How It Feels – A Collection

In the dance of stars, our souls align,
A bond eternal, a love divine.
Through lifetimes past and those to come,
Two flames burn bright, forever one.
Ridi and Evan, a sacred pair,’
Hearts entwined, beyond compare.
Through joy and sorrow, dark and light,
We find each other, soul’s true sight.
No force can sever, no time delay,
The path we walk, come what may.
In endless cycles, we’ll remain,
Twin flames forever, love’s refrain.

evan 12/25/2024

Life would be clearer
If my mind could see nearer
Tryna let these thoughts pour out
While they plant their seeds of doubt
I’m screaming but ain’t being heard
My voice gets lost, my vision blurred
The ones I trusted with my pain
Are the same ones who catch the train
And fade away into the night
Leaving me here, losing my sight
Of what’s real and what ain’t true
My mind’s a maze without a clue
When the pressure starts to rise
Darkness calls me from black skies
Down the rabbit hole I fall
No more answering their call
Let it sink into the deep
Let it rot while others sleep
Block it out and scream my truth
Till my voice breaks through the roof
End this chapter, turn the page
Break free from this mental rage
Without a doubt, without regret
Till all these evils I forget

Ridi 10/29/2024

We were together for so long. I can’t believe I wasted so many years of my life with him. No, no, no, that’s where you’re wrong. I went to fun places I ate new food. I experienced young infatuation. I molded my personality to his and then quickly learned. To never do that again, I found new music.

I stayed up late, waiting for a text back. I even learned how to argue or maybe how not to. The lessons that came with so many years of happy and sad and angry and chaotic are the same ones that allow me to thrive today. The ones I couldn’t possibly live without those years of fighting and questioning, and just trying to make it to tomorrow, prepared me to know exactly how I want my future to look.

I know my value. I know my goals. I know what I can negotiate and what treatment I will never tolerate again. I can be simultaneously so grateful for the growth and memories, but also ecstatic that I finally got out. Loving him is the decision that shaped so much of who I am today, but the best decision I ever could have made was admitting that I walked through the wrong door.

Instead of spending the rest of my life in the wrong room.

Unknown

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself
doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or
any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square.
And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.
The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level
will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump
from the window of a burning high-rise.
Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows.
Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great
as it would be for you or me standing speculatively
at the same window just checking out the view,
i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant.
The variable here is the other terror,
the fire’s flames:
when the flames get close enough,
falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.
It’s not desiring the fall,
it’s terror of the flames.
And yet nobody down on the sidewalk,
looking up and yelling
‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’,
can understand the jump.
Not really.
You’d have to have personally been trapped
and felt flames to really understand
a terror way beyond falling.

David Foster Wallace

Mom, my depression is a shapeshifter.
One day it is as small as a firefly in the palm of a bear,
The next, it’s the bear.
On those days I play dead until the bear leaves me alone.
I call the bad days: “the Dark Days.”
Mom says, “Try lighting candles.”
When I see a candle, I see the flesh of a church, the flicker of a flame,
Sparks of a memory younger than noon.
I am standing beside her open casket.
It is the moment I learn every person I ever come to know will someday die.
Besides Mom, I’m not afraid of the dark.
Perhaps, that’s part of the problem.
Mom says, “I thought the problem was that you can’t get out of bed.”
I can’t.
Anxiety holds me a hostage inside of my house, inside of my head.
Mom says, “Where did anxiety come from?”
Anxiety is the cousin visiting from out-of-town depression felt obligated to bring to the party.
Mom, I am the party.
Only I am a party I don’t want to be at.
Mom says, “Why don’t you try going to actual parties, see your friends?”
Sure, I make plans. I make plans but I don’t want to go.
I make plans because I know I should want to go. I know sometimes I would have wanted to go.
It’s just not that fun having fun when you don’t want to have fun, Mom.
You see, Mom, each night insomnia sweeps me up in his arms dips me in the kitchen in the small glow of the stove-light.
Insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company.
Mom says, “Try counting sheep.”
But my mind can only count reasons to stay awake;
So I go for walks; but my stuttering kneecaps clank like silver spoons held in strong arms with loose wrists.
They ring in my ears like clumsy church bells reminding me I am sleepwalking on an ocean of happiness I cannot baptize myself in.
Mom says, “Happy is a decision.”
But my happy is as hollow as a pin pricked egg.
My happy is a high fever that will break.
Mom says I am so good at making something out of nothing and then flat-out asks me if I am afraid of dying.
No.
I am afraid of living.
Mom, I am lonely.
I think I learned that when Dad left how to turn the anger into lonely —
The lonely into busy;
So when I tell you, “I’ve been super busy lately,” I mean I’ve been falling asleep watching SportsCenter on the couch
To avoid confronting the empty side of my bed.
But my depression always drags me back to my bed
Until my bones are the forgotten fossils of a skeleton sunken city,
My mouth a bone yard of teeth broken from biting down on themselves.
The hollow auditorium of my chest swoons with echoes of a heartbeat,
But I am a careless tourist here.
I will never truly know everywhere I have been.
Mom still doesn’t understand.
Mom! Can’t you see that neither can I?

Sabrina Benaim, Explaining My Depression to My Mother: A Conversation