Swallow Me Whole
A small look into what my depression feels like
A soft thrumming vibrates inside my head. It’s like waves crashing over me again and again while I’m pulled in and out of consciousness. The water within rises and falls, pushing harder on my mind with every work of the tide.
As I lie on my back the sensation of drowning expands from my head down my neck, through my back and into my stomach and it presses deep into my chest. My breath wavers as I struggle to maintain a steady pace of in, out, in, out. My legs are numb, completely crushed under the oceanic waters from deep inside my soul.
My hands keep their strength. They run through my hair over and over and over. They pull at the roots tugging with slight force; pain is all I can feel right now. Everything else is just a heavy emptiness that grips my eyelids and pulls them downward but never shut. I can’t sleep, for beneath the compressing waves lie thousands of small thoughts playing in a loop in rapid succession.
Images of mistakes I’ve made in the distant past, the recent past, arguments that shouldn’t occur and arguments that rip me in two flash like a thousand movies at once. I see things that never have been and things that I wish never were. My body sinks deeper into the bed but my minds crawls across the walls gripping at anything it touches. I’m exhausted but I cannot rest.
The lights in my room are still on yet there’s this darkness in the corners of my eyes. It flickers briefly, threatening to rush me into a restless sleep. My still strong hands push into my eyelids, the pain still my only manner of feeling. I see spots and flashes and my head throbs as the ocean inside me crashes to my skull.
I’m silent as the darkness grows like a blanket on my weighted body.
Soon it swallows me whole, and the waves pull me under into the deep.
