Major Recurrent Depression by Samantha Moya

2:30am, a glass of water straight from the tap,

somewhere between violets and lilies –

(I stopped buying flowers because they were too expensive.)

 

Kicking off the blanket because it’s too hot, pulling it back up because it’s too cold.

 

I loved your dimples and thought they were kind, and so did everyone else.

 

I inherit this disposition; my childhood home is falling apart,

and it’s almost funny because it seems like a metaphor but it’s quite literal.

The roof is caving in, the floor is sinking,

and I think the cobwebs have ruined my VHS tapes.

 

I smashed the clock I remember from my youth.

I wasn’t trying to stop time but I was trying to stop something else from moving.

 

Everyone says don’t take it personally but how is it ever not personal

Sometimes I read Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband –

it’s unbearably sad but it’s also a love letter.

 

Scars are figurative and very real –

I have the stretch marks from my old body

and the place where I stuck a razor when I was 26.

 

It’s embarrassing how old habits don’t die,

you’d think that eventually it should all wash away,

like runoff in the gutter.

Samantha Moya is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. She studies Political Science and does her own writing and arts on the side. She is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico and currently resides in Boulder, CO with her partner and two dogs.