ADYNATON

    Sadness is difficult to describe.

    The most clichéd comparison is a cloud – one that follows you around all day, hovers dismally above your head. But that’s only half of it. The cloud doesn’t just hang over you; it surrounds you, tugging at your limbs, weighing your feet down with its fog. It makes it hard to get up in the morning, to drag yourself out of bed and into the waking world.

    Sadness is an aerosol; a visible mass of millions of liquid droplets. Its mist leaves your shoulders damp and makes it hard to tell whether or not it’s the cloud’s moisture that’s wetting your cheeks. Sometimes you accidentally breathe it in. The cloud’s vapor assaults your senses, and it feels like something’s gone down the wrong pipe; it’s like you’re choking – you aren’t, not really, but you still cough until your throat is sore and rubbed raw from choking on nothing at all.

    Sadness is a foggy mirror. It clouds the edges of the glass, leaving a small circle of visibility in its center. But the condensation fluctuates; sometimes it only skirts the mirror, only fogs the edges – and sometimes you can barely see yourself at all; your face is smudged, hazy from the water droplets gathered across the mirror. You want to wipe it away; sometimes it’s hard, the cloud’s tendrils clinging to your wrists – and sometimes it’s easier (not easy, though, it’s never easy) to lift your hand and drag your palm across the foggy glass until you can suddenly see your face again.

     Sadness is blurry vision. The outskirts of your sight turn hazy, almost like tunnel vision, except your peripheral doesn’t disappear completely; it just darkens and blurs, slowly, gradually, not enough for you to notice unless you’re looking for it, or until it’s too late. Sometimes you catch it in time, and you can blinkblinkblink until the tunnel widens and the fog clears; other times you welcome it, the fading of the world around you – well, maybe it’s not that you welcome it, maybe it’s resigned recognition that there’s nothing to do but wait until the fog spreads and your eyes go hazy. But sometimes it’s neither of those; sometimes it’s ignoring the cloud, ignoring the fog and sliding a pair of glasses over the bridge of your nose – and then the world is no longer blurred.

     It’s clear (where you look through the glasses, at least), and as long as you have the sheets of glass in front of your eyes, you can see; sometimes it lasts, and your surroundings remain visible until you lift the glasses from your nose (because you always take them off eventually, because they’re uncomfortable and look unnatural and wearing them never gets easier, despite what everyone says); but sometimes you’re desperate and you leave them on until the glasses help less and less and your prescription gets worse and worse and the world outside of your direct line of sight gets harder to see, until even the edges of your glasses themselves begin to blur.

     And then maybe it’s not just sadness anymore. Maybe it’s something else entirely.