Depression is like a Storm
Location
You're warned - there are signs.
It starts to get dark outside,
and on your foggy window is
the soft pattering of rain. You
know what's coming,
and you're hiding in your room,
in the corner,
alone, anticipating.
You know it's coming,
and all you can do is wait.
The increasing darkness is intimidating.
Dark grey clouds, thick and heavy,
stampede across the sky.
Claustrophobic, you feel as if they
crawl closer to your mind,
encasing all of your thoughts
in an onslaught of rain and wind;
their hands cradle your skull in their palms.
Then it begins.
A mental tossing and turning,
a chaotic destruction of the things
that once seemed planted firmly,
now thrown around like rag dolls
by this angry thundering beast.
Debris targets you;
those sticks and stones that
may break your bones do,
especially when they are metaphors
for the awful words that you tell yourself
when you hold your arms up in surrender
and in defense from the sticks that pierce you
and from the stones that bruise you.
They all remind you that you're weak and ugly
and pathetic and worthless.
They are metaphors for the disgust
you have for yourself,
a righteous rebel against
becoming a societal product,
and you really only hate yourself for it
because everybody else does.
As the storm relentlessly continues,
you hope that the idiom is true -
that words will never hurt you -
but they do, and you know that.
They echo in your skull,
ricocheting off of the clouds in your head,
reverberating like thunder.
Flashes of lightning like flashes of memories;
terrifying, unforgettable experiences
that shape the unshapely mess that is
me.