Empty Spaces

Take this writing as your sign to STAY. You are meant to exist. 🦋

Sometimes, when my depression hits like a tsunami, and I’m left alone in the flood, I think about all the space I wouldn’t take up if I was gone; the seat on the bench of my dad’s dinner table, the passenger seat of my mom’s, my cousin’s, or my dad’s car, the space in my bed where my cat lies up against, the entire room in which I live at my aunt and uncle’s house. I even take into consideration the small amount of data that my contact information takes up in my best friend’s phone— or even just in the phone of anybody else I’ve ever met. I tell myself that when I add these spaces up, and more, that my existence is just too much; I am unnecessary, and the world would have so much more room for somebody, or something better if I was dead and gone. After all, a plot in the ground would be nothing compared to the combination of all the spaces I would leave free.

It isn’t until the sadness drains a little that I realize how trivial concrete space really is. The width and length of my body is nothing compared to the unbearable heaviness of grief. For months, maybe years, my room would stay barren— uninhabited and un-enterable because this is where my suicide would live; there wouldn’t even be any room left for my cat. The space on the table’s bench would be filled by my two sisters, who would always be reminded of the fact that I am no longer in-between them, and I never would be again; every relationship they’d form would have my death as a third-party. The passenger seats of my mom’s, my cousin’s, and my dad’s cars would be filled with the guilt of my ghost, and the unending tears that would soak into the seats; maybe they could’ve done something more, and I could still be there, singing along to the music in the stereo. Even the contact in my best friend’s phone would still exist; haunting her with the silence that came in response to her friendship because I would no longer be there to attempt to quiet her demons or listen to her venting. The flood of my tsunami wouldn’t just wash away my life, but everybody else’s too.

The spaces that I occupy were made for me— every chair, every megabyte, every room, every square inch of land, and every warm thought or feeling of a loved one. To rip myself away from this world would be to fill them all with grief and heartache— drowning everything in a tsunami of sadness that would never be able to be drained in the aftermath. I am not too much, and this depression I am in is not too much— it can be beaten, and ebbed— but if I were to leave, the spaces left “free” would only be replaced by suicide, and with suicide comes a pain that can never recede.