Depression is a place. It is a dark place, with landmarks. It is a cold landscape with bare trees. You follow the rutted path you have been traversing for years. You have no choice. The birds call after you. They are not friendly.

Here is the place where you imagine the bathtub, the water cooling as the red seeps out of your white body and settles to the bottom. You think of this place often, imagining the scrape of the blade against your wrists. The rut that leads there is wide and deep, but veers away at the last moment.

This is the place of the bottle. You bought it, with a pack of cigarettes, at the corner store. It is a celebration and a denial in one. It is a celebration of deciding not to die; it is a denial of the rest of the day. Tomorrow is another day. The bottle and its well-worn rut will get you through to it.

Here is the porch, where you call the one that used to love you. The words spill from your throat like blood, as alarming and incomprehensible. They scare the person on the other end. They are too much for him to deal with. This rut leads back to the bottle, the bathtub, the razor.

These are the pills. You have made the appointment with the expensive doctor, for which you will pay with the last dregs of your savings. She will listen carefully and sympathetically, and prescribe two bottles of pills. One is pink and one is white. They do not make you larger. They do not make you small. All the doctors and all the pills try to put you together again, but they don’t do anything at all.

The rut goes around and around. You follow it, for the sides are too hard to climb and the rest of the world is unmapped.

Here is the place of cutting. You huddle on your bed, slicing through skin until the red blood shows. It helps to make the internal pain visible. Someday you will have to explain these scars, but that does not matter now. After several cuts the pain drains away, and you can rest for a few moments.

These are the things that are hidden. The mouse paperweight from the stepfather you never saw again, the note from a former lover, the blades that cut, the rest of the bottle, the memory of hiding food in your drawer when you were four. They are lodged in your brain, encapsulated in scar tissue.

Here is where you imagine the bus hurtling into you. It tosses you across the road, to land, limbs sprawled and motionless. But then your imagined face creases in pain, and you realize you are paralyzed, trapped forever. Turn away from the bus. Go back to the bathtub.

Looking at the bathtub, you think of your child. That baffled, alien child, born into a world he does not understand. You curse the genes that lurked in your body, a threat unknown until it surfaced, too late for calling back, in him. Even the enormity of your pain cannot justify causing him more. Turn away from the bathtub. Go back to the bottle.

This is the path you have walked for years. Your feet have worn deep ruts in the snow. The new snow falling does not reach to the bottom of the ruts. It piles up on the banks. You are always going deeper. The crows are always watching.

All you have is you. And you are the last thing you want. Today is the first day of the rest of your life—the life that is more painful than you ever could have imagined. Today there is only you, impaled on the naturalist’s pin of your crooked thoughts. You cannot squirm away from your own self. Not today. Not any other day. Not for the rest of your life.

Back in bed is the place of deep, gulping sobs. They wrack your body like they will never end. You soak your pillow, your handkerchief, a roll of toilet paper, your shirt. Your eyes and nose are hot and red. Tomorrow morning your eyes will be swollen shut. You will wear sunglasses to class.

As you walk the trench, the cold of the snow seeping into your body, bare winter branches arch over your head. They are the dendrites of your brain. They wait and listen. You peer at them –dark lines against the cool gray sky. The patterns make no sense. You feel the black bile coursing through your blood. It makes you clumsy, sluggish, torpid. Your humours are out of balance.

This is the cupboard. It contains the food that will not nourish you or fill the hole inside you. You eat it anyway, in increasingly strange combinations. Marshmallows microwaved with peanut butter and stirred into a stringy goo, toast with too much butter, crunchy ramen noodles straight from the package, the cheap chocolate forgotten several holidays ago. You eat until you feel sick. Nothing has changed.

Above your head, the axonic crows send deep-throated messages. The trees listen. The croaks are status updates, and they are all about you. As you walk through the rut, you see the attempts you have made at escape. What was once soft, new-fallen snow is now hardened, impenetrable. “It will take a bulldozer to get you out,” taunt the crows. You stumble on.

The rut stretches far before you, far behind. It is the landscape of your mind. Years of fear, despair, and numbness have worn this deep groove in your brain, reinforced the tangled neural pathways.

There will be no outside rescue. You will circle the rut forever, clutching the bottle, the cigarettes, the razor. The winter’s cold will circle your bones. The crows will taunt from the trees, the axons to the dendrites to the neural cells. The rest of the world, thin and unsubstantiated, will be beyond your reach.

It will take all of your strength to break free.