The Unwanted Guest

If you want the edges of me, you’ll find them here – pressed between trauma, gallows humor, and grace.

Allow me a moment to sketch the edges of my lived experience.

Perhaps it will shed some light on why I drape myself in a blanket of twilight.

I will speak in metaphor, hoping to mirror emotion back to you, reader.

Behind eyes older than flesh should carry in a child,

pierced by pangs of fist and open-hand education,

love denied to my face by the father of my birth,

for some perceived slight against his honor –

requests for mercy refused,

responded to with hatred and lies.

So much so that the child I was surrendered.

She withered and cried,

and even as she died, she knew:

another would rise,

a version of me free enough to become whole.

I have seen much,

paid prices beyond what most would dare to count,

held together by the thinnest layers of glue,

laminated by Love in the Spirit of God.

When I left those halls of youth in violence,

it freed me in ways I never knew possible –

yet added still more layers to unlearn,

to grow through.

The hands that once held me

lost their grip with distance,

and even that was a price to pay:

isolation, a family only created not inherited,

loneliness eased only by immersion in God.

I left like the father who made me this way,

and it would be twenty years

before I became who I am.

A long walk in the dark.

I am still lonely, still unseen,

still reaching, still yearning.

But my yearning is filled with Him now.

Even when I am small,

when I am frightened,

He is my refuge.

Depression, though –

it became such a regular guest it moved in.

Hung a sign on its door:

“Major Depressive Disorder,”

and slammed it in my face.

Now I house an unwanted tenant in my attic.

It stomps around when I need sleep,

moans and complains.

I called an exorcist to banish it –

the priest named Psychology –

who told me to get comfortable,

it’s here to stay.

But he handed me incense for the altar,

called it Effexor,

and told me to breathe deep.

This is a little gallows humor for those of us who have been living with such mental health struggles. No insult, just lived experience.

As always Dust,

To you,

For you,

From Him,

In Me.