What remains of me is an altered self. Subtly altered.

Two years ago today, I tried to die and failed. I was salvaged. If I was a table, they would call me distressed, vintage, shabby chic. If I was a car, they would have said I just had a small dent, just a few scratches. They would have marveled at how a car could have come away from a major crash so close to unscathed.

I’m not unscathed.

Some things are less bearable. I can’t detect a survival instinct, something that would make me want to struggle to get oxygen if I were underwater, something that would make my life flash before my eyes in a dire moment. It might be there, but I can’t sense it any longer. In its place is a low-grade hum, a quiet knowledge that there is unfinished business that will stay unfinished.

Depression takes me straight to the bottom now, and ideation comes walking in freely, like it owns the place, even when lithium is on duty as the bouncer. I am tethered to life but fighting ideation is exhausting. It leaves dents and scratches.

I have a number line in my head that is shaped like a paperclip, and I used to be able to see down the length of it to eighty and ninety, the probable age I will reach, if my life is statistically average. There’s fog there now. I don’t see a future any longer, but I know that fog clears when you reach it and I may only be able to see a short distance ahead, for years and years, at any given time.

Some things are more bearable.

I have lost some kindness. This morning, I realized that we left our deck light on overnight. It’s faulty because I’m the one who installed it and I am not an electrician, and it alternates between ten seconds on, ten seconds off. It’s quite bright. It occurred to me, as I made my coffee and packed my lunch at 5:30 a.m., that it must annoy the fuck out of the neighbors who built their house practically in our back yard last year. And this thought pleased me. I wondered vaguely how much it would add to the electric bill if we left it on every night, on purpose. An LED bulb would take care of that. A cool-colored one, the kind that mimics xenon headlights.

James doesn’t remember what today is, that it’s an anniversary. The wound I administered didn’t fester, and it healed as well as that kind of wound possibly could. My guilt is somewhat mitigated.

I’ve become far more introverted and far less interested in the world. It takes too much energy to live and there isn’t any left over. Self-centered doesn’t even begin to describe it.

My brain uses itself against me; my memory, my objects of great love, my anger, my sensory recall, and even my writing are at times turned into weapons.

I’m a salvage vehicle with a sullied title. I’m scratch-and-dent furniture.

And I am loved. Loved. Loved anyway. Distressed and loved.

It’s incomprehensible that others now see me as priceless. But these days, people make top-dollar furniture out of salvaged wood, the remnants of tobacco barns and century-old decaying structures. They call it reclaimed. Their expert hands give life to what remains.