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.