A Corpse That Smiles

Functioning depression is a wearing a corpse that walks and smiles. My thoughts are my own predators, circling, waiting for the moment I forget to guard myself. On the surface, I can laugh, hold conversations, crack jokes, check boxes, keep pace with the living. I’m holding it together so well even I almost believe the performance. The next, without warning, the ground gives way beneath me, and I’m falling through a trapdoor I never saw. Sometimes I don’t even realize what set it off until days later, when the storm has already ravaged my mind and left nothing but the wreckage inside me.

It feels like my chest is its own coffin, heavy and unmovable, with a stone weight pressing down where my heart should be. It’s as though I were buried alive but still expected to smile and wave through the dirt. My ribcage is not a home for lungs but a tomb where air decays before it reaches me. Every breath feels like an act of defiance. Every smile rehearsed. Every joke carefully curated for maximum effectiveness. I push people away because self-imposed exile feels safer than offering pieces of myself to connections that only ever skim the surface. I tell myself there is beauty in my solitude… light streaming through cracks, quiet mornings where no one asks anything of me… but the truth is, it’s just a veil over the unbearable truth. A way to survive the far uglier truth that I cannot stand my own company. I cannot stand the echo of my own existence. Loneliness is not peaceful; it is a predator that gnaws at me in the dark. But it is still safer, I tell myself… safer than the sharp, brittle edges of false connections. Safer than letting anyone pry close enough to see the rot festering beneath my skin, the hollowed-out places I keep stitched together with lies and rehearsed smiles. Safer than letting someone truly look at me, the ragged, raw thing I have become, and watching them recoil, slow and inevitable, as if my decay is contagious. The thought twists inside me like a knife, and I wrap myself tighter in the darkness I know, clinging to the silence that shields me from the eyes that would flee.

When people notice I’ve gone quiet, they don’t really see me… they see the mask fraying, the carefully constructed illusion splintering. Their discomfort hangs heavier than my silence. They say I’ve become distant, but what they mean is: you’ve stopped pretending and it makes me uncomfortable. They ask me what’s wrong, they beg me to open up, but the moment I do, their faces harden, their words rush in to silence me: don’t say things like that. As if those five words could cauterize an open wound. A command, not compassion. As if being told not to feel what I feel could perform the miracle of resurrection, could somehow make the dying parts of me walk again. But wounds do not obey orders, and the silence that follows is a grave they refuse to help me climb out of.

I’ve seen this theater before, every act scripted and polished, the same hollow choreography repeated like a broken record. People justify their distance with scripts like, “well, he never reached out to me, she never asked” as though the drowning are meant to send invitations from under the water. And when the inevitable happens, when the truth surfaces too late, the eulogies begin. The same tired hymn of regret: I wish they had told someone. I wish I had known. Their laments fit together like brittle paper, folding into the empty chorus: I tried. But no one ever really does. Not in the way that counts. To try is to stand in the fire with someone as the flames lick your feet, to carry their war on your own back when their legs have turned to stone. Most people would rather sing their elegies than bear that kind of weight, would rather polish the shiny lie of effort than bleed alongside the ones they claim to love. Most people would rather watch someone drown than feel the ice coldness of the water themselves. Because to stay, to really help, demands a brutality they are unwilling to endure… a willingness to descend into the darkness they pretend doesn’t exist.

What they want is balance, a tidy exchange of energy, measured like coins dropped into a jar: I’ll meet you where you are. But where I am, there is no ground beneath my feet, only water that presses against my chest, cold and unrelenting, clawing at my lungs, seeping into every opening. I flail, arms slicing through the current, legs kicking against nothing, lungs screaming for air that will not come, and they expect me to maintain equilibrium, to hand them the rhythm of my survival like it’s simple. You don’t wait until someone is drowning to teach them how to swim. You dive in. You grab them by the shoulders and drag them through the weight and the dark, even when the water claws at your own skin. Or you step away, hands clean, and watch the surface close over them, their struggles swallowed by the relentless current. And in that choice, the refusal to descend, the refusal to bleed alongside them lies the cruelest truth: most people will always walk away. Most people prefer to remain untouched, while you thrash beneath the waves, lungs burning, chest collapsing under the water’s weight, fighting for air that will never be shared, and the surface above stays cruelly indifferent, mocking every desperate stroke.

So I stop fighting when people step away. I let it happen, letting their absence roll over me like a tidal wave, dragging me into a dark, uncharted current. I tell myself it is fate, that I am too jagged, too heavy, too fractured to be carried, too broken to ever be truly loved. That this hollowing emptiness that gnaws at my ribs is mercy. Each departure carves a new cavern inside me, echoing with the temptation to disappear, until vanishing feels inevitable… a relief I cannot resist. With every step back they take, the urge coils tighter, a living thing, constricting, pulling me inward. Solitude begins to feel like sanctuary, but a sanctuary that watches me, still waiting and hungry. Silence becomes a companion that breathes against my neck, steady and patient, its edges sharp enough to cut, its embrace close enough to suffocate. I run my hands along its contours until the bite of it feels familiar, until the darkness becomes a home that claims me. Until I believe the stillness is not merely safety, it is survival, and I am exactly where I was always meant to be.

The silence I’m left with is both punishment and comfort. I’ve cried so much I’ve run out of tears, so I sit with a chest determined to split itself open, repeating my empty mantra - it is what it is, it. is. what. it. is. - like a rosary, though it offers no salvation. Acceptance has never dulled the blade. I tell myself I’m fine when calls grow shorter, when texts taper off, when my presence becomes an afterthought. I convince myself I bring nothing worth holding onto, nothing worth fighting for. I swallow the proof of my unworthiness like bitter wine. I despise myself so thoroughly that I cannot imagine anyone else wouldn’t eventually reach the same conclusion.

So I run. I run from the weight inside me, from the voices that tell me I am unlovable. I run from the parasite gnawing in my chest. I run until the music doesn’t help anymore, until even the songs that once saved me sounds like static. Until the silence becomes melodic. I run until my lungs ache like torn fabric, until my chest feels as though it’s caving inward. I run until the loneliness doesn’t chase me anymore, it welcomes me, holds me in its skeletal arms, presses its teeth against my throat like a lover.

And when the darkness finally does catch me, when it finally closes its jaws around my throat, I will not resist. I’ll let it devour me whole. Because sometimes, I’m convinced being consumed will be easier than living unseen. At least when that happens, I won’t have to pretend I’m still alive.

But even as it devours me, something burns. Small, stubborn, unwanted. An ember buried deep in my marrow, glowing faintly like a wound that refuses to close. It doesn’t heal me, doesn’t save me, but it keeps me breathing against my will. Maybe it’s instinct, maybe rage, maybe some twisted rebellion… but it is there. The proof that even in the hollowed-out chambers of me, there is something feral that refuses to go quietly. Something that spits blood in the face of the dark and whispers: Not yet.