I look closely at my father, and I can see it. He is... heavy. I should have recognized it before. Depression. I know it, from both sides. I am his son, after all. Long slow breaths, pauses, a tendancy to look away, and that feeling, like your head is wrapped with gauze. The whole world filters through in slow motion. Dim, muffled, grey, worthless. Worthless. Without value. Lorri says he slept all day yesterday and most of the day today. I know that too. The only means of escape from that endless expanse of grey worthlessness. It is like hiding your face in your hands. You look away, not from the things themselves, but from the gauze which separates you and them. You close your eyes, your mind, to hide from that dank, rotting film that has chosen to parasitize you. Stinking grey vision and stale, useless air. You might be angry if it weren't all so worthless. If I could take the thinnest, most delicate knife, and slice the gauze from my father's face, I would. There is no such magic knife though, and I must sneak to inch the slightest bit of worth through this, like sneaking cigarettes into a prison. I cannot simply explode with stupid, blatant joy, some damn idiot love-crazed over this land of no worth. To act as such would be a disrespect for his feelings, for his suffering. Value must enter gradually. The slow blade penetrates the shield. I work gradually, summoning up all the memories of my own misery, to align myself with my father. We watch television, the stronghold of worthlessness if ever there was one. I comment, and periodically, a faint expression sneaks through onto my father's face. It is not joy, by any means, but it is something not-depression. I can offer him only this. Tiny cracks in the wall, but it is a begining, it is something.