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I wrote the following a few days ago. It had been raining for a week and my mood was as downcast as the Florida skies.

It is rare of me to write of my mental illness without trying to point out a silver lining of some sort.

There is no silver here, and I apologize for that. I post this solely in the hope that it might enlighten someone as to the silent disease many of us battle daily.

Next time, I promise brighter words under a brighter sky.

***

I imagine a blaring white sky.

Like the sole, rotting tooth in an old man’s forced smile, Haley Center’s ten stories punctures the haze-infested heavens of Auburn, Alabama.

The grass burned yellow from a sweltering September sun lies brittle and sick on the hillside. The breeze lies strangled and forgotten in the car-choked parking lots.

The war eagle stares blandly from its cage.

Everything aches…

If life was a book and a morning merely a choreographed scene, this is how the day I lost my mind would have played.

Yes, like a badly written freshman English composition. I was, after all, only a freshman. Nineteen years old and so green it hurt.

But life is not a book and all my scenes were ad-libbed abstracts of a mute.

It was slow, the losing of my mind. It meandered more than it leaped. Every step heavier and crueler than the last…

I still drag a leg sometimes. Always will, I suppose.

I should have written this better. It should be clearer, less clichés, more insight. Forgive me, but this was nothing more than a hit and run – words better apart than recklessly collided…

But sometimes I close my eyes and I wish there had been that one moment to point to.

A certain hour, a particular sky, a singular day to “x” out every year on the calendar.

It would be so much easier to “x” out one day of my life instead of two decades.

*sighs*

Well, that’s over now. Nothing more to see here. You can move on.

As for me, I now open my eyes and limp slowly away from this poorly written scene.

***

As always, thank you for your company.

Sincerely,
Cora Douglas Sands