I Was a Statue

Samantha Downey

Sam Downey is an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison pursuing majors in creative writing and psychology, as well as a minor in gender and women's studies. She seeks to explore the magical within the mundane in her creative works, which include poetry, short fiction, and visual art.

Abstract

Apathy is a subject that is close to my heart in the way of a half-hearted stab wound. For me, it has taken the form of depression, that insidious gravity that makes each movement seem less worth it than the last, ever since I was a teenager, though I only put a name to it recently. In high school, I felt at once bogged down and groundless, disconnected from my feelings and surroundings. College was a bit better: I enjoyed one shining semester and two months of the next before COVID hit. I was lucky. I was able to move home to the suburbs with my family, who I had and continue to have a great relationship with. Both my parents were able to work remotely. My younger sibling and I did online classes. I did not leave the house except to walk the dog around the block. This continued for just over a year. None of us ever got sick. But I can say with certainty that it was the worst my mental health has ever been. I was resigned to my situation, so I hunched my shoulders and let time flow past me, faster and faster, as I went through the motions of life in the same room, house, block, and town that I had lived in for 18, then 19, then 20 years. I couldn’t sleep. I rarely showered or brushed my teeth. I took lighter and lighter course loads, but the work was agonizing. I started virtual therapy. I dyed my own hair, then cut it off. I tried to turn to art and writing, my old outlets, but the tap was dry. Creating took more effort than it was worth. I drifted.

Apathy isn’t exactly an opponent that can be fought; it’s more like the creeping darkness of 4pm in November. Not now, you think, seeing the signs creep in. Not yet. Poetry is my torch against this night. Poetry, for me, has always required a deftness of thought that can only be achieved when I am, as they say, “in the zone.” Academic papers and even prose can be done “manually,” even if they lack the fluency of work done while motivated, but poems demand that I engage with my emotions and my surroundings in a way that was just not possible for me that year. A poem must be written with and on purpose.

The first draft of this poem was one of the first things that I wrote upon moving back to campus. Getting vaccinated and leaving home cracked me open, and at once I was alive and awake again, perhaps more so than I had been since childhood. This poem is a story of the pandemic and a story of depression, but it is also a story of afterward. My coping strategies had consequences: I’m underweight, I have cavities, I still struggle with insomnia. But I am right behind my eyes again, embodied and immediate, and that is worth everything. 

I Was A Statue

for the longest time, I was strong

and unfeeling, numb and roughened.

So lifelike. I stood in what was once a garden

and let the tangled ghosts of ivy

loop around my ankles. My hands

hung open, waiting, reaching. Spiders

wove strands softer than any sculpted tresses—

statues don’t shower.

Moss dug tiny footholds, burrowed

into what used to be flesh, spread

over chiseled cheekbones. One might think

this would round out the face; it grew gaunt

as wind whittled away the body.

Snow weighed my shoulders,

leaves settled, rain traced

tracks for tears that did not fall. I was so still.

Instead of emotions I felt crystalline

structures and vibrations and cracks

spreading deep from freeze

and thaw and freeze and thaw and I get stuck sometimes

in stances or expressions, even now, stolid

or stubborn at inopportune moments.

I am no longer a statue; I should have mentioned

but the habits of a statue are hard

habits to break. Parts of me

will always be stone: certain organs

and nooks of grey matter and flakes too small to chip

from bone. I roll my wrists and gravel crunches.

I don’t remember the first stretch,

or much about the time between the cracks

and falling to my knees in that garden. I was a statue

and then I was in the dirt, clutching

at mud and grass with bony fingers, choking

on my mouthful of moss. The ivy had died

long ago; I could leave at last

and did, on shaky legs. Now it goes,

Move. Feel. Eat.

Sleep. Shower. Scrape off the moss.

To be a statue was simpler, I think

sometimes, but then I breathe

because I can and remember the sun

on my face as I stumbled

from the shattered plinth.