Depression is a strange state of emotion.
It’s all consuming, controlling, devastating.
It hides under sheets and in between floor board cracks.
In places so bright no one would guess to look.
You can’t stare it straight on, like looking at the sun.
It’s just too intense.
Depression plays two roles; the prison and the keeper.
A prison made up of freezing stone.
A keeper dangling you on strings of hope.
You can sit in there and cry and starve and beg, but
the puppeteer still tugs on your marionette strings and
gives you just enough life to pass the test.
And your trapped their until something miraculous happens.
You starve enough, die enough to slip through the bars of your cage,
and your free. You relish in this weightlessness, marvel at your
escape until the weight comes back, and oh baby you can bet it will.
Pounds and pounds of emotional stress and tragedy and catastrophe
that line your veins and collect in disgusting colonies within your heart.
And you start to think, well the cage wasn’t that bad. . .
Wasn’t too cold. . .
Until your right back where you were started, with strings
tied to your limbs and needles sewn through your heart.
Except the status had changed, the cage has shrunk and
you didn’t know until it was too late. But yet again you prevail,
feel the ecstasy of tasting your newly granted life. You jump
with enough energy to convince them that nothing is, or ever was, wrong.
But you know the next part you silly goose! Oh yes, those walls
you made out of Play Dough and hope? Well they can’t stand the
hurricane and you flee to your storm cellar. You forget that the
last time you were here these cold stone walls tricked you.
Conned you into entering this optical illusion.
Of course you don’t remember, you never have. Quickly you discover
that, oh lordy, the cage has shrunk again! But you don’t get it.
You. Just. Don’t.
And this sickening cycle just keeps replicating over and over.
Lather, rinse and repeat.
Until the cage gets so small, and your so tightly packed,
that a contortionist would be jealous. This time there is no
amount of weight that can be lost, no friend to be gained, no
antidote to swallow that can save you from eating yourself alive.
The bones crunch and the skin shrivels until everything dissolves
into dust. Dust the wind blows away carelessly, not considerate of
which boy or girl it has just washed away. It’s just doing its job,
clearing out the cage for the next occupant, and you can bet your
life that there will be one.
There always is.
