Depressed.
Your stomach rose, your stomach crept.
Your stomach filled with air from a theft.
The diaphragm all the time unaware.
Drew inch after inch of this pitiful air.
Not to scare or to hinder.
Forced down through the cleft.
Thievery mocking in silent shared breath.
Binging on H and then 2 on to O
Drawn back to the lungs that will handle the blow.
Wind circulates through the plates, through the blood.
The pilot light out from the beat held above.
A trace of vibration round hollowed and bare.
Knocking for life within bodies to share.
Shattering, smashing like waves of the sea.
Rolling through ribs cut in two just to see.
Punctured and tunneled, a hand reaches depth.
A lung compromised waits deep and depressed.
No life line or ringing, a body lay still.
Just speak but a word to avoid having killed.
It’s easy for us to forget we breathe, simple as can be but it goes unrecognized until influenza or allergies rear their ugly heads. We do it when we sleep, most vulnerable to anything and everything but our bodies just keep breathing for us. The metaphor here is simple, for me breathing is as simple a task as any but for some a struggle and in the moments it took me to write this someone out there breathed their last bit of air. The metaphor continues, just as breathing is essential to life I believe that love is equally essential. Within that comes the need to feel worth, the anomaly is (within the metaphor) sometimes we have to be broken, opened up and most vulnerable to actually love.
In these moments of vulnerability, opened up lying on the table for the doctor to pry, it’s with the hands of the physician that we are brought back to life. The air circulates through us, just as love can so do. But unlike breathing, we are conscious of the love we seek and may someday find (or have already found) just not until we’ve been opened up and examined and for lack of a better term, “fixed.”
“No life line or ringing, a body lay still. Just speak but a word to avoid having killed.” This is personal, the ringing represents the phone and the speaking represents the person on the other end. It could be anyone, but sometimes you just need to hear from someone. “Depressed” doesn’t represent a feeling, it represents an action, when our chest has depressed and all air has left our bodies we then need to fill it up again. Elementary, I know, but the point is that you don’t know for certain you will take that breath after breathing out, just like you don’t know if you’ll receive love in return after giving it.
If you wouldn’t purposely cease breathing in fear of the next breath, don’t stop loving in fear of what comes next. If worse comes to worse, there’s a great physician that can “fix” you.
