Therapy Bits

Morning arrives like a question mark,
curled against the sky, asking nothing kindly.
I wake with a weight that has no handle,
a gravity stitched inside my ribs.
Depression speaks softly, never urgent,
yet it sits in every chair I pass.
It dims the color of coffee,
turns mirrors into cloudy water,
and teaches time to limp instead of run.

Anxiety enters louder, breathless,
tapping its foot in my bloodstream.
It rehearses disasters with intense devotion,
building stages from maybes and what ifs.
My heart becomes a siren without a street,
my thoughts scatter like startled birds.
Even silence feels crowded then,
filled with alarms only I can hear.

Together they form a weather system,
low pressure days, sudden storms at noon.
I carry umbrellas made of jokes,
maps drawn by friends who mean well.
Sometimes the rain listens and eases.
Sometimes it learns my name.

I try small rituals:
opening a window, counting breaths,
touching the solid edge of a table.
I write lists that forgive incompletion,
feed plants that forgive my forgetting.
On braver afternoons, I walk,
letting sidewalks remind me of forward motion.

Hope is not fireworks here;
it is a pilot light refusing to die.
It hums beneath the floorboards of fear,
steady, patient, unimpressed by despair.
Some days I feel it warm my hands.
Some days I only believe in its existence.

Still, I stay.
I stay through the fog and the racing drum.
I stay when joy feels like a foreign language.
I stay because staying is an action.
Because tomorrow might soften its voice.
Because even broken mornings can mend.
Because I am learning, slowly,
that surviving is a quiet kind of courage,
and breathing, again and again,
is a poem my body insists on finishing.

Night teaches me another lesson:
rest is not surrender but strategy.
I place the phone face down,
dim the room, name the shadows.
They shrink when spoken to.
I thank my mind for trying to protect me,
even when it guesses wrong.
I promise to ask for help,
to let hands hold the trembling truth.
Sleep comes imperfectly, but it comes.

Tomorrow, I will practice kindness, starting gently, again.

Fiction Monday – 278 – Void Thoughts