I appear to be depressed. My life is meaningless, like a desperate shout into the void. So I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some place, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at  the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more  invisible. 

Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is normal,  and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

And that's what depression is like, isn't it? It's like drowning. 

Except that you can see everyone around you breathing. 

Just kidding. Lol.