This Is What Depression Feels Like

By

A fault, a wedge
a widening gap
between connection
and reality –
what mental illness feels like.
Senseless disorder
apathetic action
melancholic happiness,
feigned.

What is real is distant,
what is feeling is disconnect,
what is home is an unrecognizable place.
Unattainable,
always within reach
and perpetually out of grasp.

Fragmented glass reflects
an altered image
much like perceiving one
outside of the self;

Satisfaction, humbleness, gratitude, self-worth–
A smokescreen
beneath,
a body, a mind
sometimes separate
sometimes equal.

Like a drop of water disappearing among
indecipherable molecules
the same way rain accumulates in puddles–
one gathers, the other disperses.

What is connection, what is meaning,
What is relevance, groundedness
when a void exists in the space between your ears,
your chest
your lungs.

A puddle fills the wedge between the cliff the same way nerves
make connections between hemispheres —
but sometimes,
they don’t.