6.28.2023 - S.A.D.

6.28.2023
S.A.D.

When you hear the word depression,
We both know the picture your mind paints.
Awash in midnight blues and the deepest hues,
With the steady overcast sky reining above,
Weeping with us, tears and rain flowing as one.
And yes, sometimes it is that simple.
Occasionally luck is with us and we can cite and source,
Pick our saboteurs from the line and work it out.
Named and known there are actions to take,
“Have an extra nap with the seasons.”
“Be kind and show self-love and self-care.”
“Drink enough water to sweep away the cobwebs,
Or have we tried a walk in the fresh air?”
Easy to use and implement,
Grass is cheap and free to touch.
All too often those simple clues evade our pauses for reflection.
I don't know why I woke up hollow one morning,
With a void where my passion and purpose once dwelt.
Can they call it Seasonal Affective Disorder,
If the sun is shining and the birds bask in hot still vapor?
The world a riot of green growth and red dust,
The lazy days stretching their long legs into tomorrow,
Into next week, all the way to August.
The tasks that eluded me in busier months,
Lay before me, svelt, ready, and intoxicating with promise.
I pick up the laundry and nearly reach the washer this time.
So close, but the task of pairing socks,
Judging which band t-shirt can go,
Do I even wear this dress?
I think I’ve washed the same load ten times this month.
Out of the dryer and draped like graveclothes upon a chair,
Ready for me to neglect to fold or store.
Instead, they will fall, and I will lose track,
What was clean, it was all on the floor.
Back to the washer, lint plucked from the dryer,
A mindless numbing rota of pointless unfocused stupor.
That is how depression lingers.
Not a frightful bombast of turbulent tears and bleak gasps,
Not in a neatly cataloged list to check from,
Never sauntering in like a thief to steal my joy.
No, depression is a foe far more sly and slippery.
It creeps in when I am focused elsewhere,
Settles down and draws a cold grey blanket of nothing,
Swaddles me in a comfortable well-worn shawl.
The cup that held me got a tiny crack,
So small and innocent, I hardly noticed the chip,
The soft snick of sabotage,
And now like consumption, my fire flows away.
Unobserved the darkness of the groundwater spread.
The steady rock I believed I had reached,
Is steadily bored away and drawn into the unforgiving earth.
When the sinkhole opened it didn’t swallow me like a man in Florida,
There were no cars devoured by eggshell pavement,
I didn’t even know I was slowly sinking,
Until the walls started to chill in their shadows,
Until I realized how much of the sky was receding,
The borders of my world are now the rim of the pit,
With me low on muchness at the bottom.
I don’t feel sad, there is no grand grief,
There is not enough left for me to rage at the heavens.
That sort of fire I could use like a ladder,
As a sail to catch a breeze and waft out of the depths,
I could harness that energy and shake it off.
Instead, this is a numbing thing,
A blunting of purpose, apathy personified.
Its almost comfortable, nearly serene,
In the stillness I want nothing,
I feel the world through a curtain,
All is calm and silent and empty.
As I sit in the pit letting more of myself go,
Draining away in drops and rivulets,
I try to find a hot center I can use,
To reach up before I am too far down,
Before I need a ladder team, firefighters, and a bucket brigade,
To restore me to the surface once again.
I tell myself to lift my hand,
To stretch leaden limbs and grasp the edge.
To ignore the tidal swell of summoning oblivion,
Reach out and pull myself free.
But it is so very far,
So indescribably heavy and cloying,
The muffled thump of the world so dim,
It barely reaches my seashell ears,
Echoing with the liquid sound of my heart.
Depression can be a million tiny grains of sand,
Wearing away at the moorings,
Patient and silent, yet erosion is a matter of degrees,
The soil beneath hollowed and empty as my breastbone,
Cracks widen above the void relentlessly.
The nothing without becomes the nothing within.
I’ve seen these cobblestones before,
I know this well of old.
I am wiser, stronger, and better breached,
I may have no spoons left, but I can make a call.
I can ring my mother to tell her I’m worried,
I can dial up my doctor and enlist his expertise.
Slowly by tiny inches, I pull my feet from the sucking sand,
And creep back into daylight.
Edging away from the brink.
Some days are just like this,
Maybe weeks or months in descent.
But I promise you I will eat nutritious fare,
I will sleep, but like Goldilocks, not too much nor too little.
I will drag my flesh into action to stir my blood,
Regain a smidgen of Vigor and Vitalis.
Embrace my phoenix embers,
Burn instead of falling to ash.
I make my calls,
My appointment is tomorrow.
One twenty pm and fifty miles upstream.
The night might be long,
But it’s a reset button,
Its a start,
It’s the way to tomorrow.