Where is your depression?

I’d tell you my answer would be different. For my depression travels like I do.

I developed depression initially when I was 11. My consciousness awakened at the reality of my environment. My depression presented in the fluctuations of my voice. I was silent. I was angry. The flip-flop between the two and the exhausting practice that would carry—

At 12 it was the pressure between my eyes as I watched my friend slowly die. Lung cancer, then liver, then death. I stared at her corpse as my first experience of life.

At 13 it was my heart. Too bleak I won’t recount.

At 14 it was my wrists. Depression blinds every inch of a world already shrouded in gray. I tried to take my life at the bottom of a lake. But God intervened.

At 15 it was my mind and that was the song I sang till I was 18.

At 19 it was my world. Another awakening of something deeply wrong occurred. Abuse in love and self.

At 20 to 22 I moved forward from it. A village and God carrying me through it. My heart is whole. But—

I’m 23, it’s 12 again. The pressure between my eyes. Cause my mind knows, my heart weighs, and my eczema screams. My friend died at 23. Her cancer preventable was the hardest pill to swallow. She grew up in a home with parents who were addicted to a completely legal drug. Even when she had chemo, they didn’t stop the smoke. I can never fully blame them.

Yet, I’m going to be 24. I will outlive her. So, I know my depression will be in a scream. Because I can’t blame anyone fully. Not her parents, not the legalization of drugs that clearly kill, not the system of research that failed her, not the Healthcare that wasn’t enough for her, and not the sin in the world that ate her.

No. Cause it’s everything.

So, I got out of bed with the pressure between my eyes and threw a brick in the bank window.