Thanks for the responses so far. However, I still cannot shake this mood. It is now affecting my relationship with my wife and co-workers. I apologize in advance for the following, as it is quite long. Perhaps there is another place I should post this, but I cannot think of another place to put it.
Be warned: it is long and full of self pity. I wrote it the other day, trying to put my feelings down. Didn't help any, but maybe someone will read it and see something useful.
"How do you reconstruct your life when you think it has shattered yet you cannot pinpoint when it fell apart? The usual joys you had no longer even amuse you in the slightest. The smile you give your children is false, the words you say to your wife feel like lies, the face you look at in the mirror no longer looks back at you but glares back, accusingly. You can feel the threads of madness seeping in. Reflexes are shot. You drop things, forget things, try to recall exactly what the hell it was that you were doing.
Then things have to have a certain pattern. Like soap dispensers in the mens room. There are five on the counter, and they all have to be turned so that they point in the same direction. However, fixing the position of the dispensers can only be done an odd number of times a day. One to three times, never ending on an odd number(say, two, or four).
And then there is the rage, boiling just under the surface. It does not take much to make it all boil over. Then you wind up screaming, punching or pounding, your heart racing as the focus of your rage does whatever it was doing when it pissed you off to start with. Whether it is a wife complaining, another driver driving away, a child crying, whatever.
The pressure of everything pushing down on you. You can feel the weight of everything, not on your shoulders, as the poets would have you think, but on the top of your head. It makes you feel shorter, squishes you down.
The smile you give your children is false, because you cannot locate the happiness inside anymore. Its like you woke one morning and it was gone, left you in the middle of the night like a pet dog. You may be proud of their accomplishments, but it does not matter to you. What does any of it matter?
The words you tell your wife feel like lies because you have trouble saying anything with outright conviction. You may not be lying, but the words all feel strange, as if placed there in your mouth when you were not looking. Perhaps by the happiness that left you, one last prank before it skedaddled. The only time you say anything that feels right is when you actually do lie to her; when she asks how you are, or if you will be okay, and you answer yes, Ill be fine. That lie sounds right coming out, no matter how wrong you know the answer to be.
The face in the mirror is accusing you of the past. Every mistake, every person you ever hurt, they live there, in that mirror, contorting the face you see there into a mask of hatred.
You fix the soap dispensers, not because you know something horrible will happen if you dont, but you dont want to know the consequences of not making sure they are aligned perfectly. What is the penalty? Better to never know.
You are not suicidal, but you do not know how quickly you would move to get out of the way of a drunk driver.
Everything that mattered before no longer does. The morning cigarette, food, your favorite TV shows, people, family, a good book, a bad movie. The purpose behind it all is lost now.
Everything is on your mind, except the one thing you always blamed all of your failures and problems on, that one son-of-a-bitch that screwed up your childhood and thus affected you as an adult. For some reason, that one fricking thing eludes you, does not even come into your thoughts. It is not a welcome reprieve, because somehow everything feels worse.
You know there was something there before, but you do not know where you put it. You dont know how it broke or how to put all the pieces together again. You can see the pieces, but they are all from different puzzles. They dont fit together anymore. And you cant look at the cover to the box to see how the pieces connect because the box is there, but the cover is not.
The destruction is quite evident, but the weapon that caused it is not. What do you do? Where do you go? It is only the automatic things that you can now do successfully. Things that take no thought, no large amount of concentration.
Where is the cover to the box? Why does it matter?"
