& This Matters Too

things i never saw

A friend--
For all the ways im sorry--

Maybe I didn't watch you struggle day in and day out of the exhausting depression--the thing you beat back, using all your fight, energy, courage. Maybe I don't really know-maybe I never knew. And maybe it's not as easy as they make it look, all picture-perfect staged up nice and neat in the movies. Like depression is something that can be explained with runny mascara. It's not camera-shy; it won't disappear behind the lenses of menacing eyes, daring us to show just a subtle hint-a tiny dropping of the mask. Should I be worried? it forgets to ask, as it clicks away the last moments of your meaningless life. As the lens itself gets carried away taking all your moments, stealing from you the only happiness you've got left. Sooner or later you won't even be able to shrug it off because you're too damn in focus. Not by the camera zoom but by the rest of the world trying to see you as clearly as they can, wondering with a tiny backward glance why you don't look so good. Not like "anymore." You don't look like you used to "anymore." Why aren't you smiling "anymore"? I guess you never got a truthful answer out to tell them why. I think the problem is we never thought you were the girl it would hit on first, scraping it's nails in your skull, burning through rage in your nostrils and then simply using you as a side-walk to carelessly dig holes into with the edge of your heel. Depression masks itself in so many ways--ignoring road signs, careening through red lights. And all along it's rippling, urging to bleed out just below the surface of a paling skin. It was so desperately trapped in you--right behind squeezed eyes and covered wrists that... I didn't see it soon enough. Not in the creases of your fake smile, not in the fear of your dilating pupil or the nervous hairs on your limp arms. I though you looked alright, kind of. Like if I took that photo of you from far away I wouldn't see all the cracks replacing what was missing, stolen by the hungry and greedy mouth of depression. And maybe if I blurred the photo just the slightest bit, I wouldn't see any of it coming through the filter at all. But in real life, now that I recall, depression didn't look so good on you-it fit tight and sharp, choking you up and down like a jacket with too many buttons. I didn't pick up on it. You looked so easy being yourself, even more comfortable than a mattress with a deep dent in it. The impression of depression. You were all worn-down though, and not in a cozy way, more like in an unfixable way, the kind that could damage for a lifetime. Maybe even lasting on the soul. I wish I'd known the signs, the symptoms, the causes, the cures. But I saw none of it while gradually seeing all of it. Restless nights of your mind screaming for you to keep your eyes up, squeezing out just a few more morbid thoughts, while I way awake dreaming happy things like shooting stars and reality becoming a dream, but you only wished your nightmares were the real world and not all in your head. So dreams didn't take you away, but they kept you coiled up like the roll of a cigarette hiding all it's nicotine. That's what hurt me. That you wouldn't reveal it in the slightest. I thought you kept back a little rage, bit your tongue until it bled, matching the blood-curdling screams of your insides. But instead you locked it all away and got your teeth pulled out by biting on the key, until it was crunched into a thousands pieces of denial. Why didn't you give me your hand, take me into your mind? Let me blow back the demons, unbury the trademark, "I'm fine." Why didn't I see it in you, little wide-eyed baby, clean-cut doll? If roses were your knife, would I trace you by the smell? I'd wondered so long after, when you were really alright. What tiny fraction of time did you manage to slip by? To skip on your daily dose of depressing thoughts, take the razor and cut off the voices, throw out the pills you knew had no right to be in your body. Nothing could evaporate an insanity that lurked behind every dark corner, every flash of a warning light. How much life was it taking from you each day it thrived? I wish I saw it in your body sooner, maybe then I would've know exactly why this was all my fault. And what I could've done to unbury the guilt that lays like heavy dirt on the deadest part of me. I would've known, if your own dirt hadn't choked its weight down your throat, carrying you to heaven, for you wouldn't be found on earth. Not alive. Because we all knew you were dead before we opened our eyes.

Sincerely,
The girl who didn't take notice

And all the others who ran out of time

We cared.