triggers and holidays (are more or less the same thing)

I always get really down around the holidays. Any major holiday, or my birthday. I don’t know the exact reason behind it, but I’ve established that holidays most definitely trigger depression. My mood declined really fast just after I got back from Florida, and it’s stayed that way since.

Mostly I’ve been distracting myself since I realized it. Trying to go out with my family, writing, cooking, anything at all. It works, but the moment I get a second to myself, everything settles back on me like it never left. That’s always been a problem for me (idle hands are the devil’s tools?).
Just something I was thinking about. Oh, and also a snippet of something that I wrote, vaguely inspired by “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” though you wouldn’t know from reading it. My mind works in mysterious ways, apparently.

–

I had a leaky faucet. It wasn’t something that honestly bothered me, per se, but it was a bit eerie, like hearing something both unpleasant and familiar. Pity that the plumber couldn’t seem to do a damn thing about it.

“I’m telling you! The damn thing’s broken, and no amount of your tinkering is going to fix that!” I felt my face heat with frustration. The man just kept scratching his head, as if trying to claw out whatever the solution was. From where I stood, it just made him look unclean and lice-ridden. “Now, are you quite done?”

“Sir,” the man sounded weary—as if it were my fault that he kept fucking it all up!—as he stood, legs shaking, “I’ve done everything that can be done for it. I think the pipe is faulty.”

“The pipe is not faulty!” I hissed back. “Don’t blame your deficiencies on my pipes!” The plumber’s eyes were shooting from my face to the door, filled with trepidation. I was angry, hysterically so, and all over a leaky pipe. But there was something behind that feeling, a niggling sensation in the back of my mind, pushing me to boiling. It was a heady, powerful feeling, and it felt normal. I can’t say how or why, but there was something almost comforting and familiar about that sort of rage.

Of course, then the plumber had to go and ruin my good mood—why yes, I do consider that a pleasant mood—and blow up his own head.

Really.

His own damn head.

I was yelling louder than I would normally dare to and with each word I spoke, a part of his face began to swell. It was bizarre, and god knows that it should have been terrifying, but watching his eyes bug out like balloons inflating and his ears swell like a tire float seemed to goad me on. His pores swelled fast and tiny rivulets of blood would occasionally break through the skin and trickle down his neck into his hideous, sweat-drenched collar. And then, as though there was simply no more room for anything to swell a single bit more, his head just exploded and coated my kitchen walls. As his body hit the ground with a solid thud, all I could do was blink. Stranger things have happened in the past, and I was fully willing to let this one go.

But then my landlady walked in, took one look at the decapitated corpse of the plumber, and promptly burst into flames.

It all went downhill from there.

–

Advertisement