I’ve been thinking about you since I last said goodbye. Nearly everyday, working to recount some ritual to disperse my pooling woe. Alas, no exorcise, no experience, no solace came as depression doused me crown to heel; thick and heavy as molasses – in pressure, in pain, each ripple of woe convulsing over the next.

Its best service? To suppress the hairs of doubt, each stroking my gut. One anxious thought, one lie I told, another: self-judgement, the next self-pity, and so forth - a colony of fire ants enflaming my gut. Every searing lash culminating to the enraged fire flaying my stomach, manifesting itself only through my bulging eyes screaming self-hatred.

To dull it, depression holds no quarter. My hooded eyes refused even sunlight, my skin denied the feeling of wind dancing amongst my hairs, and my nose had lost ability to smell, period. My mouth only served to hold the bile building as a retort to closing off the pain swelling my stomach. To let so much as a pulse of emotion out held enough weight to hurl me to the trash bin, retching the bile I tried so hard to swallow in class.

I wrote you a few imaginary posts of how I failed to shake off the pain during those nights I was too weak to put two feet on the floor and stand with my own two legs. There I lay with the resolve to let the pain flow from my eyes to drown my cheek. Yet another time I wrote, curled in my closet, tears streaming from cheeks to knees to shins.

In truth, it’s died down; the price of my pact: when the roommates are sleeping, I will turn on soft music to overlay the guttural shrieking muffled into a pillow as I curl up, stowed away in a closet. Just being me has been a lot harder than I thought it’d be lately; more so than I thought it’d be a month ago: when I saw this coming. I was so proud of myself having turned the last bout around before it took me to skipping classes. I thought I could do it again, but this is easily the worst I’ve felt since I first bottomed out.

There is no hopeful end to this bit, just affirmation that “I know it gets better”. It’s just a shitty place to be and feel and live in until that happens.