So it's mental health awareness month, and I'm going to share the snippet I think covers depression the best.
After she leaves, I die.
I die, and I lay in my bed, and I rot.
My body decays, it melts.
It soils my bed, my room, my home.
It leaks, it lingers, it destroys.
The stench of my sadness is a physical thing, choking me, suffocating me, making it hard to breathe, and harder to move.
It drowns me in its scent.
The scent of nothing left to live for.
It tells me I have nothing left to live for.
My mother, my brothers, my father, they all come to visit me, but the wild beast that guards my corpse drives them from the room.
It shrieks and cries. It rends and tears. It is unstoppable, untamable, feral.
The days pass, but my decaying body doesn't recognize the passage of time. It does not recognize hunger or thirst.
It is dead, after all.
One day, my mother comes to my room.
She tiptoes in on soft feet, trying not to wake the beast, but it growls.
"Go away." It roars.
My mother ignores it. She is strong when she needs to be. She can face the beast.
"You need to get out of bed, Angel. They will be here tomorrow."
They. Them. Those people.
"Hand them my fertility papers and tell them to go away." The beast cries.
"I can't do that. You need to meet them, you know this darling." My mother tries to talk sense to the beast.
The beast doesn't care. It growls deeper and burrows further into my bed.
I feel the weight of my mother's body as she sits next to me. Her body makes an indent by my hip.
An indent in the place where SHE used to lay.
Where our bodies used to touch. The pain rips me in half.
Who knew the dead could bleed?
My mother gently touches my shoulder.
"Darling if they don't choose you, then you go to Chabal. You don't want to go to Chabal." She whispers.
The beast winces in pain.
The dead remember that there is a fate worse than death.
I move.