I promised myself to never write when I was depressed.
And then I realized I would never write again.

So yes, sadness has its flavour, a taste acquired,
Like all the finer things in life,
A bit of bitter often brides us better,
The sweet of things misleads and makes us dull,

So yes,we have arrived to suffer, to ask and persevere,
Our fate is not to believe but to become,
We are God in the making, we are the design.
So little time.

“How do you feel?”

She sits across from me with an unintentional smug look
plastered across the canvas of her face.

“Fine.” I say bluntly.
“Fine” meaning ‘I can’t stop picturing his face
and how his hands feel on my waist
and how it’s so much better when he’s with me and not her’.
“Fine” meaning ‘why did he have to ruin it?
Why didn’t he just pretend he loved me back?’
“Fine” meaning ‘I could catch the bus to his home right now;
stand on the doorstep and demand
he glue and stitch back together my broken heart.’
“Fine” meaning ‘I don’t want to talk to you about it.”
“Fine” meaning ‘I’m going to go home now,
lie on the roof of my house and try to get the sound
of his muffled-through-his-chest heartbeat
and the sound of my own crying
out of my head’.

Sometimes I go into the city at night
alone.
Let the pavement trace the way without breaks,
get lost under the blue lights.
I go to the places we used to
and sometimes get a little drunk –
I don’t want to remember
but I have gravitated to these places
so maybe I should just honour
my cravings for you –
the sickly-sweet syrup
of your spit,
the saffron, sticky honey of your eyes.
We used to
do the same
together
as I am now doing alone –
let the concrete slabs
pave the way
without breaks;
going nowhere
and everywhere
all at once.

It feels so heavy right now –
like your bones are cracking
under the weight of your head.
You swore you could get through this –
clutching notebook in shaky hands
saying
“the words will get me through.”

You thought this was going to be easy
but continuing each day,
lifting the fork to mouth,
watching your life
fly south for the winter,
is harder than you ever thought it could be.
But let me tell you that one day you’ll be ok –
sometime soon you will not be able to wait to start your day
and I know how hard it is right now.
I know depression is crushing you into a fine dust,
but I can tell you now that one day
you will feel good again.
One day
flowers will bloom in your head
instead of wilt. Just
please
don’t give up.
The shift is coming soon.

My depression is a glass of flat lemonade –
hard to swallow
but I can’t stop coming back to its sweetness.
I have learnt to stop
wallowing in it, though -
deep down there is a part of me
unwilling, yet it knows
to give up trying to get rid
and I’ve learnt to accept,
because despite what I’m told,
that I should not let my depression be so bold
in telling me what to do,
existing like this is almost bearable
because it exists like outer space –
there is so much of it
yet it communicates its complexity in silence.
I am yet to receive a response from the void,
but feeling this crushing nothingness at 2pm
in an aisle of a supermarket
makes me realise it’s not gone yet.
I don’t know if it’ll ever leave.