What Depression Is Really Like

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I’m writing this to give people hope that it’s only when you’ve slid to the bottom of the ocean floor that you can finally see the shore more vividly than everyone else. I’m writing this to let you know that when you think you have nothing, you really have everything ahead of you.

The bleak air swallowed my eyeballs as I stared at nothing. And everything. My thoughts were pregnant with the words, “why won’t it shut off?” My nightmares threw parties during the day, indulging themselves on MY territory. “That’s MY record player you’re spinning!” No matter how much I yelled, they never opened their ears to me.

I wished I could sleep to pass the time so that every second didn’t drag like a millennium’s struggles would. It was like arduously studying for weeks and failing the test; like passing a pearl-studded cross picketed on the side of the road and discovering later that the person whose face had been planted to the pavement was a childhood friend.

Every moment a devastation. It was like rummaging through chest drawers trying to find, find, find! But you don’t know what you were looking for. It was like running like lightening to escape who’s behind you, but you don’t know who you’re running from.

Alone. With only my exhausted heartbeat to accompany my forced breaths. It beat like the sound of dripping water hitting the linoleum flood from the leaked ceiling on a rainy July Thursday.

Death had manipulated me and seduced me with her dry mouth, scented with lumps of blood.

I remember when the knife danced with my wrist with every intention of draining my body of everything. And nothing.