Glitterland (Spires #1)

by Alexis Hall

Depression simply is. It has no beginning and no end, no boundaries and no world outside itself. It is the first, the last, the only, the alpha and the omega. Memories of better times die upon its desolate shores. Voices drown in its seas. The mind becomes its own prisoner.3

There was little I feared more than happiness, that faithless whore who waited always between madness and emptiness. My moods, when they were not sodden with medication, could turn upon a tarnished penny; happiness was merely something else to lose.

I wished I could sleep. I wished I could stop thinking. But my mind has always been its own enemy.

Shit. Fuck. Wank. I was going to have to leave the house. Interact with people.

I was my own cage. And I hated it. Hated myself.

What use to the sane, after all, were the words of the mad?

“Then we’re all mad here,” I muttered.

He catches my face between his hands, his painted fingernails twinkling like stars, and when he kisses me it feels a bit like fear and tastes a bit like tears, but it’s as bright and sweet as sherbet, and I decide to call it joy.

I closed my eyes, as Icarus must once have done, and was glad to burn.

It was a pure, fathomless pleasure, as rightfully mine as any other, not merely the tatters of a thing other people called happiness, snatched like a thief in the dark. I lost myself and did not fear the finding, for I knew Darian was there, with me, holding me and waiting for me when the light faded.

Tomorrow was waiting. And the day after. And the day after. And then the day after that. Only so many reprieves until my next depression.