You will not live in my memories as a cloudless summer day, or the time I first feel the ocean on my skin.

No, you are the day I got kicked in the chest by a horse. Scrambling across the ground clutching my screaming lungs, fighting for a scrap of air. Oh but the bruise was gorgeous. A tiny hoof print, like a horseshoe tacked just above my heart, only flipped upside down and drained of its luck.

You are the angry red scrape spread down the length of my back the day I tried to lower myself down easily, instead of risking fractured ankles from the fall.

I will remember you like I remember the burning heat of the shingles on the roof in summer. Searing the skin on the balls of my feet as I try to stay for as long as possible, just to drink in the evanescent freedom of being closer to the beating wings of the birds.

But I will not remember you like my first pile of autumn leaves. Nor will I remember you as the first mimosa bloom of spring. No.

You are the sun, burning my skin, turning my tongue to sandpaper. You are me, standing in the middle of the afternoon gazing up at sun just to feel it's warmth, all the while knowing it may burn away my eyes.

I spend a lot of time sitting and thinking, silence coiled around my bones. And despite the depths to which my thoughts drag themselves in their attempts to ease my pain, I know nothing will come of crawling through the mud of my own mind. And I think that's what depression is: gazing at yourself from above, drowning in a pit, and trying so desperately to pull yourself from the hole by a noose, but at the same time, understanding that any attempts are futile. Because you ARE the one in the hole and YOU are the one who dug it. It is torture, trying to play the hero, when you are also not only the victim, but the assailant.

Despite my atheistic views, I have prayed more in the last couple of years than I have in my entire life. Maybe not to a god, but for the same purposes. To be saved, helped, fixed, to be granted the strength I need to pull myself out of this, to be forgiven. And even if I don't expect an answer, I can respect those who do. If I could make myself believe in a force more powerful than this earth, I would do it in a heartbeat. Yet, I know I will never be endowed with the strength and courage I desire, unless I begin to realize it is already within myself. And maybe that's who I'm really trying to reach when I pray: myself.