Mutations
The Shadows of a Monster
Depression is a terrifying creature. It does not always show itself as we expect it to. It does not dance on children’s faces in dark tear-tracks, nor does it fall on the floor in the shape of a screaming woman clutching at her chest, nor does it sit in the hands of a man as he screams at the sky. Nor is it quiet and romantic, as some would have you believe, as it aids acclaimed stories by making characters interesting, fragile, beautiful. No, depression comes with silence. It comes with acceptance, apathy, submission and defeat. It comes with what appears to be a puddle in the ground and then later what becomes nothing less than a pit full of quicksand, a bog of thick noxious gas. It is a place where dreams go to die, where smiles turn vacant and forced, where children learn how to lie for reasons other than themselves.
Depression made my mother a ghost. Sometimes she was a grey lady, pacing the halls of my childhood with her sallow face and wrinkled hands. Sometimes she was a poltergeist, screaming and clining onto tombstones and vaults, begging to be freed from her physical form. And sometimes, she was there physically, with her arms outspread and her voice full of warmth, but then she would vanish. She was never there. Her words became borrowed, repeated tracks of lessons of inspiration, religion, and commercialised hope.
Depression made my sister a wraith, a snail clinging to a vast cliff waiting for the storm to blow her into the abyss. It transformed her into a parcel of worries and cares, of expectations and failures. She walked in hallowed footsteps, never daring to look at the path for fear of what it might show her. It made her draw patterns in her skin and carve words into desks and under beds. Monster, monster, monster. It drew black circles in her hearts and hollowed out caverns in her soul. It taught her bitter words and how to fling her fists so they carried more weight than her tiny frame. It taught her to kick. It taught her to cry, loudly, and throw whatever would hurt.
Depression came for me too, with its grotesque sisters. Mine was a house already half-taken, the upper corridors and rooms crammed with rules. Rules that could not could not could not be broken, written in cursive pink neon lights, stamped over and over again in the paperwork of my mind. Depression came in anyways, an uninvited guest, and befriended the previous occupants. It hollowed out the rules and made them necessities, turned them inside out and made them walls of containment, and walls of protection. Only the worst was filtered in, the criticisms and the disgust and the pain. The pain, yes, the pain. It drew tiny burns on my fingertips and razor cuts on my palms, drew dark figures in my dreams and purple butterflies that carried secrets of brighter worlds full of brighter people. It dragged my seven-year-old legs to a balcony and begged that I jump, just jump, please, just a little.
It won’t hurt.
It won’t hurt a bit.
Depression was sovereign of the kingdom that I was. There was no room for much else. No room for pride or hope or wonder. No room for futures that were no already set out by the rules. No room for happiness of the selfish kind, only for a strange sort of refracted happiness, one absorbed from the happiness of others. It swallowed completely, corrupted entirely, extinguished all in one stroke. Depression is a terrifying creature. It should never, never, never be depicted as beauty. It is a monster, a beast with thorns in its hide and talons scraping against the ground like nails on a chalkboard. It is a thousand locusts crawling under your skin, screaming to get out, and the silence that sits in your throat after the have. It is the blood in the sink, the blood in the tub, the emptiness when you have left.
