The Specter of Depression

There you are. I thought you’d gone forever this time.

You’re so familiar. Oddly comfortable for something that is shaped like despair, a consistency like clay mud and the sensation of millions of threads of fiberglass embedded just beneath my skin. It says so much that I find you comfortable.

I don’t want you here anymore, yet I don’t know who I am without you.

Each time you leave I tear down an identity that doesn’t make sense without you, only to have to rebuild it when you return. You are the voice in my ear, the hand at my throat and the vacancy in my heart.

You’re pieces of me. Pieces that swallow me whole.

You’re everything I’m not, all that I am and everything I don’t want to be all at the same time. The last of a family that I didn’t want in a home where I never belonged. You drag it all with you, everywhere you go. The bodies of the past piled at your feet, staring into a sky they can’t see.

You’re the feathers of the bird, and you’re the cage that holds her.

We fight and we struggle, battle after battle. A bloody warpath that only we can see. We fight for territory, for majority, for takeover. For a body, for a mind, for a life. But now it is only ego that keeps me fighting.

There you are. I thought you’d gone forever this time. But I’m so tired.