Cheese Bag

A little art therapy as I realized how my creative phases were like the water cycle 🌧️ If you’re also in a bit of a creative “dry spell”, this one’s for you.

but emergencies are loud, and passionate, and hit the floor. you are not a lion or a hurricane, you just live in a pretty okay apartment and your back hurts. you wake up and drag yourself out of bed and banish what if i was dead thoughts like cobwebs. you pick out your clothes and try to stay active. you apply for jobs on the internet.

the anxiety is a wave, and the depression is a spiral. the other stuff keeps things "colorful." you mitigate your symptoms and take your meds when you have them and you try to hang out with friends. you go home and your head is full of riverwater. no matter how much you sleep, you still stay tired. you journal and practice gratitude and build from the bottom upwards. and still, the haunting.

you're not a 911 call or a shriek. you're just staring up at the ceiling and feeling the house settle into your bones. you feel you are playacting as a wolf when you're only a sheep. not quite dry and not quite drowning.

in the dream of that house, you sometimes remember meals and silence and long hallways and your hand cramping over your homework. you sometimes remember the yelling or the limegreen falsehood veneer your parents could construct in the presence of guests. mostly you remember the way time seeped through you, dripped onto everything, how the words it'll get better felt like an arrow through your chest.

you would lay in bed and hope for death with the same fantasy air as romance, picturing a glorious coffin. sometimes you'd picture a dramatic end or a tragic illness that would sweep you away. but mostly you pictured some kind of strange miracle; that you'd go to sleep and simply never have to deal with that again.

when you got out, you had to burn the atmosphere to escape. these days you reside on another planet entirely: one bright and full of lights and color and friends and spice and laughter.

and still sometimes when people say summer, you still remember the back deck. you still remember building a castle. you still remember the birds. when you lay yourself down at night - some part of you still whispers about catacombs, and the dark, and the bones.