Trigger: self-harm, suicide.
Last winter I had an article I published about seasonal depression. With Fall and Winter coming around, it’s important to remember this form of depression. The following poem put the experience of seasonal depression into an art form. My hope for this poem is that more attention is brought to seasonal depression and that people who are privileged enough to not be in that condition are sensitive when approaching the subject.
Hell can’t simply be frozen over.
It’s the time where the leafs have fallen,
but I just want to leave.
I’m the leaf stuck in the wind, being blown
away from the safety and the certainty I once knew.
As the seasons change, my mind shapes and shakes back to what it once was.
I get haunted with terrible flashbacks and memories.
I want to walk down the sidewalk, but the cold freezes me over, I can’t crack a smile, my body
shivers and I think about the damage that’s been done.
The nights come quicker and the weather comes colder.
The darkness surrounds my mind leaving me freezing.
I see what I have been keeping frozen all the time, passing it over, never letting it defrost.
I’m sliding on ice and I keep falling, and it feels like pretty soon the ice beneath me will break.
If this ice breaks, I break with it.
Falling into the coldness of neglect and the pain that was caused through years of ice burns.
Dry ice fills my lungs as I soon feel myself burning from the inside, while everyone on the outside
wonders why the changes are happening.
Blue and red flashing lights.
I don’t have time for you because I’m afraid time for me is running short.
Police rush to the scene of the night, this is all I see as my world fades from out of sight.
“He’s taken his own life”
I slowly cry as I say goodbye, thinking that what once was isn’t here anymore.
A shimmer, yellow, flashing, caution lights.
A psychopath gets their fair dosage of decisions.
A warning, saying that if I were to enter back into the sun from out of the darkness, I enter into a false reality.
Telling me that though I feel warm again, it will soon be stripped from me and I will be left shivering.
Seasonal depression
