The Aftermath
Math seems to me to, in my sense here at least, to refer to a disaster. Look it up and it appears to be an olden word for a tragic event - a "mowing"!
After means after.
So, I live in the aftermath of what was not an event for me. Perhaps, considering my miniscule lifespan though, it was an event, my existence is just a blink after all. For me, it was an age, half of my possible life span. Half a life for me is just an universal event - or an instant. Perhaps a universal non-event - what does it mean to the wider reality anyway? Half a life of depression.
None of this is to say that I didn't have a good time. Far from it, I've had a great time, so much fun and games, but that demonstrates the problem in itself. I've had great jobs, girlfriends, money to spend, freedom, mobility, an insane blast with my friends. I have had a ludicrously good time, it has just been punctuated with intermissions of darkness. Indeed, continually overshadowed by that darkness, always looming there, if I stopped to look over my shoulder. I have had half a life of despair, with frequent episodes of joy. That's the definition of the problem for me - I have had a great life, pretty much all the positive ingredients were in there - and then at the end of the day (and at uninvited visitations during the day), I have wanted to end it all. Suddenly, it is hell and there's no reason to go on, the strength to avoid literally crashing to the ground is almost impossible to find.
When there's everything to live for and you still want to die, then there's a problem. Oddly, a problem that the sufferer can struggle to see. Isn't that absolutely mad? Insanity, literally a form of insanity. Some might take exception to me calling it a form of madness, but I don't have difficulty with describing myself as a bit mad - I think it's a true enough assessment. Have a great day at work, then get home and want to die. Have a night out with the girlfriend, or an evening of alcohol with friends and the get home and want to die. That can't be 100% sane.
And then, to feel that all the time. In every blink, in every instant that the outside world does not grab your attention. In every space possible, to feel the fact that even if you don't feel it now, then you soon will. If not suicidal now, then soon you will be.
I know for some, this is a living hell. For those who've never felt this way (good for them), it's probably unimaginable and then simultaneously a form of hell. For me, in the worst moments, it was hell too, but then, in those in-between moments when it was not hell. Then I looked toward the hell. And I found it somehow comforting, a sort of refuge, a perverse dark corner to which I would frequently retreat and look toward whenever I was not distracted. It was a cell and a hide-out. Madness. A brand of mental sickness, no doubt in my mind.
And do you think the madness is over with? Do I think I am over it? No, not yet, not ever. I know I will never be over it, but I do believe that I am out of the battlefield. Not out of the woods though, I feel I'll spend the rest of my time ambling through the dark of the forest toward the sun-drenched plains, forever moving on, with the undergrowth continually diminishing, but never wholly departing. It'll never be over with.
I really doubt the words of those that shout from the treetops of how "over it" they are. Of course, we all differ, but I don't think for anyone, that the past is ever completely "got over".