The quality of his penmanship had declined since grade school. By the time he started keeping a journal, the only way he could assure himself he could read what he had written was to print his words in a slow, precise style unsuitable to capturing the flood of ideas that poured from his mind. Still, he tried.
“You try as hard as you can. But, still, it’s not enough. You can’t avoid that damn black hole swallowing you. It’s the inescapable allure of the swamp, sucking you into its seething, bubbling, overpowering muck. You wish and scream and try to awaken from this deadly dream that pulls you in like quicksand. But there it is, that inexorable draw; you have no power but to shout, hoping someone hears. No one does. Your voice is still, silent, caught in a web. Noise cannot escape.”
That evening, sitting alone in his tiny apartment with a dwindling bottle of whiskey for company, he withdrew from the sweet odor of the pipe smoke from the man who lived in the apartment next door and the sounds of the drunks singing outside the tavern on the ground floor below. Though the window was open and the crisp late autumn air called for a sweater, he felt no chill.
Chambers was so distant from the world around him he felt certain he was in another galaxy. His tears were like molten clots of transparent lead, ripping his cheeks with their weight, clinging to his skin like epoxy.
His thoughts were smoke. Billowing and choking, some too thick even to walk through, others thin as a lace curtain. He continued to write in his journal, the leather-bound ruled pages yellowed from time.
“A black void is so much more attractive than this sharp, ugly shredding of a lifetime of hope. Hope is meaningless drivel. Reality spins hope into what it is; steely, cold, and dangerous. Hope is a proxy for reality, years after reality lost its first child to cholera.”
He tipped the bottle to fill his glass, swallowed a mouth full of whiskey, and kept at it.
“I watch and listen and learn of people who have lost their battles with depression in ways that ruin the people they love, the very people who kept them from the abyss for so long. Pain, whether real or imagined, is part of the process of growth and change. So, you soldier on, keeping the worst of it to yourself, and let your chosen outlets speak for you the words you cannot dare use with your own voice. I would not like, nor could long tolerate, someone who writes and feels as I do.”
