A Poem to My Depression
The first time I remember meeting you
was in my mother’s eyes.
I didn’t know your name then.
I just knew you’d given her permanent frown lines.
Time never erased you from her life.
It erased her from mine.
My entire bloodline is contaminated with you,
including me.
In reality, I’ve lost so many people
that the cemetery has left the light on for me
and put out a welcome mat.
I’m not sure anymore who it’s waiting for.
A Motel 6 for the dead.
You are sinister.
You lead me to believe the fallacy that
I’m fine
is the right answer to any inquiry about my well-being,
because the truth is too much, and too overwhelming for
people desperately avoiding their own emotions.
You are waking up on the wrong side of the bed every day, wondering if a right side even exists.
I’ve hidden under the covers so long, praying a new day would change things,
but that same side of the bed waits for me
every morning.
It’s always wrong, no matter how hard I try to make it right.
And I do try.
I still rarely shower.
Scouring my skin takes more willpower than I can muster, and who is there left to impress?
I have a closet full of nice clothes, and I’ve worn the same T-shirt for a week.
My mouth is dirty.
My teeth feel furry
because I don’t care about them either.
What’s the point, when I never smile?
I can see the frown lines getting deeper on my own face now.
My mother’s scowl staring back at me in the mirror.
Your ugly cousin, anxiety, is the only one who ever visits.
I don’t care how I look for her either.
She took my most precious gift.
Peace.
Even in the quiet, it’s gone.
My mind is louder now, imposing its thoughts on me like a verdict.
You steal hours.
Every day is Groundhog Day.
It’s always winter.
You make my soul cold.
I feel powerless.
My life unmanageable
against the racing thoughts
of
who,
what,
where,
and what if.
That feeling in the pit of my belly is a constant fall off a cliff into nothing.
I keep asking God where my sanity went.
Did it ever really exist?
Somewhere in that wide expanse between anxiety and peace is where forgiveness lives,
and I have yet to visit there.
I am tired.
I am lonely.
I am angry.
I am sad.
Excavate me.
Pull my skin back from my bones.
There you’ll find the ones that broke when you left me alone.
Abandonment doesn’t let brokenness heal the way it should.
It leaves scars unknown until they sabotage a life from the inside.
You are sadness in a straitjacket,
confining emotions that were meant to be felt,
writhing beneath the locks of an impossible escape.
Muzzled like Hannibal,
wanting to devour the words I can’t speak,
because anxiety chokes them down before they ever reach my lips.
My stomach is an ocean of painful poems,
burning with everything I’m dying to throw up.
My brain laughs at my attempts to discover meaning in my world.
It knows I’m the same little girl,
curled anxiously into a ball of fear,
waiting for the sky to fall into my lap
and crush the dreams I dared to dream just yesterday.
You always remind me
I never follow through anyway.
I feel numb.
The irony of that isn’t lost on me.
Numb,
and still I hear the loud crack of my back
breaking under the weight of this sadness
I’ve been carrying,
finally pushed
to my knees
where I stay frozen in prayer.
My tears become waves so thick
I can no longer find air.
This foreign feeling swaddles me in discomfort,
blanketed in shame.
It sings to me.
It taunts me.
It knows me by name.
Sorrow found me
in the mirror today.
Grief is waiting
for me tomorrow.
Yesterday
I mourned the past.
But it’s faith that tells me
peace has to be somewhere up ahead,
waiting to follow.