Adulting (Still Under Construction)

I call the month of March my blue period.

A single month each year where I become a prisoner of my own mind, a hostage in a cage with no doors.

Like Picasso in his Blue Period, I feel stripped of everything. No possessions, no lover, no children, nothing that guarantees the things my heart truly desires. And she seems to acquire all of it so easily. But more than that, I am mourning someone I once believed was the happiest soul alive, or maybe just someone I needed to believe was.

I’m 26 years old, and I don’t think I’ve ever outgrown the boy that death turned me into, the chronically depressed, anxious adult I am today. For years I’ve asked myself, why can’t I let him rest? Why is his death something I couldn’t bury, couldn’t move past, couldn’t overcome?

What is it about his death that unravels me every March?

A month where I lose control of my thoughts and my emotions. Days of spiraling, panic after panic, until I eventually surrender. But if I’m being honest, like I promised myself I would be, what am I really surrendering to?

Because over the years, I seem to have lost the reason for my blue period.

Is it his death itself?

Or the fact that he took his own life?

Is it the memory of him alive, the way he sang cheesy songs, the way he left pieces of himself in everyone he met? The way he challenged the world and its social norms so fearlessly?

Or maybe it’s guilt.

Maybe it’s the feeling that I saw his suffering and didn’t interrupt it.

All the plans he made, the ones he spoke about like they were certain, like they were already on their way, and the quiet part of me that knew he had no intention of keeping them.

The way his body looked in the casket, so unfamiliar, so wrong, so soulless.

Or maybe it’s something harder to admit.

Maybe I was fascinated by the stillness.

Like time had stopped. Like the noise, the crying, the chaos vanished the moment I saw him lying there. And maybe, somewhere deep inside me, I crave that silence. That peace.

Maybe his death made me feel like I couldn’t choose the same escape.

Like he took something that was meant for me.

Like he replaced me somehow, like me living meant he couldn’t.

That in his final moment, we both asked for relief, and he was the one who received it.

And I’ve been left here ever since, trying to understand why.

Trying to piece together a puzzle with no pieces.

Maybe that’s why I’m stuck, reborn over and over into different shades of blue.

And maybe that’s why, after all these years, no matter how hard I try,

March always finds me.

I can’t beat it.

And every year,

it wins.