Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

EC 3.2.1.4

Illustrated by MONY PICH

EC 3.2.1.4 is based on my personal experience with depression. I can identify with the theme of collision because that’s exactly what being depressed felt like – a massive car crash inside of me. We as humans constantly have emotions running through us, whether it’s excitement, jealousy, fear, and so on. These emotions are extremely complex, and can be broken down into two simplified categories: happiness and sadness. We are most often settled somewhere in between these two forces. When sadness took over, I was struggling internally to try to get that balance back. I didn’t just feel far away from happiness, but also from normality; from the emotions that fall towards the middle of such a vast spectrum. Depression is an internal war, a complex collision between the search for familiarity in happiness and the overpowering pain.

As I raked the crust from my tear ducts I wondered how long I’d been asleep. What name should I give to another day that I waste, sitting in my walls of confinement?  How old was the prison I'd built until my hands bled and the tender tissue of my throat grew sores from crying out into the concrete? The daylight interrogated me with its scorching sound. Unfortunate genetics seems like a forced conclusion, but as the darkness sang I couldn't help but force myself to stay awake in the desperate hopes of catching every beat, every breath of its lethally soothing song. As the ballad secured me into its affectionate embrace, I fell from its capstone and although it felt as though I was pushed, I knew that I had jumped.

I looked out of my window and could see the summer sunrise. It was the same face that haunted me every day. I was daunted by the freedom, what the season swore. Two months of poolside promise trudged on. They dragged on forever. I looked around me. Dresser drawers were flung open, heaps of clothes popping out. My shelves were packed with dust. I looked at my floor. I saw myself. It was covered in earth. Roots grew from the cracks in the tiles and snaked themselves around my furniture. I blinked. The roots were black with rot. Maggots crawled around them, poking their slick bodies in and out of the soil, starving. I blinked. I looked around. It was everywhere. I could smell the putrid fungi. The death. Close eyes.

I was awoken by a worried ringing that bore unanswerable questions. I didn’t want to cut anyone out, but I did. And I couldn’t stop doing it over and over again. What would I have said if I did answer? Would I have told them that it feels like little ants live under my skin? Or that even when I scream at the top of my lungs, I make no noise? Should I tell them about my aching eyes or the maggot slime? My brain was stumped and my lips were stupid. How could I tell someone what I was going through when even I hadn’t the slightest clue? Nothing had caused this. Nobody had died. Nothing had happened to me, I was fine. I had no excuse. I was selfish. And I knew I was selfish the minute that the sound of my concerned friends sang me back to sleep like a lullaby.

I lived in one position. Grooves in the sheets matched the curves of my body, and I fit perfectly. All I did was stare at the ground; at my rotten pity party. The more I stared, the more I created. My skin was rubbed raw from the constant posture, and bits of my flesh started to fray. Puss filled sores bubbled up onto my skin. I ripped open, as if I were a child’s old doll, outgrown and destroyed. I came apart at the seams and everything stuffed inside of me leaked out. My decayed ecosystem grew. Worms joined my maggots and they became friends. Black flies fluttered their wings in harmony to the sound of my pounding head. I soaked into the sheets. I was alive but made of scabs. Nothing was real. I healed into my setting. My scabs turned to scars and my flesh grew over the sheets. I was stuck. My heart repaired itself into the bed. As I lay on my side, it pumped blood into my pillow. When I inhaled, my capillaries carried carbon dioxide into my mattress. I had lived, breathed inside of it. I was not alive. I was dead there for years.

The shrill of my breath made my head whirl and my mouth go dry. I was empty of sadness and I had nothing left to hate. Black flies nipped at my neck, at my sides. I lifted my legs and my skin ripped open. I arched my back and everything pulled apart, the skin on my neck peeled off, the flesh of my arms was split and I was an open wound. I stood on my feet. I found matches and lit them and threw them around me. I was drained. Slowly, my room filled with orange light and smoke and heat and then I was gasping. I was surrounded by a ring of fire and I pulled everything I could reach into it, reviving dying embers and raising them to the ceiling. Everything was alive. The fire rose, licking the walls and crawling across anything it could touch. It enclosed me. I was inside a cave of flames. I looked at myself and my eyes were parched. Everything I had known was turned to ash and I couldn’t breathe and my head hit the ground.

When I opened my eyes, I realized that my maggots had cast themselves away for a better place to play. I shivered far into the dirt, seeking peace in their ashes.

My room was disgusting. Clothes covered my floor. My bed was heaping with books and blankets. My mirror was inches thick with dusty scum. I put on clothes. They were from the floor and they made my body cold. I couldn’t see what they looked like on me. Because of the mirror situation.

I went outside and walked until my legs cried and I was high from the fresh air. I didn’t care where I was going; I only focused on soothing my burnt lungs and scabbed flesh. I walked until I was vaguely lost, and it was there that I said goodbye to my worms and my maggots and my black flies. I said goodbye to my aching eyes, and I said goodbye to being lost. Then I inhaled until my lungs were about to burst and I held my breath, knowing that if I wanted to, I could scream loud enough to wake the dead.

When I got home that night I took off my clothes and folded them neatly and put them away. Then I stood in front of my mirror and cleaned it. It took so long that by the time I had finished some of the roots on my floor grew over my feet. I pulled them free, ripping the ground open. Dirt splayed across the room in protest. It didn’t like me upsetting the comfort of its rot, but who does? I got on my knees and lifted the tiles, cleaning out the warm, decaying plant life little by little. I was better, but I was only just learning to cope with my issues. I looked at myself and saw that the dead embers in my eyes had lit to a soft burning glow.