Mother, when I was young and small enough to fit into your arm,

I would hide into your chest and listen to your soft heart beat trying to make my sadness go away.

You would brush away my tears and tell me all the pain in my heart would disappear and for every tear will make a smile come its way.

 

But mother, even if you shower me with your unconditional love,

worshipping me as if I was your mosque,

treating my tears like holy water,

I can never answer your prayers for me to stop crying.  

 

Mother, you’ve tried your hardest to teach me how to spread my wings and fly, but you can’t fix my broken wings.

 

Please stop asking me all the time why I’m sad,

I don’t even know the answers myself.

 

But I do know that sometimes my depression is a sly snake tightening around my lungs

making me gasp for air,

biting into my skin releasing its poisonous venom with a mix of my rage and anger, paralyzing my body,

hissing into my ears words that make them bleed,

leaving me thinking, “am I going to die now?”

 

And other times, my depression is small like a bug.

A tiny, tiny bug.

But thousands of them crawling all over my body, discovering new parts of my skin and claiming it as theirs.

They make my skin feel itchy. I try to make them go away, but they’re going to stay with me forever.

They already made families and homes on my skin.

It’s funny, because they already know they’ll stay with me forever.

Like my depression.

 

But mother, why can’t you understand?

You tell me to go outside and take a walk and get some fresh air, but there’s no such thing as fresh air to me.

It’s like everywhere I go, the air is toxic as if every day was the same day and it was August 1945 in Hiroshima.

 

“Make some new friends!” you say. Like it’s that easy.

I’ll meet someone and we’ll get close, alright.

We’ll watch movies and spread peanut butter on our Oreos,

drink some pop and have a great laugh.

But sooner or later, they’ll start to notice the living snake inside of me,

and the bugs crawling all over me.

They can’t only be friends with me, mom, but with my depression too.

Sooner or later, my friends will fade and only exist in pictures.

 

Mother, I’m still the same daughter you raised.

I still like to wear mismatched socks,

I still like the rain and the smell of it

but not for the same reasons.

I’m still the same daughter you raised, but somehow along the way, there was another person inside of me you took care of too.

 

Mother, I know you will never understand my depression,

But neither can I.