The Depressed Cockroach

I used to have it so good. Then I lost a leg. For months, I walked around, dragging my shell like a flat tire. I thought that was the end. I became reclusive, spoke to nobody. Life took on this heavy and jagged texture that felt like a new, worse kind of heartburn. Or maybe it was regular heartburn, just more severe.

All of the problems of my youth that had once seemed so fixable and unserious transmogrified into huge, weeping, miserable shadows that terrorized my every move.

And I had aged. On top of everything, I had aged. My formerly cool, hard exterior was now soft and weak. Of course, I knew it had happened over a long stretch of time, but the final reality of it seemed to settle in overnight. One day, I woke up to a complete and total self-loathing. I avoided mirrors. I stayed indoors. I slept all day. I was a failure, a loser—not even the right number of legs.

Then the leg grew back.

I thought that would fix everything—it’s always “that next thing.” And it did. For a few weeks, it did. I ventured into new apartments. I got a younger girlfriend. I lost weight without even trying. I felt light, free.

Then, not long after, the emotional pain reared its head, just like before, this time with an additional layer of self-referential disgust.

The very idea of my emotional pain became its own kind of burden. Every roach I knew dealt with the same problems, varying only in shades and flavors, amounting to nothing more than a vague, unwavering discomfort with being alive. Most seemed better at managing it, but I knew many were just too ashamed to disclose how bad things really were.

It bored me to even think about my suffering and still, I thought about it all the time.

One afternoon, in a rancid, derelict apartment that smelled like rotisserie chicken and old hiking shoes, I ate a mushroom off a tie dye tapestry and began to feel quite strange. I was compelled to walk down to the waterfront, which I hadn’t done since I was a kid.

The ocean was glimmering—infinite and prophetic. Everything around me liquified, expanded, and became more vivid. And here I was, just a bug in a puddle.

For a while, I sat there, watching the waves crash. I began to feel a sense of inner calm that I’d never before experienced. My own insignificance moved me. Then, suddenly, the feeling of peacefulness seemed to glitch, get corrupted and begin to consume itself, recycling the same thoughts I’d had moments ago through a more venomous, realistic system of filtration.

The world had betrayed me. The world, the beautiful world—so hauntingly beautiful—except for me, the cockroach. The hideous, dirty, cockroach. Unanimously loathed; a vermin. And somehow my existence seemed to debase even the worst of my own vile species. It was not some great evil that I had done, but the lack of it. I’d done nothing, made nothing, had never really sunk my mandibles into the marrow. I took the path of least resistance and I was fine with it all. The first half of my life had been so brief, and yet, I only felt burdened by how much longer I had left. How many more days would I have to fill, just passing time, waiting to die?

I watched the sun slide down the sky like runny yolk. I wondered if I’d been a crab in another life. I hoped that I had, or if I hadn’t, that I’d be one in the next. People seemed to respond to them with a more complicated kind of fear. A humor and awe; a sense of respect.

For me, it had always been the same old disgust.