Depression Poems: What If

by Laura Frisbie
(Asheville)

Life happens and you are a kid, you are like a deer in the headlights. Frozen, numb, shocked, freaked. Your heart pounds, physically –mentally-emotionally, it is all too much. There is a disconnect, a shut-down.

You don’t even get it, what a big deal it really is, what just happened to you. It just goes by, it happens and is over, whether it was one incident or on-going, you are whammed and wide-eyed inside. It’s all inside. And on the outside, life goes on. Like nothing happened, just like nothing happened.

Then you are grown-up, or you are in-between, not a kid, not a grown-up, and you can’t get things to work out. Life doesn’t add up for you, it is in funny bits and pieces and there is always some kind of a mess. In here or out there, there is always some kind of mess.

And by the time you are forty, when there is so much of your life already written in stone, etched in regrets and loss and uncertainty, patterns emerge. It is hopeless for me-there is no closeness, there is no truth or refuge or light to grow by.

What if. What if, when you were the wide-eyed freaked kid, the one with the big frozen stuck place inside, what if you had an imaginary friend. What if your sweet Aunt Jemima Momma held you so close. What if she held you and shushed you and brushed the hair off your face and rubbed your back just a little, right behind your heart on your back, little circles of rubs and warmth and shhhh, shhhh, shhhhh.

What if she didn’t say a word and she holds you and every heart beat is a little pulse of warm love. She’s a mountain of love warmth for your inner mountain of fear.

She warms and holds you and she knows. She doesn’t care what you did or about righting wrongs. She cares about that big block of screaming fear pain ice that’s inside you – and she melts it.

You feel her melting it and you feel it melting deep inside and when you are ready you talk. You talk and tell the pictures in your brain-eyes and say the feelings in your heart-hurt and stomp out the mean-mad in your hands and legs and she holds you.

She takes it all and she soaks it up and the more you let it out, the more love there is. There is a huge warm chocolate river of love connecting you together and you are safe and warm and no matter the horrors out there or inside, cuz she melts you soft again. Warm again. Safe again.