I am in my mother's arms, she holds me tight, and tells me she will never let me go,

I run around the playground with my younger brother, I am seven years old, I wish we could run forever.

My siblings and I live here, our home is America, but why is it that one day we are packing our bags?

Why is our father not coming to this foreign country with us? I am nine years old.

We spend four years of our lives in this unknown world, but why are we here?

In a place where instead of walking outside and seeing children playing, children with body parts missing are

digging through the garbage for food which is clearly present in a rich man's hands.

We come back to America, I still cannot understand why a part of my childhood was spent thousands of

miles away from my father, but I am told not to ask,

I reconnect with old friends and go to the mosque I went to as a child, it is as if I never left.

Years pass, I am entering high school, where friendships did not seem to last,

Still filled with questions from my past, I decide not to address them and have my "peace" at last.

I was sixteen years old when I made a new friend,

He never showed himself, but he was with my everywhere I went, when I woke up, to the minute before I

fell asleep.

He always wanted to stay with me in my bedroom, lay next to me, completely cover me,

He silenced me, told me not to speak nor think, that he would do it for me.

He said he was my friend, a friend who would tell me how worthless I was,

A friend who drove me to insanity, and would say, "it is all in your head."

My friend accompanied me on late night drives, he sat in the empty chairs across the room,

My friend, who one day handed me the pills and said, "do it. they will be better off without you."

The friend who was always watching over me, never leaving my side, disappeared one day,

I could not seem to find him sitting on the empty sofa in the therapist office, neither in the backseat of my car

when I looked through my rear view mirror.

Will he ever come back? All my other friends did not disappear, but where did he go?

Why was there a part of me afraid for his return?

This is when I realized, my friend who never showed his face,

My friend who would sit in the empty chairs where no one could see besides me.

This friend, who spoke to me, all the whispers, all the screams, all the holes in the walls,

The tears, the scars, the wounds.

This is when I realized my friend I made when I was sixteen, who followed me through my young adult life,

He did have a name, a name that carried darkness and pain.

I realized my long lost friends name was Depression and he had managed to become a part of me.

-aleena (2014)