shades of blue

sometime in the middle of 2022, i started feeling out of time with myself. a half-step behind each movement i made. whatever tethered me to myself loosened its hold, and i became my own bouquet of balloons, dragging myself on so many strings behind me.

a lot had just happened in my life all at once. i had moved to maryland. the day i moved, a category 5 hurricane hit my hometown, and my grandmother had a seizure. my wedding was in three months. i tried very hard to feel anything at all about it during the thirteen hour drive from florida, but all i could do was stare at my hands.

i arrived in maryland in autumn, and found that my depression was seasonal as well as chronic. i couldn't sleep. i couldn't eat. i wandered around my life like a troubled ghost and started having a lot of thoughts about whether i'd make it to thirty.

i visited my mother soon after this started. it had been a couple of years (COVID times), and i was there by myself, staying in my soft pink high school bedroom. she kept it pristine, like a shrine. the entire time i was there, i was boiling under my own skin. i have to tell her, i thought to myself. but i didn’t even know how.

at one point, she held my face gently in her hands and said, you have something no one else has. a light behind your eyes. it's something she's said to me since i was a little girl. i could say it with her in unison at this point, if i wanted. it's the one thing you got from your father that i love.

she watched that light die in my father long before i landed on her earth. every day i could feel it dying in me as well. i sat there wanting to scream, and instead i just smiled.

the second day i was there, we went to see my grandmother at the care center where she was staying. it had been three weeks since her seizure. as we approached her doorway, i was gripped by terror. my chest felt so tight that i couldn't move. i was so scared to see her. i was so scared she wouldn’t recognize me. i reached out to grab someone's hand, but there was no one's hand for me to grab. and then i breathed, and put that feeling into a special gilded box deep inside of me to deal with later, when i was alone.

(she did recognize me, and she recognized me every time after that, until she was gone. at the time, i thought, my fear was silly, then. i had no reason to be scared. in hindsight, i see a 25-year-old girl whose grandma was dying, and it hurts.)

for all my dissociative misery there were also all these odd moments of clarity, where suddenly the lines of my body and the lines of the spirit i had started to wear like a blanket around my shoulders met up again. i remember going to the mall once and buying a cup of mini pigs in a blanket because i thought it might help quell the sensation i had that i was eroding, but then after running across a busy street with them cradled in my arms i tried to eat one and my throat closed and my stomach churned and i remembered i don’t even like hotdogs. briefly, a light turned on. i’ve never liked hotdogs. i felt so dumb.

i guess the greatest punishment of this clarity was that i couldn’t hold onto it. over and over again i’d have my legs knocked back out from under me by the ocean waves of my own stupid life.