desire.

I remember the first time I stumbled across the concept. 

The words on the page in front of me froze themselves. They then began to blur as my eyes did what my eyes are so good at doing: filled up with water until all the too-hard edges of the world soften into tolerability. 

What I was reading was the first description that had ever made sense of the feeling I’d carried within me ever since I was a child. I'd finally found words that illuminated the achey, bottomless sadness that by then was as familiar to me as my own shadow. 

The words told depression not as a chemical imbalance, not as something wrong with me that had to be fixed or managed with medication, but rather as a reasonable response to a nearly unbearable circumstance. 

What was the unbearable circumstance? 

Separation. 

From what? 

In simple terms: