the revelation of antidepressants while walking home in the rain, music weeping between my ears jolie prather First rain, like first snow ever in March. First ever this year, on this day of the monkey, two thousand and something. Shattered angles to my left, wet like water, sharp like glass: another time, another place. Stumpy walls to my right and the splash of my foot bisecting puddles. The revelation comes hard, like the water, and loud like the glass, sharp like the angles. Depression is a state that tells you your shoe is untied And you're an awful person because. You are irredeemable at the thought of stopping to stoop and tie it. But there is enough of that, enough of that music to last a library of lifetimes, your peers who have jumped and stabbed and choked and shot and gone to sleep for lesser things, oblivious to the fact that, with the help of pathetics and reuptake inhibitors, they could have been saved; they, too, could have stood to walk and look down at those shoes, see them tied and know that, yes, of course it's sad: the way we tie our shoes. Dead conformists, but at least we're alive, far from the coffins that feed the worms: displaced brains, twisted twists of neck, liquefied insides and sunken slivers of chest.