For Those Who Don’t Understand Depression

By

I know you are trying, circling me like I am encased in a ring of fire, and all you want to do is come and save me, but you don’t want to get burned. I know that if you could make the pain go away, if you could make it all make sense, you would. And I know that you don’t understand, but that you try, that you understand at least that their really is honestly nothing you can do to fix me. All you can do is bandage me up and smile.

To me, though, it’s really quite simple. Depression is my abusive relationship. It will always come around again and hug me like a knife, kiss me like a grenade, lay in bed with me at night and encircle it’s cold hands like a corpse into mine and whisper to me that I’m worthless, taunt me until sleep seems trivial, torture me until food seems nauseating.

You may be there, with your arms actually around mine, your hands, warm like the sun, around mine, whispering you love me before you slip to sleep, but that doesn’t change anything. There is something about it, something about depression, that I can never leave behind.

For it will always be jealous of my relationships, my love and my friendships, it will always see them as a threat to the outright attention that it gets, and so it will always come track them down and alienate me from them, sweep them out of my life like crumbs on a kitchen floor.

Scoop me up in it’s arms that smell of rot and take me home.

I go without complaint, because like it or not, some things are forever. This is forever, this is something I can never leave behind, something I know nothing outside of, something that tears me apart because you can never have quite as much fun when you don’t want to have fun.

So when you see me, hunched in the corner, watching the fun, I’m really not asking to be included, I’m really not wallowing in insecurities. This has so little to do with insecurities. It has so much more to do with nature. It feels unnatural, maybe, to you, but to me, sadness is as automatic as breathing, oddly cathartic.

I will follow depression back home to my bed, let it hug me like a knife and kiss me like a grenade and encircle it’s cold hands like a corpse into mine and whisper to me that I’m worthless, taunt me until sleep seems trivial, torture me until food seems nauseating.

Doesn’t anyone understand that an ingredient of love, is hate?

I will go to a party, I will go out to eat, I will find a shred of happiness that is entirely independent of it, but it will not want me to be there, and how can I want to be there if it doesn’t want me to? So along it will come, take me into it’s arms and take me to the stars in a Ferris wheel.

It will fail to mention that we will come back down again, but I will remember the high. You ask why I love it, you ask why I stay.

It’s not love that keeps me coming around again like a boomerang, for love is not quite strong enough to pull us into something that we hate so keenly. That we resent so much. Love could not do that.

This is something a lot more powerful than that. I’m not quite sure what there is outside of sadness sometimes, I’m not quite sure what there is to this world, I’m not quite sure that this world will want me back when I find a way out of this fog.

But more importantly, as hard as I try, there will never quite be a way out. There will be little snippets of time when the sun shines through, and maybe I’ll make it for miles in that sunshine, maybe for a while you’ll see the light return to my eyes, a smile to my face, you’ll see me include myself and be myself, and you’ll think that the fog has cleared.

They’ve broken up, it’s okay now.

It’ll come around again, though. It’ll come around again and hug me like a knife and kiss me like a grenade and encircle it’s cold hands like a corpse into mine and whisper in my ear that I’m worthless, taunt me until sleep seems trivial, torture me until food seems nauseating.

I’m not okay with this, this isn’t love, it’s just reality. Sometimes thats the best we can do.

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