Melancholy

Melancholy has alabaster skin, with eyes like heavy pools full of infinite depths. Her hair
is golden, shimmering with mirage. She is garbed in a robe made of cobwebs which glisten with
dewdrops. She possesses the beauty that perplexes men to scrutinize undecipherable paintings
for hours, the same beauty as the ocean that produces life and drowns life, the beauty that causes
joyous men and women to weep and mournful birds to sing.
Melancholy likes to create. She sits before my easel, paintbrush in hand, pallet in the
other, and from her hollow soul she renders images of ineffable emptiness. With my notebooks
she scribes page after page of scrawled words and incomplete thoughts; her handwriting is
shockingly similar to mine. But she can never write on her own. Her friends Rage and
Exasperation like to assist with their wild ideas and crazy fantasies.
Those two tear me apart like lions to the flesh, but Melancholy has a more subtle art to
her cruelty. She is the river, and I, the stone. The current carries mesometimes I lie on the
beach, in the air and the sun, and other times, in the muck of the riverbed. Her waters are like hot
ice, her devastating tendrils warped around my heart, eroding all that I am into what I had been.
With a tug of her skeleton hands on the reigns, the hollow feeling in my chest exacerbates. Day
by day the chasm grows wider.
Melancholy trails me everywhere. Sometimes she hovers directly beside me, icy breath
tickling my neck, an incessant shadow over my shoulder. Other times I am able to distance
myself, though shes never far behind. She peeks around the corner as I stroll by, waves to me
from the window of my office. No matter how far I may wander, she always follows me.
During the daylight hours, I ignore her to the best of my ability, but she persists. When
the sun disappears and the world is enveloped in the cloak of night, she rolls in like a storm. Oh,

how she loves our late-night conversations when we sit beside the window under the yellow
glow of a lamp past its bedtime. Often I can speak to her for five minutes before growing
disgusted with myself and forcing slumber upon my clouded mind. But that occasional night
when her doubts crawl beneath my skinlittle sleep can be found on that night.
Sometimes what we say doesnt make sense. She whispers the most intricate
phantasmagoric enigmas to me. Theyre simple to her, but to me they are like the cobwebs that
arrange her gown; the more I pull them apart, the more entangled they become until I can no
longer shake them from my mind.
Perhaps I enjoy Melancholys company more than I can admit. She knows my secrets,
my emotions, the dark abysses that spot my soul. I neednt tell her a thing, but somehow she
knows what it is that plagues me. Rarely could I be lonely in her presence.
She is both my comfort and my curse, and I, her victim and her friend.