NO FACE [monster]

Closure. Connection. Comprehension. I’m not sure if these are the perfect words for what I want out of myself. They just look safe. They just seem like the type of diction people find in their lives that makes them understand what they’re all about. I’ve hated people for it. Knowing themselves, understanding their limitations and aspirations. I’m not sure how anyone can actually know these things about their life. The world, reality, it constantly flows like some secret river in a haunted cave with a ghoul fishing it. You never really understand it. Chaos appears. Happiness too. They swing back and forth like that pixel-forged pendulum from the intro to Chrono Trigger. This is the nature of our existence.

I guess I just get jealous of other people because they appear to have control. They present this illusion that they have the answer to every question life will throw at them. Usually, it is fear of change that puts people in control. You do not fear the woods because you will never walk in it. You do not fear the mountain because you will never climb it.

You will never understand the demon because you’ll never want to see it.

I work in monsters a lot. They make the more complex emotions in our world more palatable and understandable. You can study how people react to them. You can evaluate the very basic emotions. Fear, love, hope, a monster puts them all in perspective. Nothing makes a human more human than when a devil crawls out of a cave looking for fresh meat. Nothing makes life simpler than a half-metal dragon hunting you through the sky like some phantasmal arrow. This is why I love monsters.

They aren’t a parlor trick. They aren’t a tool for entertainment. They aren’t something to gross you out and make you cower beneath the blankets. I don’t use them to garnish cheap feelings out of you. I’m not trying to make you scared. Monsters are not some sort of game to me.

After all, I have one living inside of me.

If you’re honest to yourself about a mental illness, whether it is anxiety, or in my case depression, you realize you have little to no control over this feeling. You are eternally lost. You are the lost wanderer looking for hope before the end of the world. It is not a welcoming feeling. It makes most people crumble. Some face suicide. I have been there. I have been to the bridge and watched the rocks curve beneath the water like lost sound waves. Some choose withdrawal. They hide from the world behind their children and family, until the outside has changed so much they can’t relate to it. Others hide behind crappy jobs, other people’s expectations, or a culture’s own hypocritical view of life. You then take out this pain of non-being on the people around you. Another action I’m very guilty of committing.

So what to do with the unseen force? How do you accept that you’ll never be cured of sadness, anxiety, or any of the inherent chemical disfigurements of your brain’s colliding gray matter? Are you cursed? Has god forsaken you like in a Greek myth? Are you tied eternally to a rock with an eagle prying out your liver?

No.

The answer is better than you think. Accepting the chaotic nature in yourself is to realize the lack of control in the universe around you. Instead of focusing on trying to cure an incurable ailment, you should adjust your lens to the parts of your life you have control over. For me, it is the creation of monsters. This is by far my favorite past-time, my interest in media, and now my profession. Instead of trying to conquer my depression, I apply monsters to it so I can understand it easier. I focus on what I’m good at.

Sometimes, when the house is quiet and empty, I close my eyes and look into my mind for my depression. I don’t find anything at first. Then I give it some air. A fog wraps around the room. The mist is black and inky, like I was trapped in some stormy gem atop a mad king’s scepter. I don’t blink. I don’t fall asleep. I don’t move a single atom of my body. It simply rises up out of the floor. An undead serpent rising in a sea of tombstones. A dragon rising up from its golden hoard.

It has no real form. Just a hood pulled tight around it’s shoulders. There is a gap of darkness where its face would be. The abyss could both murder you and raise the dead. It rivals the void you’d see spinning at the center of a black hole, yet, it is the shape of a man. The shape of me.

That’s all I get.

And more importantly that’s all I want. A complete and utter answer to my depression will never be said. A remedy or cure isn’t possible. I cannot mask, change, morph, or cloak my disease like a flaw in a painting. All I can do is give it a shape without a face. All I can do is make monsters so that sometimes I can understand myself. I can comprehend the sadness that powers me like a lost reactor on some abandoned planet. A metaphor will do, because the truth will never be there. It is lost in the chemical composition of my brain.

I will never see my monster’s face.