I have learned that my depression is like doing everything with gloves on.
It makes anything so much harder,
still possible,
but not even worth it.

my therapist keeps telling me to stop thinking in black and white,
she keeps saying that there is grey in
between the night sky
and the ivory sheets of snow folded into the earth,
but what she doesn't understand is that grey isn't a stranger to me,
my life has been seeing my surroundings go up in smoke,
I see in thunderstorms,
my own anatomy is a hurricane staring back at me in the mirror,
before it becomes shattered glass planted in the garden of the floor,
I harvest my own blood.

I am always trying to put the pieces back together,
as if recovery is a destination on a map
but every time I become frustrated,
because my palms are on fire and the glass fragments are laced with gasoline.
I just break them up some more,
until they are grains of sand falling through my fingers.
I can't tell the difference between my hands and an open flame anymore.

I constantly am torn between living and dying,
because every day another forest becomes a graveyard,
every day the sky starts to look more like an emergency exit,
every day the ground starts to feel more like home,
because everything around me is already burning,
but I have always loved mystery and my palms are covered in my own blood,
I am the only suspect in this story,
and I will never take the blame for my own self destruction.
every other culprit's blood and fingerprints have seeped into my skin.
it has become part of me,
there will be no justice.

I am still looking for the clues to weave together the fabrics of my own ******,
where it all began,
who pulled the trigger first,
every other event has just been salt on these wounds,
I have chosen not to address.
but my therapist also told me to stop living in the past,
it's over,
but it doesn't feel over,
I am still a suffering child,
I have not grown out of my pain.

maybe that's part of the problem,
I keep thinking that I'm going to grow out of this,
when the reality is that over time, my body will only shift in shape to wear it better.
and some days, it is going to be bigger than me;
it will become me until I am drowning in it's violent tide.
other times I am going to do to it what it has done to me;
make it feel so small so that I can break it in my palms.

I often feel like this is a death sentence
but I am not dead yet.
and I still have other mysteries to solve,
like how to turn greyness into home,
how to lock up the past, so he stops coming back to my head like he owns the place.
how to turn these gloves into armour so that I can
grasp my life by the throat,
even with gloves on.