Go Figure

So there I was last week in the middle of the blackest broken glass depression I have ever known. Like, lying in bed in the middle of the night howling at the blackness of it all, but silently, so I wouldn't wake up my wife. My inner monologue basically one unbroken litany of you're no good as a writer, you're no good as a husband, you're no good as a man. With extra focus on the tangled mess of my marriage. The tiny voice trying to say that at least some of that wasn't completely true went unheard in the howling hurricane of BLECCHHH.

Then came Sunday morning. My wife said she wanted to go to India Town to replace her wedding ring which she had lost some weeks ago and did I want to come? She has always loved India Town, which is a huge, very active commercial district of Indian restaurants, clothing stores, jewelry stores, grocery stores, etc., about ten miles from us, and she has been trying to get me to go there for years. Bleak as I felt, it didn't seem right to let my wife go off and buy a replacement wedding ring on her own, so I said I'd go, in the afternoon, after I got some work done. (Read: after I stared pointlessly at the screen for a few hours.) When she came home she was getting ready to go into the shower and I was sitting at my desk and I reached up and put my hand on her breast. Now you may know that depression is very hard on the libido and sexual desire was, I thought, the last thing I was feeling, or ever would feel, but for some reason the feeling of her still-clothed breast under my hand sent a hundred octane shot of desire through me that was all the more intense for being completely unexpected. Then she got into the shower and some force--well we know what that force is--picked me up from my chair, took off my clothes and put me in the shower with her and--well--I'll draw the curtain there and leave the rest up to your wildly overactive imaginations. That was good enough. But something else happened. As we emerged from the shower all dripping wet and moony-eyed I realized that the entire cloud of shadow that had been hanging over me and getting darker and darker for weeks had lifted away and vanished like smoke.

And that was only the beginning. We drove out to Artesia, where India Town is, and got off the freeway early so we could drive through neighborhoods we had never seen, and commented and exclaimed at everything, and then got to India Town and went to ten jewelry stores looking for just the perfect ring, and stopped for various amazing Indian snacks every ten feet, and finally found such a beautiful (and cheap!) ring in that super-yellow-glowing Indian gold that I decided to get one to match, and we were hugging and holding hands the whole time and being just ridiculously lovey-dovey. Because we were married on 9/27/81 -- that is, three squared, three cubed, three to the fourth -- our wedding rings were inscribed 3² 3³ 3⁴. On the new rings we had the same inscribed and added + 5², because this year we will have been married for 25 years. Then we went to this great cheap all-you-can-eat Indian buffet place and got big plates of chickpeas and cauliflower and best of all goat stew and sat there over the paper plates and plastic forks and did a little improvised ring-exchanging ceremony, complete with vows. In the picture, the new ring is the one on the bottom.

That was Sunday, and now it's almost Thursday, and the depression has not shown its face since.

Is this just a manifestation of the fact that my self esteem is overly tied up in sex and sexual performance, meaning the high will last only until that shot of confidence has eroded? Is it the start of a new manic phase, as predicted by the Depakote-prescribing shrink I saw last week, that will lead to another crash? Is it the new meds already working? Is it the healing power of sex? Is it love?

Does it matter?