Grey Like Sugar Grains

Having depression is like walking into Whole Foods to look for frosting, and you find the organic kind that spreads like chalk. The descent into oblivion tastes like vanilla, when you wanted chocolate, and have only ever tasted chocolate.

It runs like the treadmill you swore you'd spend hours on every day, the piercing summer sun breaking you into a million small fractures of despair. In the happiest situations, it is wanting to reach for the sharpest object in the room. It is endless forms, endless waiting rooms, endless time to think about what you've done wrong.

It is a slow progression of events, or perhaps a sequence of particular events. At some point, a depressed person know they have depression. For me, it took lying on a cement floor when I had a perfectly nice bed, unsure that I deserved to sleep there. I won't go into any more stories, it's pointless and sad and backwards and ultimately, nothing trumps just getting up and putting on your pants.

I have had depression for over a decade. It alienated my family, made my teenage years something of which we don't speak of. I don't have any regrets, really, and I don't feel any animosity towards the universe for this curse. I sit in cafes, writing dark poems, and simply wonder at the others: how they can save the world through their actions, and I am merely waiting for my next hospital visit.

I never developed an attitude, but I did reject God. Every day with depression is a lifetime of grey clouds, hovering and threatening total collapse. I certainly did.

I can tell anyone, everyone, that it gets better. But it doesn't. It gets harder, and then it gets better.

Perhaps one day I will find myself again surrounded by insanity in some hospital, counting my regrets on a pretend rosary. I can say I've learned something, but I haven't. Depression is stagnant, coarse like so many grains of sugar in organic frosting.