Without a Parachute

source: https://www.npr.org

I was 22 when I married

22, when I got pregnant

23, when I gave birth

24, when depression consumed me whole

25, when the world stopped revolving around the Sun

At school, I was the one whose laugh

Echoed in the corridors every day

I would never be caught without a smile

And outside the gates of my house

Through hail, sun or rain

There always stood a rainbow

By 16, my jaws were tired

My tongue parched, mind unsettled

"Happiness isn't everything," I told myself

Sylvia Plath wasn't happy, Virginia Woolf wasn't

Neither Anne Sexton nor Ernest Hemingway

But their works spoke to me -

Their bold, unequivocal confessions -

And became the gospel I'd turn to for comfort

Now depression does not make a hard knock

On your door one fine morning - No

It begins with a gentle hello

Has small talk with you that spills into the night

It coaxes you and shows you the beauty

In grief, in the morose, to the point where

You hoist a cloud in place of that rainbow

Outside the gates of your house.

You who once ran out to dance in the rain

Now sit by the window, writing a poem

About a sullen, overcast day

An ode to depression, your companion

On this late summer morning

I am sore, my body numb, and the sun isn't up yet

Why do I forget I'm 25, and the world stopped revolving

Last night on my flight from the attic without a parachute?