why does despair ensnare me
one moment i am fine and the next i’m
staggering slipping stumbling
down the slopes of stability to
crash headfirst into depression.
it isn’t a chasm cracking open
beneath me, a crumbling hole
i’m falling into freefall
but a forbidding fog rolling in,
perverting the light to turn
my surroundings into mockeries
of what they had been of
what i thought they were whereas
i am still here.
i am still me.
it isn’t darkness, plunging
me into black; i wish it were
because then i could hide,
i could ignore. it’s a
beacon baring my doubts, a
spotlight on my fears, a promise—
a whispered promise that i was wrong,
wrong about it being behind me
wrong about breaking free of it. a
show my brain puts on, where i am both
audience and performer,
chained to the stage and to the seat,
forcing me to look—saying:
look at your
helplessness, hopelessness, worthlessness;
look until you are blind
to everything else and you are
nothing but a suppressed scream,
soaked in tumultuous terror; look until
your thoughts swell and swirl into a cyclone,
laying waste to the shabby shelters you built in
your deceitful, deceptive time of respite;
look until reality shatters
your pathetic platitudes of
it gets better;
it’s gonna pass;
it isn’t permanent;
because it is,
because this is what you are,
because this will always be the result,
because
this is how it ends.

a therapist
prescribed me rose-tinted glasses.
she told me
my view was too blue and the pink
would counteract my countenance
so i would
finally
see normally.
a “shift of perspective”
she called it. i didn’t
tell her that the color i saw wasn’t blue, it was gray; i didn’t
tell her i had fifty pairs at home, perched pristinely on the vanity; i didn’t
tell her i pressed them onto my nose and stared into the mirror; i didn’t
tell her the only shift of perspective
was the way the world
became blurry,
water welling up and
flinging a flimsy filter
onto my mirror when
i realized this wasn’t working,
this wouldn’t work.

instead, i smiled
and added another pair to my collection –
this time,
it was different. this time,
when i put them on and
nothing changed,
i convinced myself that it did.
i swore i saw swirls of scintillating salmon in the sky,
swore sunrise was less montonous and sunset less muted.
“it’s gonna get better, it’s better, i’m better” ran through
my mind, up
my throat, out
my mouth and swirled
in the air and coated every surface until
my breath was reduced
to those words:
it’s gonna get better, it’s better, i’m better.

and each day battered the words,
each hour chipped away at their strength,
each minute batted them out of the air until
i was lightheaded from oxygen deprivation, stuck
gasping with a gaping mouth in a vacuum.

when i shattered my rose-tinted glasses
and used the shards to carve
two neat little lanes up my forearms, when
i smeared the rivulets of
blood across my eyes –
because a pink filter hadn’t worked, but maybe,
maybe red would –
i whispered to myself:
it’s gonna get better, it’s better, i’m better.