Here I am in the darkness, and I can’t muster the strength to wave.
Of course, that’s not really true. If it really were coal black inside me at this very moment, I wouldn’t be able to type these words, never mind lift my hand in some half-hearted greeting.
But it comes, this darkness, and I am afraid of my feelings.
So very thin, so very fragile, is the distance between “okay” and “broken.”
In college, “depression” flitted at the edges of my mind and in my Internet searches, but I rejected the notion. It was something else. It was insecurity, it was stress, it was my spiritual state.
This time, there is no doubt, no explaining away, no alternate narratives.
It came without warning as I sat at the table with my lasagna and the people I had been so excited to see again. It came, and excitement left me and I couldn’t follow the conversations around me and they were a million miles away and I shut down and curled inward and wanted to cry. Later, I did cry.
It came gradually as I walked hand-in-hand on dark, wet nights and wrote pages and pages in my journal while everyone slept. It came, and so did fear. All my certainty left me and I thought of things being shaken and falling away, and soon even that clarity was gone too.
It came like a brick, like an anvil, like a dementor, as we got in the car and prepared for a long drive on that rainy night. That terrible rainy night.
There were respites between the storms, and even a day or two when I felt like my old self again. But it never truly went away, and eventually my body began to wear down too.
I’m home again, and it looks different here. Duller edges, familiar motions, the quiet breaking and forgetting and existing.
I want healing, and I’ve been pursuing it a little. But mostly I’m still holding back, clinging to my defense-mechanism isolation, becoming almost a mechanism myself.
I know healing is so much more than those little white pills they gave me. That word, healing, seems so gentle and soothing and right, but when you stop the sideways glances and look it straight in the eyes, you realize how hard and messy and uncomfortable it will be.
Here I am in the darkness, and I want out, but I don't know and I’m afraid.