Memorandum to Emotions Part One (Helpless, Hopeless, and Numb)

Dear Depression:

 

When I first met you, I had no clue just how much of an impact you would make on me. I just assumed that you were a small wave of sadness that would be pulled back out to sea, I wasn't prepared for you to catch me in your current and pull me along with the tide. I wasn't prepared to be drowned in sorrow. It was so strange. To be pulled down onto the ground and to be stretch out as I tried to keep hold of dry land but you had latched hard onto me. You hurled me out to sea and it seemed like I was observing my body being rolled around on the waves as a spectator. I felt the pounding of the water and sorrow against my flesh, but in my head everything was underwater. My eyes only saw blue, I would wake up to the sound of the ocean on all sides and my thoughts were flung around like passengers on a ship's deck during stormy waves.

 

At first I was able to ride on the surface. I buoyed myself above the water and let you surround me without being anchored down. But slowly I began getting so exhausted from treading water that I began to sink. The salt began getting into my eyes, and I began to hold my breath. I would feel myself begin to sink, breathe in deep and think if I kept enough happiness forced inside me, that maybe I could hold you off until I surfaced again. But that didn't work. I would feel the last few bubbles of pleasure leave my nose, my lungs dying for release as they began getting filled to the brim with exhaustion.

 

It's strange that even when you are buried so deep under the waves your body continues to fight. You continue to hold to the chance that you just might make it back up to the surface. And then right when you feel you are about to pass out, you open your mouth and just let the depression in. Like seawater you pushed past my teeth and went down my throat, filling up my lungs. It's peaceful. Not having to breathe, or fight, to stop living for a moment. Or two, or three. To open your eyes and just see blue and not have to worry about all those silly people around you. Wanting you to surface, but that would be so hard. Depression you are simpler company, you take a lot from my body, but you don't ask a lot from my mind; only that I let you drown my thoughts till they are all dyed with a bit of blue. The world above would have me think of impossible things like hope. You just tell me to give up and that is so much easier to let the fight inside me loose. To let it swim away like a fish into the ocean's deep sapphire abyss. To unclench my fist and give up.

 

You got me Depression. You convinced me to lie down against the reef, hide me in your caves and caverns and let people wonder what happened to me beneath your waves. Maybe someone will visit me and see my bones, bleached white from sea salt. Maybe they'll see that I finally was able to rest from your constant tidal tossing and turning. They can see that I just sunk, and gave up.

 

Sincerely,

Hopelessness.

This poem is about: 
Me
My family

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