Depression.

 

Sadness comes with her hair falling loose over her shoulders.

The house shrinks with her presence, walls pushing towards one another for warmth. 

She likes the bedroom most, lays herself in my bed, covers pulled up to her chin, hums all the songs that bring you to weeping. 

Sometimes she looks for herself in the mirror, presses on her bones, sucks in her stomach and looks idly at what so much inactivity has done to her body. She wears her eyes heavily lined, flicked up at the corners. Her pupils have forgotten how to dilate, her eyelashes drift like ash into the darkness. 

She is always this way: nearly deteriorated but for the heaviness in her feet. How she moves zombie-like towards me. How I can hear her on the stairs. 

In the nights, I hold her, rock on my side in a slow rhythm. 

I tell her, you can’t stay. There’s too much I have to do. And I feel sorry in the morning, when I leave her behind in bed and come back to find her gone. No note, no explanation, just the smudge of her eyeliner left on my pillow. I have had to learn to let her go. It’s easy to host her, to cater to all her waist-deep needs, but it does no good for me. 

The longer she stays, the more I lose myself. The more I fail to respond to the calling of my name. It’s her or me. It always has been. 

These days, I’m giving myself a chance.