"The taste of dried up hopes in my mouth"

I guess I was pre-emptive in celebrating the brevity of my usual October/November slump, as it's back with a vengeance. Maybe I'd over-analysed it and it's just the changing seasons getting me down, though this year I feel unusually eager for winter to come. 

I sleep fitfully at night, and wake feeling tired and heavy. In my office I sit at my computer with the curtains drawn and the lights off and tears streaming down my face, frightened and confused by this inexplicable, all-consuming sadness. I sit alone until 5.30, not eating, not seeing nor talking to anyone. I drive home in the dark. Often the thing I want most is to take some sleeping pills and fall into the warm, dark winds of sleep and dream that I'm not lost. I imagine sleeping for days and days - days and days worth of cell turnover and renewal until I finally wake up and I've become someone else. Instead I make dinner, make conversation with A and our friend who's staying with us for a while.  A drifts between being bewildered by this thing and exasperated by it; between dismissing it as an affectation and trying to fix it. Sometimes there are moments of buoyancy; bright little glimmers of laughter and light that pierce the fog with a straight, narrow beam.