Melancholy – a Poem and a Song

“And so being young and dipped in folly, I fell in love with melancholy.”

~Edgar Allen Poe

Hello. You’re back. I remember you well. We go way back and are like old friends of sorts, or acquaintances, or frenemies rather.

I missed your familiarity. You are ugly, yet comfortable like my old favorite, ripped up, tattered and torn sweatshirt.

I feel you. I know you. I sensed you were coming back and here you are.

Now, I’m not alone in my loneliness. Not with you entering back into my life. You are here giving me a gentle hug. A squeeze to my heart. A peculiar warmth. Your essence creating a sorrowful glow that touches my heart weighing it down like an uneven brick of pressure.

You are a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause. Your name is melancholy. A painful melancholy that overwhelms and overflows my spirit.

Miss melancholy, I know you. Sometimes you bring all your friends with you. Sadness, sorrow, unhappiness, desolation, dejection, depression despondency, the blues, gloom and misery. You are basically the same and yet slightly different at the same time. You seem to work in groups. One leads to the other or leads to a group of mass destruction that can wreak havoc on the most beautiful life.

You call out my name and scream, but no one else can hear you except me. I listen to you because I know you. You have been part of my life for many years, since I was a little girl.

The depths of familiar pain I have reached with you by my side. This indescribable feeling is still a feeling. Oh, the depths of something I can’t describe.

I have been blessed and cursed in ways others can never know unless they too have been visited by your touch. I know the depths of human emotion for I have known death while living. Pre-death, the outer edges of dying, the place just tipping the end. A flirtatious taste of what it is. I know it. I have been there.

Your hug is singing inside me. You have come to visit so far a little bit at a time. However, I fear you will overstay your visit. Please do not try to get too close. I don’t want you to stay and enter back into my life fully and completely. You are destructive and can lead to depression.

You have caused tears already. Tears that have come when I did not want them to come. I think you have been here long enough. It is time for you to leave and take your tears with you. Take your sorrow. Take your grief and your shame and you hurt and your regret. Take it all. I do not want it. I need you to flee. It is time for you to run, scram and scadaddle out of here.

Get out of my heart, get out of my soul and get out of my life for good. Never return.  Goodbye.

“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.” ~Victor Hugo

I wrote that free verse poem about two days ago and guess what? Miss melancholy listened. She left… almost completely. Oh the beautiful power of words, living, love, prayer and God.

Oh the overwhelming, never-ending reckless love of God.

There’s no shadow You wont light up,

mountain You won’t climb up

coming after me.

There’s no wall You won’t kick down,

lie You won’t tear down

coming after me.

Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending reckless love of God… 

Reckless Love by Cory Asbury

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