Welcoming the Darkness
A prose poem about depression. Trigger warning — Dark thoughts ahead
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You look out through a fogged up window. You wipe it clean with your palm, and there it is again — the world. It’s right in front of you, and there’s a glimmer of hope, a faint return of the memory of who you are, what you are. But then, your breath slowly fills the wiped out circle with more fog. Each breath taking you further and further away from clarity, from reality. And you’re back in your hole of darkness and distance from the world that you long to be in. A prisoner stuck behind the most ephemeral bars there ever have been made. Bars you put up each day on your own. Barriers of your mind alone. Barriers that while fleeting and intangible, are as strong and impermeable as any before. You fight against these bars when the sun shines especially high, and its rays push through even the deepest fog on the window. A soft golden light peeks around the corner of that dark curtain of breath. But by then, the light has become a stranger to you. The warmth of that glow is like a fiery torment. And though you remember that you once loved its golden and warm embrace, you know that now it will hurt you. It will claim you. And you will be lost. And somehow, though it is as hot as the sun itself, that shining and shimmering peak of warm sunlight burns so cold against your skin. Where once you longed for the…
