Listen to the Footsteps

I’m walking down the hallway when I think about footsteps. When I think about shadows. When I think about silhouettes projected on the empty walls, projected up there like we own them. We are puppeteers and the shadows are our friends, dancing in time with our jagged jerks and pulls. Yanking their strings to tell the world, Stop, look at me. I’m fine.

And I wonder if people can hear sadness from footsteps; hear the heaviness, hear the dragging on and on to nowhere. I’m always hoping that these heavy feet will lead me somewhere, but we always stop at the end of that hallway once again, where the shadows grab my hand and tell me it’s okay. Come with us, they whisper. Like a fool, I let myself believe them. Because whispered words from demon shadows are far more comforting than the silent words screaming in the back of human heads.

My old therapist once asked me what sadness felt like and I said, “Heaviness.” She looked at me funny like she didn’t know what I meant, even though she was the therapist and she was the one who has seen plenty of sadness in her years of practice. She asked me what I meant by heaviness, asked me what the heaviness felt like, asked me to go further to help her understand. Further down that hallway that we pretend is never there, and yet it is where I so frequently reside.

But the sadness buried my words and nothing came out besides a small, “I don’t know…never mind.” And we dropped it just like that, stopped talking about sadness. Just like always. Just like everyone who has ever walked into the hallway of my life. One breath of sadness and we cut it right out, cover it up with ambiguous shadows that hide the true shape of reality. Pretend it was never there, pretend those small breaths of fear were never taken. Even though it is in these times that the sadness must be embraced. It is in these times that we must walk a little further down that empty hallway, where my silhouette is a ghost against the light shadows on the wall.

All I can do is take their hand, walk a little further where they torture me with fear. With sadness. With heaviness. Because trusting the demons of my head are much more comforting than listening to the screaming words that the reality around me always pretends was never there. Close your eyes, blink one two and the shapes on the walls have already changed. Disappeared. And I’m gone.