Sundown was a small town that straddled a small river, which had no name, because there was no need- it was the only river, therefore simply The River. The shores were beautiful- sparkling sand, cans, and the sheen of oil on rocks.
But a little trickle of water escaped through a grove of mismatched green and brown trees and formed a quiet, grey-blue pool, which, like all things, had been claimed. This small pool had the unlikely fortune of being ruled primarily and almost exclusively by frogs.
The Sundown Frogs' dominion over the little pond was broken only on the few days when the black-booted man came to visit.
A rock, neither small nor overly large, sat on the side of the Frog Pond, and the man would sit with the rock and quietly ask for its secrets.
Sometimes the rock would cry, dripping oil and water, and sometimes the rock would remain as stoic as the man himself.
If the man, a minister, decided sit long enough for the trees to quiet, very slowly, the Sundown Frogs would return, their soft croaks following like shadows.
One day, as the minister had been sitting close by for hours, a frog jumped quite near him. It landed on a lily pad coated with the rock's tears, and the ripples it made reached the minister's unforgiving black boots.
The frog looked at the man, and the man looked back.
This contest of pride was ended only by the soft buzzing of a fly, lazily making its way over the little pond. The minister now straightened his spine, for this was his favorite part.
It was fascinating to him, the frog and it's life. How her tongue released, curled, and then retracted. Just like that! a death of a fly.
The minister had watched such a show so many times he could imagine the action in his head, step by step, like pictures in a old film reel.
Out like lighting, the curl, the buzzing stops, in quicker than out, and then the silence of death.
And so the minister said to the frog, sitting on her lily pad, "The coming days will be brighter, for the sun must always rise again in the morning."
The frog said nothing, because frogs never do.
In the silence, the frog jumped away, and in the empty silence that followed her hollow splash, the minister promised to return again tomorrow.
I tried to explain how my mental health feels day to day. Not every day is laying in my bed, sobbing or empty. A lot of the time it's acknowledging the world is a beautiful place, objectively, but being unable to understand happiness in actuality. And there's irony in that that's hard to explain. There doesn't seem to be a reason to go on, and yet I get up every day.