Weight

Sadness has weight.

In my youth, I was well acquainted with this weight; comfortable and seductively warm, it settled over me like a well-worn blanket. I wore it like a velvet albatross around my neck – it was almost sleek in how it felt, a presence against my heart that lured me into quiet contemplation. It brought on a lethargy that slowed time down for me; an antithesis to action, it gave me the room to think, to expand, to seep into spaces I would not normally consider. And when the moment came to pass through into something else, when the weight fell away, I felt all the more free for having carried it about on my shoulders (which had acted as a scale to the real and imagined griefs I had conjured).

It is not a mantle I wear so often in adulthood; anxiety and stress have replaced sadness and depression. They were luxuries of youth. Now, I do not often have the time, the room, for such things. I can be a dark person, but it comes now from my cruelty in action and not so much from a brooding demeanor.

And the familiar weight has long been absent, a friend thought of but seldom spoken to.

I believe there are times I miss it.