My dad is sleepy.
He cannot move.
His medicine makes him tired.
His medicine makes him mad.
It's the medicine.
He's yelling because of the medicine.
"It's making me frustrated,"
Oh, okay, father.
I believe you.
I understand.
My medicine makes me tired,
Though, you call me lazy.
My medicine makes me moody,
Though, you call me dramatic.
But that's okay.
I understand.

My brother says that he is better,
My mother says it's true.
Though, when I tell her all I'm good at
She says, "Oh, that's cool."
My brother punches walls,
I try to get straight A's,
My mom says she is proud of him,
But for me she turns the other way.
My brother says he's the good kid,
I don't think that's right,
But if I tell my mom I love her,
She just tells me goodnight.

She said we could spend time together.
A me and her day.
When I asked about it,
she got angry with me.
"I never said that,"
she says.
When I remind her that she did, in fact, say that,
she rubs her head.
"I don't feel good,"
She explains.
The kids at school are wondering why I'm so loud.
Being loud gets me attention,
And I don't have much of that elsewhere.

I do not love you, and you do not love me, either. I have stolen your first kiss, your spare time, and everything in between, but God forbid I ever take your heart.
I'm not good with hearts.

Depression does not care.
I thought changing my style, changing my diet, changing my sleeping routine, but no.
Depression doesn’t care.
It doesn’t care how I look; it doesn’t care how little I eat, it doesn’t care how much I sleep, hell, it doesn’t even care how spoiled I am. It just doesn’t care.
It doesn’t matter how skinny I make myself, not eating for 4 days in a row. It doesn’t care how much I hurt myself to make it happy, I feel the same.
The same being… I am up at 2:40 am on a Wednesday. The same being… I ate a Pop-**** for dinner and that’s all I ate for the day. The same being… I cannot get out of bed no matter how many hours of sleep I get. The same being that I feel so uncontrollably empty.
Depression doesn’t care how long ago the trauma was. It doesn’t care that I’ve forgotten it almost entirely, every once in a while flashbacks just pop up.
I make jokes about my trauma that make people uncomfortable all to try and pretend that it wasn’t a serious thing. It wasn’t serious, it’s something to laugh about.
Because it wasn’t.
It wasn’t a big deal, people have had it worse, but depression doesn’t care about that.
God, how much simpler fighting depression would be if depression cared.
But it doesn’t.
And I need pills just to help me battle it, and I feel shame in needing help. But I need help.
Depression doesn’t care, and it doesn’t matter how good your life is.
It just doesn’t care.

I want to cope,
But I cannot.
I try music,
You know, listening to it??
Singing it?
Writing it?
But my mom says shut up.
I try to sleep,
You know, until the next day?
When I sleep on it and it's better in the morning??
But my mother says I am too lazy.
I try,
But it’s not hard enough.

When we were little, long before nana found me on the side of the road, Kody’s mom made us lunch. Kody brought it to me and smiled. He was kind of like a guardian angel for me. I lost everything, but I still had Kody.
I always had Kody.
He would make me clean up my mess when I visited his house. Kind of like my mom. He even covered my ears when his dad got home.
When his dad came in the room, Kody made sure I was hidden. Either in the closet or under his bed. Either way, he made sure I wasn’t the one beaten. His father took one look around the room and then stumbled over to Kody for a drunken slap. For “being messy,” though really, he wasn’t.
Kody was bruised, trembling, shaken up and ******, but he smiled at me when he opened that closet door or looked under the bed. He smiled.
He yelled at me when I deserved it but always stopped quickly. Long before my father had broken my voice, I wanted to tell him something that made him trust me.
Kody used to get sad when he was mad at me. He cried after shouting. He said he didn’t want me to leave. He said he didn’t want me to be scared of him.
I just placed my hand to his cheek and smiled at him.
“Just breathe.” I said, “It’ll be okay.”