Epilogue
(Unstitched)

When I survived depression

for the first time.

I did so by making the sadness 

it fed on part of my identity. 

I hadn’t matured enough to realize 

that humans were never 

supposed to be comparable 

to monsters. 

I became a scarecrow, 

to protect my sadness. 

Not straw and a top hat 

standing stoic in a field. 

But soul eating, 

Bubak— 

A boogie man.

Something that Depression 

would see when deciding to make a meal 

of my blood and second guess 

weather or not it wanted to fuck 

with me. 

During this transformation,

the phrase: getting better 

became synonymous with:

not dead yet. 

If I could feel,

no matter how negative

it meant Depression hadn’t pulled one over on me.

I wasn’t dead.

I owned my sadness.

I was the monster who protected my sadness.

It couldn’t have my sadness.

My sadness belonged to me. 

I never stopped to ask myself

if the life I was protecting worth living

if I was fucking sad all the time. 

When I was young

 I stitched up the cuts that depression fed 

through with scare tissue. 

Pointed to them as if they were some type of seam,

a symbol of the scarecrow I forced myself to become.

It wasn’t until I was older that I started to unstitch them,

but with therapy, not a knife.

 So they could heal 

the right way.

See, the human, he was still there.

Hiding. Scared. And alive.

It took awhile, 

But I’m not a scarecrow anymore.

I’m a human.

Depression can’t have me.

but not because it’s too afraid to feed on my sadness.

but because my sadness is only a fraction

of who I am.

A fraction too small,

for depression

to sustain itself longterm.