The black demon comes from out of nowhere, obliterating previous thoughts and feelings, destroying all that was before, changing me into an anomaly no longer recognizable even to myself. It’s tentacles spread themselves like a cancer through my body into my brain feeding on the life that was once there and leaving behind a frightened, desperate shell of a human who crawls through each day certain that this time it will not leave as it has always done in the past but this time will stay and complete it’s task. 

The days are endless, without color or hue much like a gray day of winter when the trees are in death, leaves long gone. Hope of spring, of rebirth is never to be felt again. In nature, seasons come and go and spring follows winter when the ice thaws and buds spring up again and blossom and the cycle of life once again becomes beautiful. Not so with the demon of depression. The trees remain in death eternally - immobile, unmoving, accepting only of the icy coldness that comes with winter. There will never again be a spring or a summer or even a fall. There is no hope. Hope is a word that never was. Michael reminds me of hope, promising me I have been in this place before and it has always ended and it will again. But I know this time it will not. This time is the last.

There have been so many winters before that have ended and life has returned to me. But this one I will not make it through. I’m too weak from hanging on, I have the strength of one whose body has been ravaged by cancer, so badly that death would be a kind ending to the sufferer. But for me, it is my mind that has been ravaged by the depression, so completely stripped of any remote form of hope that death would be a welcome ending to the enormous emotional pain of having my mind consumed with black and tortured thoughts and feelings.

I have stayed alive for only one person. How could a girl, even a grown woman, understand a man who would take his own life? How would she learn to accept it, even knowing that I’ve had this illness for years? Could she ever understand that for me, it was only an end to the pain that I desired? Could she ever believe that if I truly loved her as I do that I could leave her without a friend? a brother? perhaps more. She is so proud of my tenacity and my strength. How could I take that from her?

Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, I wake up one day, months after this demon has inhabited me, and I think I might feel like getting dressed and going out today. But I’m afraid to trust the feeling. So I tell no one. I simply continue to wait. And then the next day I wake up and it’s gone. Completely. As if the prayers for me have at last been heard by God and He has answered. I am grateful beyond explanation but I do not understand. 

Because this has happened so many times before and still it always comes back. I am grateful for the reprieve but my fervent prayer is that it will leave me for good lest I someday cannot bear to go on and manage to finally take my life.

The saga continues.....