Depression as a wound

It all started when I woke up one Saturday morning and saw it–a faint red patch just above my stomach. At first, I thought it was nothing more than a smudge, perhaps from the way I had slept or something that brushed against me in the night. Perhaps an insect bite. I was a deep sleeper, so there’s a possibility.
I went into the bathroom, wet my fingers and scrubbed, expecting it to fade, but it stayed. It wasn’t there yesterday. I had no birthmark.

I shrugged and put on my shirt. It was easier to ignore something small, to pretend it didn’t exist. Yet, like all wounds that fester when neglected, it waited.

On Monday, the classroom felt smaller. Or maybe it was just my eyes. The walls pressed in, and every sound, the shuffle of feet, the tapping of pens, was louder than it should’ve been.

Miss Kate stood in front of us, tall and slim, her dark skin glowing under the flickering fluorescent light. Her silky hair framed her face neatly, and her pointed shoes clicked on the tiles like a metronome pinning us to our seats, reminding us to sit straighter, listen harder. She wasn’t very nice, but she wasn’t cruel either. Maybe that was what 7th graders needed. She was the kind of teacher who made you unsure whether you mattered to her at all.

That morning, she announced there would be a debate. “We need to win this one,” she said, scanning the room as if the right person was written across our foreheads. My hand shot up before I thought about it. I wanted to try. I really liked debating.

But Miss Kate’s eyes paused on me with a face calm enough to sting,
“I think you should sit this one out. The school needs its best chance.” she said.

She didn’t say I was still grieving my father. She didn’t say I wasn’t smart enough. She didn’t have to. Both possibilities rolled around in my head like unsettling marbles.

I sat back down quietly. There was this pulse beneath my shirt where the patch was meant to be. It hurt, but softly. Not enough to make me cry, but enough to remind me that it was there.

My father passed away eight months ago. I didn’t cry when it happened. I didn’t even understand what was going on at first. Everyone kept saying words that blurred into each other: condolences, arrangements, burial, loss. It was only three months later that it hit me—that he wasn’t coming back from that trip. That the empty chair at the dining table was not a mistake of timing but of permanence.

I was very sad. I still am. I miss him every day. Some mornings I wake up expecting his voice in the hallway, and then the silence comes heavy, pressing down on my chest like a stone.

Maybe Miss Kate still felt pity for me. Maybe that’s why she didn’t pick me for the debate. Or maybe it wasn’t pity, maybe she really thought I wasn’t good enough. The uncertainty gnawed at me more than the answer itself. Still, I worked harder. I buried myself in books, notes, speeches—anything that would prove her wrong.

I wanted so badly to show her I could be a winner, too.

Over the years, the red patch grew darker. It spread like ink on paper. I was afraid to tell anyone about it. Mom was already struggling to make ends meet, paying school fees for me and my younger brother. I didn’t want it to be another medical issue, another reason for her to stretch her already-thin arms further until they snapped. So I kept it to myself.

Every girl I tried talking to in my class mocked me and how I looked. I decided to stay on my own. They can’t hurt me if they can’t reach me.

In 11th grade, I had my first crush. Daniel. Daniel was, in every way, the dream boy of every sixteen year old. Tall, gentle, attentive. He had a laugh that made you want to laugh too, even if you didn’t understand the joke. We became friends, and with time, I found myself sharing almost everything with him—my lunch, my homework, little secrets I had never said out loud before. I told him about my father and how he died in a car crash. Daniel told me it was okay, and he understood. I felt seen.

One afternoon, after school, Daniel invited me to his house to play some games. I told him I couldn’t stay long, that I needed to help Mom in her shop. But because it was Daniel, because it was easier to say yes to him than no, I agreed.

When we got there, his parents weren’t home which was strange. Still, I followed him inside, trying to ignore the nervous flutter in my stomach. We sat on the couch and played board games, laughing when one of us cheated or lost. He offered me food, and I took it. That was the last thing I remembered before everything went dark.

I woke up in a place I didn’t recognize, the sky outside already pitch black. My body felt strange, heavy, wrong. I started to cry, but the sound caught in my throat. A fire began inside me, rising from the red patch above my stomach, climbing into my chest. It tried to escape through my mouth, but my throat felt knotted, tied in a way that made breathing almost impossible. The wound was no longer silent. It was screaming inside me, but no one else could hear it.

I stumbled my way out, asking strangers until I found familiar roads. By the time I got home, Mom was frantic. She had already gone to my school, searching for me. When she saw me, she shouted and cried at the same time, her voice breaking in ways I had never heard before.

“Where have you been?” she demanded.

“I don’t remember,” I whispered. Trying to force the words out of my knotted throat. “I was… with a friend and I don’t remember what happened.”

And in that instant, she knew. Or maybe she guessed. Her face twisted with something between anger and despair.

“How could you do this Dinma?” she spat. “why have you decided to bring shame into this family? After everything we’ve been through?” she wailed.

I wanted to cry with her. To tell her I didn’t mean for any of this to happen and I also don’t know what is going on. That I needed to hug her and I wanted to scream. But I stood there, the tears falling uncontrollably.

“You’ve disgraced me, Dinma. You’ve hurt your mother” she went inside her room leaving me at the door of the house.

Her words struck deeper than Daniel’s betrayal, deeper than the fire in my chest. They sank into the wound, feeding it until it felt like the red patch might consume me whole.

The next week, I went back to school, my stomach still tight from the fire that wouldn’t let me sleep. I thought maybe, just maybe, I could slip back into routine, pretend everything was normal. But it didn’t take long. By lunchtime, the boys in my class had started whispering, then laughing, then pointing when they thought I wasn’t looking. I didn’t know how much Daniel had told them. I didn’t want to know. What mattered was that the laughter found me everywhere–in the classroom, in the hallway, even in my dreams.

I tried to hold it in, tried to swallow the lump that stayed in my throat, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t take the mockery. So I left. I begged Mom to transfer me, and eventually, she agreed. But a new school didn’t mean a new life.

By the time I graduated, I knew I couldn’t afford to go further. College was a luxury, and luxuries were not for people like me. I needed to work, to help Mom keep the lights on and pay for my brother’s schooling. So I folded my dreams into the corners of secondhand clothes and job applications.

Meanwhile, the red patch had begun to spread. It crawled down my arms, peeked out from the edges of my sleeves, and darkened across my legs. I wore more clothes to cover it, even in the heat. No one could see the wound if I wrapped myself tightly enough. No one could know.

By then, the red patch had taken everything. My laughter. My voice. My will. It was no longer just on my skin. It was me.

I found a job working as a caregiver, then as a housekeeper, and later a waitress. I did what I could to stay afloat.

I worked hard enough to save a little money. Enough for Mom and my brother to eat without counting every grain of rice. Enough to pay his school fees. Enough to finally buy myself a form for a public institution. I thought it was impossible, but somehow, the endless hours of caregiving, housekeeping, and waitressing stitched together into something close to a future.

When the admission letter came, I held it in trembling hands. It didn’t feel like mine. It felt like I had stolen it from a version of myself who never had to wear long sleeves to cover her wounds.

On my first day, I met Cherish, my roommate.
Sweet syllables, too gentle for my rusted tongue. She laughed easily, shared her food without measuring, asked questions without demanding answers. She was nice, I didn’t trust nice people. The idea of friendship scared me more than exams or debts. Every time she offered to share her things, I thought it was a setup. A trick. Some shadow of Daniel’s betrayal replaying itself in a different costume.

So I ignored her kindness, kept my distance.
But proximity is a quiet thief. It steals away suspicion in the small hours of shared living:
two girls brushing teeth at the same sink,
two girls whispering before sleep,
two girls who learn each other’s breathing patterns before they learn each other’s stories.

It was then I noticed the boy, the boy with Cherish. The boy always staring over Cherish shoulders. I’ve learnt that boys are all the same. They destroy things thay were never theirs.
I thought they were together, so when he tried to speak to me one afternoon, my chest tightened. I thought he was planning something evil, maybe trying to use Cherish to get close to me. Or trying to get her to hate me. So I cut him off before he could even begin.

He approached me one hot afternoon, smiling like he had seen something funny. Trying to speak to me.
“I know what you’re trying to do. Cherish is a nice person. Don’t ever talk to me again,” I said once, and walked away.

But you know, boys never listen. He showed up in the places I couldn’t avoid. In the hallways, on campus, at the restaurant where I carried trays heavy with food I couldn’t afford to taste. Or was it a coincidence that I noticed him everywhere? No. Surely this was the prelude to harm. Surely this was how betrayal re-enters a life.

Until the day Cherish turned to me, her eyes puzzled.

“Why do you hate my brother?”

Brother.
The word cracked something in me. All at once, my fears folded into themselves, leaving me exposed, foolish, trembling. All this time, I had mistaken his persistence for danger, when it was just patience.

I explained to her that I didn’t know he was her brother and they didn’t look alike. Or was I just oblivious and think everyone is out to get me? But they are. They’ve always been.

That evening, I went for a walk to clear my head. The sky stretched wide, an open wound of orange fading into purple. I didn’t expect to see him, but there he was. And this time, my legs didn’t carry me away. I didn’t run. I ignored the fire rising in my chest, where the patch had begun, and I stayed.

We sat and talked. Or rather, he talked, and I listened. His words were simple, ordinary, yet they wrapped around me like something I hadn’t felt in years: safety. It was the most wholesome conversation I’d had since Daniel, and before that, since my father.

That night I did not think.
I was quieter than I have ever been, emptied of every rehearsed response, every careful suspicion.

Three days later, I saw him again, waiting outside my workplace. He asked to walk me back, and I didn’t decline. He gave me a letter, folded and handwritten. and it became our way of speaking. Every few days, another letter. Every few days, another walk. I hate to admit how much I liked it.

One night, he came with suya wrapped in old newspaper. We sat beneath a tired streetlamp, eating with our fingers. After a while, he said he wanted to show me something.
He rolled up his sleeves.
The skin there was patchy. Lighter than mine, but spread everywhere, too.
For the first time, I showed him mine.

I told him about my father.
How things were different when he was still here. He was a good man and a good husband.
How he died trying to bring my mother a gift on her birthday, something she had always wanted, though she never named it again after he was gone.
How she wept that night, and how she has wept every birthday since.
How grief and poverty shaped my childhood like rough hands on wet clay.
How this red patch, this silent inheritance I cannot name, consumed me whole.

I told him how I once knew love was real because I had seen it in my father’s eyes, and felt it in his arms when he held me and called me his golden child.
Now this gold is dull and rusted, my spine bent beneath all it has had to carry.

I told him how this red patch that I cannot name consumed me whole.

And he told me his story.
How his father bruised his mother with gifts no woman should ever receive.
How, at five, he watched her fall down the stairs with a child in her womb. How he lost his brother before he was born.
How he grew up too fast, offering his own small body as a shield, taking in every kick, every punch, every drunken throw, because that’s what he thought men were supposed to do.
How he worked, and fought, and bled for a mother and a sister who deserved better.

We were two creatures born in water but never taught how to swim.
Grief should have pulled us down, anchored us to the bottom.
But somehow, we resisted. Somehow, we were still here.

We grew fond of each other in ways I didn’t expect. Letters turned into walks, and walks turned into hours that stretched past curfew. With him, silence wasn’t heavy. It was a kind of rest.

I finished school with his encouragement. Every late-night study, every exam, he was there—steady, relentless, believing for both of us. I saved enough from waitressing to put my brother in school, and that, more than anything, felt like victory. For the first time, I was doing something my father would have been proud of.

When he asked me to marry him, I refused at first. Not because I didn’t love him, but because I did. I told him I would only burden him with my sadness, with this red patch that had eaten so much of me already. He only smiled
“I want to spend my life with you, Dinma. We would heal together. We would keep each other afloat.”

He was my soulmate. We were in love.

But two broken things do not make a whole. The patch was never just a wound. It was a virus. Some people survive, and some don’t.