God Sometimes Plays the Devil

It’s not depression.

Depression implies a listless incapacity to summon joy and passion.

It’s more akin to brutal unhappiness.

Like being tethered to a ravenous beast that bites and claws, leaving me alone to lick my wounds, feeling the force resurge in the fast-fleeting interim when the beast’s belly bulges.

For when the beast is sated, the passion is reignited, the potential of purpose, romance and adventure reengages my heart, beseeching my consciousness.

Then the beast turns towards me once more, and my heart is hacked, my mind is masticated, my fears of the future flay me, and my longing for lost life lashes out until I’m knocked to my knees.

How to untie the tether? Cut the cord? Afford myself the possibility of lasting peace? Only love. Love like an apple I’ve only ephemerally held, and once brought to my face, but that's always been hacked from my hand before I can bite.

It’s as if God, wearing the red robes of the Devil, has decreed:

The fruit is forbidden to you, you who’s been made to endure this evil, for to actually savor the fruit demonically-dangled before you wherever you go is to satisfy and soften, and thereby lose thy deprivation-driven will to join forces with the fullest future.