft's phantoms. The clock is a phantom. It's an object, a device designed by man for his own convenience, and inanimate, but its four-digit eyes hollow me out through my own tired pupils. Every second takes something from me. I'm a little bit less alive in this moment than I was in the last.

And sometimes it's not like this at all. I can get out from under my sheets, no problem. It's better in the summer -- I can take care of my life, one priority at a time. When I go back to school in August, I know it's going to be terrible, though. I'm going to have to balance books and work and sleeping and getting dressed. I don't have enough freaking arms, and too many faces.

I have a really hard time just getting dressed, during the school week. Everything is bigger than me, so what's the point in even getting dressed? I might as well go to school naked. I'm just decaying, anyway; it might be nice to have something to say for myself when I'm looking at my rotting body from heaven.

I want to do something extraordinary, but I can't, because I'm this big. I'm this big, and ten years after I'm dead, my good deeds will be buried someplace far from me. And there isn't enough time to do these things, anyway, and there's too much pressure to be successful.

A cop-out. The biggest fucking cop-out of my entire little existence. My parents think and say it, only out of their concern and hopes for me. I'm such a big disappointment, I have so many different talents that I never use, and depression and anxiety are just cop-outs.

They could be. But they're cop-outs that I can't control. I can't control the fact that I don't own the strength to maintain myself, to build myself up -- rather, only the ability to accelerate my own demise, and watch me spin wildly into oblivion. Watch me explode into the separate parts that compose me. Watch me shrink into myself, catching up to the others who have been blowing themselves apart for fifteen or twenty years.

It's kind of empowering, in a terrible sort of way. The first panic attack I had, I was having a piano recital, fifteen years old, and I crawled outside of myself. I saw myself playing the same four notes, which constituted a lunatic song that would never end if someone didn't jerk me away from it. All at once, I was more than my body, and less than a human being. That's important to know. I had to jerk myself up. I had to grab my own ankles and move me forward, down a church aisle, past my angry mother, who was embarrassed by me because I couldn't finish my asylum song, and not because I was practically having seizures, trying to get out of there.

Trying to get away from that fucking devil piano.

The mother of death.

The sister of heartache.

All of that happened because I couldn't handle a hundred people waiting for me to play. I couldn't handle just one.

Sometimes I still play, when I'm very alone, and very lonely, but it really isn't about the piano. It's about my failure to operate when someone is observing. Expectation equals pressure equals anxiety plus depression. Equals this terrible feeling of simultaneous infinity and decadence. I am limited, but the world extends forever. And I am in the world.

It's too much, sometimes. I get anxious and lonely and depressed. I have a panic attack. I reset myself. I start a new day.

Tomorrow will be a better day. Tomorrow, I will write some very happy bullshit about how I went to the mall with my friends, or ate at a nice restaurant with my coworkers.