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Dragon

A Poem to the Depression in My Life

By Brigitte VonPublished 5 years ago 4 min read
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“You can’t change my family,” I said, “They are the ones that ruined me.” He didn’t look at all convinced.

“I don’t want to change anyone. I only want to keep you.” That’s how arguments usually start. It’s not heated. It’s not icy. It’s desperate for answers, desperate for someone to understand. I’m not exactly sure if he understood anything I was trying to tell him. Maybe that’s why I got upset. Maybe that’s why I kept so much in and let him believe I was okay.

All my life I have been searching for someone to understand. I started searching when I was eight years old and none of my class mates could imagine that I was fighting a dragon to save them. I explained the intricate details of the dragon. The way she smelled like sulfur and heat, the way she was taking her wrath out on us for being good kids against her wishes. People look at me the same way now when I tell them I’m still fighting a dragon, but that dragon has a different name.

This dragon is much uglier. It’s harsher. And it doesn’t eat you all at once because it doesn’t eat flesh. It gnaws at your soul for the rest of your life until your dying day. That’s when the dragon gives you back to the earth, and you realize you’re hollow as the chocolate bunnies sold for Valentine’s Day. Except when someone looks back at your memory, there isn’t going to be anything sweet about you because that was the first thing the dragon took.

The dragon knows there’s nothing you can do to stop it because it’s bigger than the millions of universes and deeper than the love between two people. Yes, even love can’t stop this dragon. I’ve tried, and I come back from battle worn through, bruised up, soul bleeding, heart failing, limbs numb. It brings a realization that love isn’t the most important thing because people like me can’t think of others 100% of the time. We can hardly take care of ourselves and keep us going. I’ve been told that in order to have love with someone, you have to be rid of everything that makes us human to be happy.

How can I get rid of the dragon when I’m too weak to even get out of bed in the morning because it’s sapped up my strength to move and speak and eat and breathe?

“You want to keep me?” I asked harshly, the tears already flowing onto my clothes and into my pores, as permanent as a tattoo. “Then help me fight this! Pick me up and carry me because I don’t have the strength to do it by myself!” The sobs wrecked my body, and I collapsed onto the floor begging for death to take me away from this life. I had been forced into it while my mother screamed and my father fainted and my brother wretched up his dinner because there was too much blood.

We come into this world the same way we leave it. We’re covered in life, and we’re disoriented, and we can’t breathe, and so many people are fussing and worrying, and we can’t get a moment’s peace to ourselves. It’s like when fire burns a building down. I wonder if it’ll be the same in the cemetery when my corpse is buried and consumed for the last time. I wonder if a fire will break out and eat what’s left of us dead ones, and people will ask, “Where did the fire come from?” and my children will know oh too well where it did, and they’ll say, “The dragon is dead now.”

And I wonder if I’ll smile surrounded by dragon fire, the flesh peeling off my bones, the feeling much like that first warm breeze of spring which makes even the quietest person laugh because everything is going to live again. The flowers will bloom stronger after that fire. The grass will be greener, the trees will grow taller, and the earth will rise up despite the harm. It will be my last defiant act against the dragon, and it will be everything I have ever wanted.

At last, I fought back and came out with my sword in the air singing because even though I had been so tired and so lost, I had found the spark of life that I had lost so many years before. The spark that made the earth grow. The spark that told me I wasn’t alone.

The spark that whispered, strongly, “You’ve won.”

sad poetry
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