Story Writing -
I was Depressed , When i saw ........
Answers
He knocked at the door. It was dark inside and he had to turn on the lights to find me.
He found me sitting in the corner of the room, legs folded and drawn to the knees, with my head dropping on them.
‘You missed a call,’ he said gently, my phone in his stretched hands.
I don’t want to talk to anyone,’ I said.
‘It was Natasha,’ he said, as calm as a silent river.
‘I don’t want to talk to anyone,’ I repeated.
He turned off the light and shut the door behind him.
I sat there in darkness in the corner of the room while my 8 months old baby slept on the bed. Natasha was my closest friend, and I didn’t want to talk to her.
I cried again, feeling hopeless. Hopeless about myself, hopeless about the world, and hopeless about my life. The world held no meaning for me anymore, and this burgeoning feeling of worthlessness resonated in me. Again and again.
My baby was born a few months back and we had moved cities. With no sleep, taking care of the new born, a terribly hectic move, setting up the new home, making sure everything about the baby was perfect, I was a walking dead.
A depressed walking dead.
While we settled down in the new city, I had changed immensely. It was not the same me anymore, smiling, cheerful, bright, always motivated and in high spirits. I was more withdrawn and silent with occasional bouts of a latent anger. Mostly cantankerous and sad, I kept to myself. The most minor things disturbed me, a wrongly placed doormat, or a missing towel, a misplaced pen brought out the worst in me.
My routine with the new born was overwhelming for me. Perennially sleep deprived, I didn’t know what I ate, and when I ate I could only feel the coldness of the food. I would often forget where I had kept my plate because I was always running around finishing tasks of the baby and home. The baby was an extremely light sleeper, and that added to my misery. The slightest sound and he would be up. Once, I took a bite of an apple while the tiny one was sleeping next to me, and that one crunch woke him up.
I needed help with the baby, but I could not rely on my husband. Everything he did seemed irrational to me. Looking back I know there was this motherly instinct of things going wrong that had gripped me, and that made me refuse help from him. While on one hand, I saw him get up each time I woke up at night to feed and clean the baby and silently understood that he was being immensely co-operative, on the other hand, I felt that he would not do things for the baby the way it needed to be.
I was tied and tugged between an anger for him and a love for him, and when I weighed these feelings, anger was on the heavier scale.
My husband, whom I loved more than anyone else, had almost become a stranger to me. Whenever we talked, it was more of a fight. If it was not an explicit one, it was a cold war. While I silently waited for him to come back home from work every evening, I never expressed my happiness on seeing him. All the warmth of my happy home had suddenly been stolen by an ugly, icy wind.
‘He has changed. He does not love me anymore,’ I said to myself constantly. There was a time when I almost waited for him to just ask me to leave.
Torn in this cogwheel of negative feelings, I continued to live. Lifelessly.
Now, when I think of his situation back then, my husband had a lot going on. A new job, a new city, a terrible boss to deal with everyday, the daily drive through the conundrum of traffic; life was difficult for him. What made it more difficult was probably a perennially angry and sad wife. However, not once did he let me know of anything that was eating into him because he knew I was struggling with my own situation. He maintained his composure and fought with his time.