if my sadness were a person, i think i’d ask her, what’s wrong? not because i don’t already know, but because i still want to hear her say it. at the end of everything, there’s never a real solution for me. i am the way i am because i am. but sometimes i wonder, what if i wasn’t? what if i could talk to my sadness, really talk to her, and tell her that i want to help her, that i love her, but also that i never want to see her again, because she makes me feel poor.

she makes me remember things i try not to, like the way the sarah’s and the sage’s stopped being my friends in high school, said i was too much, too sad all the time. i think about how i pull away from my sadness now, the same way they pulled away from me. and i wonder how that makes her feel. my sadness. i wonder if she knows i’m trying to leave her behind, even as she keeps sitting beside me, quietly, waiting.

quietly waiting like i did for my father to arrive. and he never came. said he was going to, and believe him i did, again and again. i wonder if that’s how my sadness feels when i allow myself to be happy. like maybe things are really different, and we don’t have to be afraid anymore. but time and time again, the walls come crashing down, and the sadness lingers.

i think, sadly, i am my sadness. for so much of my life, she has been engraved in me, has molded me, shaped me into who i am. without her, i don’t know who i would be. isn’t that sad? that without sadness in my life, i wouldn’t know what else to feel. has it really been that long? all i feel now are waves of down and gloom. the only time i’m high is the mania that creeps in at night. but without that, i’m just blue.

my mother will tell you the first time she met my sadness was when i was as young as two. wondering what was wrong with me, at such a young age i couldn’t even grasp what was to come, and neither could she. she said she saw it in the way i cried and the way i laughed. like a sadness that lingered in everything, like it had already taken root. a shadow behind my smile, a heaviness in joy that didn’t belong to someone so small. she says it was always there, and maybe she’s right. maybe my sadness didn’t show up later. maybe she’s always been with me. maybe she is me.

well then what if my sadness is me? what does that make me? what does that make my life, my future, my destiny? was i cursed to bear this cross forever? did someone choose this for me? did i? or was it stitched into me before i ever opened my eyes, like a birthmark beneath the skin, only visible to the ones who really looked within?

sometimes i wonder if there’s a version of me buried deep inside, untouched by this sadness. someone softer, lighter. someone easier to love. someone i could even love myself. but if she exists, i’ve never met her. and the longer i go, the more i think maybe she was never there at all. maybe the only “me” there’s ever been is this one.

how can i like me
when i am me
and i am sad?

it’s not just a question. it’s a mirror. and some days, i can’t look straight into it. some days, i turn away. because the truth is, i don’t know how to love something so full of sorrow. i don’t know how to hold myself without also holding the weight. and i want to be more than this. i want to be more than sad. but i don’t know where sadness ends and i begin.