The tears behind those eyes that stare out upon me hurt to see. The eyes that once gleamed with laughter and love have been replaced with emptiness and despair. It’s as if the very thing that had made them happy had been drained from them, swirling into the dark depths of the underworld. Where the bright light that had lit those eyes once laid, was now succumbed and covered up. Any glimmer of the old content self that had been in those eyes had been concealed to a place unknown to even those that had once known those eyes, even unknown to the owner of those eyes that had once gleamed with such happiness. A happiness that had slowly dissipated long ago without the knowledge of those eyes as their gleam was slowly seized away.

The glimmer of joy in the eyes is the first to go. But it disappears slowly, yet all at once. As if a vacuum is sucking it up. A vacuum that takes away all the joy and happiness in those eyes, leaving them to feel hopeless and empty instead. I knew these eyes. These eyes were the eyes that once stared upon me. They were the eyes of someone so close to me. The eyes that I had never expected to change, the eyes that I had thought would always maintain that jovial gleam. That gleam that had dissipated was replaced with a slight look of depression.

The story of depression is something that often has been retold over and over again. With approximately 350 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, is in a depression, it has been often overlooked who else is affected by those depressed. This being said the story is rarely told by those who hold the hearts of the depressed, the story of those who watch as their loved one’s eyes are overtaken with emptiness and despair. As the once gleaming eyes diminish into a depression. Forced to watch their loved ones seclude themselves into a rut. Pushing out the very ones who love them the most, leaving them to only watch as those eyes remain filled with anguish. Those eyes that mark up their arms in a repugnant design. The suffering behind those eyes as they fill with tears in hiding. Those eyes that don’t feel loved, no matter how much one tries to show their love to those eyes. The sheer abhorrence at the thought of that cannot even be understood by a thousand words even by the best of writers.

It is the feeling of being powerless and helpless for those eyes. The inability to rescue those eyes from the very bowels of despair, the incapability to free the gleam back into those eyes and the incapacity to comprehend exactly where that gleam disappeared to.

It is often misinterpreted that those depressed eyes can simply be cured through medications and therapy, but those that watch those eyes know better. For it is those surrounding those eyes that watch, plea and hope for the return of that gleam in those eyes, a gleam that they hope will soon return into those eyes for those eyes are loved beyond imagine.