When I first saw this prompt, I was honestly annoyed and taken back by it. Melancholy does NOT suit me. I am known as being a bright, bubbly, glass-half-full, sickeningly optimistic type of person. I am always cracking jokes to make people laugh.
But then I think of something a friend, Shane, once said about my writing. I think it was when I was in college and we were chatting on AOL messenger (yep, I just dated myself a bit), and after telling him about one of the most recent things I was working on for writing class, he asked me, ‘Don’t you ever write anything happy?’ I tried to protest that I do, but I actually kinda don’t. I have a few things that are funny and upbeat, but the last few things I have written have been about a dystopian patriarchal world where a girl finds her long lost twin and they take down the patriarchy; a novel about anxiety and grief; a novel about the Goebbels’ children during the last week they were alive in the Fuhrerbunker. I can’t remember before that off the top of my head.
So you see, I clearly dwell the best in melancholy. There’s something about writing about these hard emotions and difficult situations and seeing how the characters deal with them that just really gets my creativity going.
There is definitely a sharpness to melancholy that makes the beautiful things that much more beautiful.
On the day of Sarah, Lula and Tyler’s celebration of life, I definitely was feeling sad and grief clung to me like the humidity in the air. I brought a blanket that I am working on to give to Arlo, and I used the crocheting to help keep me grounded. It was a beautiful but hot evening, and I sat with my Lincoln Elementary family and we all were together and we cried as the celebration of life happened.
Then there was a tree. There was a tree donated to Lincoln by Sarah and Tyler’s family to be planted on the grounds of the school. But our principal had to leave the celebration of life early so he couldn’t take it back to the school, and we weren’t sure what to do with the tree.
So my friends Shannon and Jessica and I ended up walking down the street from the park to the school with the potted tree. Jessica was carrying it and Shannon and I walked with her and we were all cracking up laughing because it had to look RIDICULOUS walking down the street with a potted tree that kept getting stuck on the other trees as we walked. And then we had to get it in Shannon’s car to take to Jessica’s house where it would live until it was time to plant it. After we figured out that we needed to have the sunroof open, the tree poked out the top and Shannon and Jessica were on their way to Jessica’s house with the tree.
It felt so good to laugh, and it really felt like Sarah was with us in that moment because she would have thought it was hilarious what was happening. So maybe that’s why it happened.
When my depression was less under control, I was more melancholy all the time. College was soaked in melancholy. I had a boyfriend I broke up with in college because he drove me completely insane trying to help me get over my depression. I told him that this was something I needed to do myself and he said that he knew he could help me (he was a psych major so OF COURSE he could help me!). He refused to stop trying to help me. So I broke up with him and spent the rest of that winter being angry and melancholy about the whole thing.
So yeah, melancholy is apparently my thing, I just hide it and keep it a secret.
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