Trees Get Wheeled Away

You know, it's hard to notice sometimes, but it feels like a knife, cutting my heart in half and stealing all the good. They're filling it with poison, but I can feel nothing more than a small tug every so often.

I finished reading a book, and I cried--real, liquid tears. I don't think I've ever cried at the ending of a book, no matter how sad it is, but this one really got to me. A few people that read this know what book I'm reading, so I won't give away the ending to those who also plan to read it, but it was completely unexpected, and almost wrong. It was like triumph and victory for the main character with a page or two left for the absolute worst to happen.

It's weird how life is like that sometimes, how our Christian walk is like that. After the biggest successes, the greatest leaps of growth, we take a small step backwards and end up falling down the pit we just made it across. Yeah, we had the strength to jump, we just lacked the wisdom to realize that we need to learn from our past experiences. We forgot that looking behind can actually benefit us, so we fall into the mess that we have (or Christ has) just overcome.

The first time I ever got depressed, I can hardly remember the reason. It was probably a broken relationship that hadn't even really started mixed in with family problems resulting from the death of a loved one. Depression is different for everyone, some disguise it with anger, some cover is with quietness, others scream for attention, wrap their tears in blood and hate. I started asking for attention. I was young, barely thirteen, the first time I set the scissors on my wrist watched blood start trickling out. If I hadn't wanted attention, I would have picked a better spot. But I wanted it to be out in the open. And it was, at first. I reveled in the attention until I started receiving the wrong kind of attention which resulted in counseling and yelling and a lack of privacy. Then I got a little more secret because the sadness bloomed inside of me like a flower. I was attending church all of this time and Jesus came inside of me like a really good landscaper, buzzing down the weeds that I had allowed to grow. However, I missed the weeds, I wanted them back, so I chose to let them grow, ignoring my landscaper, ignoring what I really needed. The cuts were secret, but then they stopped. I rehired him in the summer while I was away, only to shortly let a new string of weeds grow along my garden of thorns. I tried to make myself disappear, my body, my image became my worst enemy. I rehired him once again during the summer, trying to spread his services and his love to other people the next year. But then I fell in a hole when I met a certain person who said he wanted my landscaper, but really only wanted me and depended on me and blamed me when anything went wrong. My heart was kicked and beaten and bruised until I felt like I had nothing left. I was no longer of garden, but a field of garbage. I was absolute garbage. And I kept running away. I tried to find other people to do the work of the landscaper, they would grow tiny flowers that never seemed to come up right. They would make me happy for months at a time, but end up dying and adding to the rubbish of my wretched field. I tried to think of more ways to make myself disappear, but nothing worked anymore. The guy who hired the good landscaper wanted all of me to stick around because I think he had a big project planned for my field. I just had to make the choice to stop standing in chains, petitioning the reconstruction of my garden. I'm still trying to make that choice.