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.