Gravestone

Depression convinced the world it wasn’t real.

And that’s why, even after all this time with it, it terrifies me.

Because people around you don’t truly see it until it’s a gravestone staring up at them.

I didn’t realize how deeply these words would hit me until I read them over again.

People don’t like to talk about depression and suicidal thoughts.

Because it’s depressing and it’s sad and who wants to listen to someone who just brings them down?

But it’s time to talk about this before you’re saying false words of kindness over a casket and bringing flowers to a grave of someone you couldn’t even look in the eye.

Those who haven’t experienced it will never truly be able to understand until they see the raw reality in front of their eyes, or feel it themselves.

And some will still never understand.

To see someone break, fall apart, rip themselves to shreds from the inside out as they scream and beg and pray for someone, something, anything to take the unbelievably excruciating pain away from them, it isn’t something you forget easily.

To watch as someone begins to lose the will to live, the will to go on. To see the light leave them and they make the revelation that they no longer want to be alive.

That they no longer want to exist.

It’s a deep slope that we fall down quickly.

We never see it coming until we wake up one day and wish with everything in us that we hadn’t.

I remember very clearly, the day that I made the statement out loud for the first time.

I was walking to class one morning, on the phone with my mother, and I finally said it out loud.

“It isn’t that I want to die,” I had said quietly, defeatedly. “But, if life feels like this, I don’t want to be alive either.”

Those words terrified my mother.

And looking back, they terrify me. Because I still think them sometimes.

My mother has stared at the face of depression, she does it every time she looks at me.

She sees it in my eyes when she looks at me, and hears it in my voice when we talk on the phone.

It terrifies her.

Because she knows.

She’s watched me fall apart slowly over the years.

She sat in the uncomfortable chair in the hospital room when I was admitted for suicidal ideations.

She saw as I laid on the too-small-bed, curled into a fetal position, crying and begging someone to take the pain away.

She wished she could take it away, but knew she couldn’t.

My mother doesn’t understand what it’s like to feel it, but she understands what it’s like to see it.

And it terrifies her.

Because she hears my words, she hears when I say I wish I didn’t exist.

And she knows that, in that moment, I truly mean it.

And she fears the thought of seeing a gravestone with my name on it.