beatrice zodiia - d7 - wip

Happiness was something I viewed as a luxury a long time ago, when it was a merely a wisp of something that I could see but never reach. I thought I was going to stay in the perpetual state of having my desire to do anything constantly ripped away from me, motivation reduced to a four syllable ghost lingering in the back of my mind.

You see, when people leave, it means they simply don’t care. It means that all the possible strings that could leave to someone caring for another have left, or were never there at all, and so the person must go off in wanderlust to find them. And although the deserter doesn’t feel anything except, perhaps, a subtle nag and occasional remorse, they hold up pretty well. But the people left behind are so used to the strings holding them together they simply can’t stand on their own.

Of course, I talk a lot for someone who’s only been on one side of the spectrum. The side whose population are left broken and wondering what they did wrong, asking themselves what they needed to do to be better.

At the tender age of eight is when it happened, where the peaceful solace of childhood was prematurely interrupted by an a deafening absence. My poor mother was bombarded with questions dripping with torturingingly hopeful innocence. She did her best, I know, but we all, one way or another, eventually reached the same conclusion; Dad was gone, and he probably wasn’t ever coming back. It left a rip in the Zodiia’s history that refused to seal.

Nine is an impressionable age. And when a girl is with her friend, and she explains to him that her father left a year ago, and he tells her ( perhaps jokingly ) that it was probably her fault, that little, sweet nine year old girl has a lot to think about. It sticks in her brain, day in and day out, until it is almost an obsession. It took two years to manifest, but it sprouted in me all the same. My thoughts nurtured it, time let it grow. The sadness was almost disarming. It stole away everything from me, and filled me with a numbness that was painful in a blank kind of way. Hopelessness was something that seemed to kill me from the inside out. There was a little voice whispering into me, telling me everything I did was wrong, that I was just a burden. It led me to feel very anxious about my mistakes and how others would take them.

It would have been nice to say that it was the night I let it all out to my mother was the night that left me healed. But the next morning, I couldn't feel anything different except for the weights that were deadbolted to my chest. But over the course of months, it slowly left me. It was a gradual leaving, something of a marathon rather than the sprint my father had. Of course, it never left. There was still a slight fear of a relapse later in life, but for the time being, I treasured every good day as my last great day, because you'll never know when that will be, and whether it will be your last because of depression, or because of death.

But I'm almost happy it happened, because I feel like joy would have been such a minute detail in my small life, something too small enough to really care about. But really, life isn't just one small thing you're supposed to cram a bunch of big things into for it to matter. It's supposed to be a big thing that you cram with small things. That's life. Or, at least, life that's worth anything.

I guess it's hard to see a bright side of things when everything is so dark, but I do. Darkness is something I'm blind to, or at least, I pretend I am. I have found, over the years, that pretending I'm happy usually ends up with me being happy, intentionally or not.