This Is A Sad Poem

The first time I tried to kill myself I had dumped half of the contents of a Mr.Bubbles bottle into the tub, making an iridescent and bubble gum scented grave for myself.  
I dunked my head underwater for the next hour or so and continuously tried to drown to no avail.  
I couldn’t get past the annoying survival instinct to come up for air when I started to panic.  
 
I tell my therapist this as though I was telling her about dressing my dolls or playing a game with my cousins. She furrows her brow and frowns the way people do when they don’t get my dead parent jokes. I ask:  
 
“Isn’t it normal for kids to be preoccupied with death?”  
 
And she says:  
 
“Not so preoccupied they give it a go.”  
 
And I say:  
 
“Ope.”  
 
She asks me why a first grader would ever think, albeit naively, to commit suicide, why do I think I wanted my life to go down the drain along with Mr.Bubbles.  
 
And I say:  
 
“I thought it would bring my mom back.  
Put the smiles back on everyone's face like pegs to my LiteBrite if it had batteries.  
I wanted to make my dad happy and for everyone to stop looking at me like my mother’s living eulogy in light up Sketchers, wearing her face, and instead thank me for delivering her home.”  
 
And she says:  
 
“Mars, that’s terribly sad.”  
 
And I say:  
 
“I mean, I guess.”  
 
It’s not the first time I’ve been accused of this crime, being “sad”,  
a harbinger of early 2000’s emo music, black eyeliner, and, of course,  
purple prose about death.  
 
My freshman creative writing class joked that they would do a prompt where I was only allowed to write about happy bunnies and rainbows as a challenge because everything I wrote was sad.  
My cousin and her girlfriend watched the children’s movie “Igor” and informed me they had affectionately named the suicidal, immortal rabbit played by Steve Buscemi after me.  
 
My older brother tells people when they ask about me what I am like and he refers them to Netflix’s “Wednesday.” This sentiment is echoed by a date when meeting for the first time.  
 
You see, Sadness and I have a relationship. She is the cartilage between my bones. Her and I are conjoined baby calves who can see 2 moons in the sky but don’t know they’ve been born to a preserve jar in a freak show. Let me explain.  
 
My mother died of a rare bone cancer that no one in my family has had before or since.          
She only lived long enough for my first memory to be the kaleidoscope her morphine drip made in the reflective sunlight.  
She was 33 when she died.  
I was 3.  
And people think that’s sad. But on her hospice bed, with all the strength in her sick bones, she would splay out her arms like a frail snow angel, so my sister and I could still crawl into them. My father would ask her:  
 
 “Do you want me to move them?”  
 
And she would reply:  
 
 “Don’t you dare.”  
 
And maybe that is sad but sometimes I think that’s what Heaven is.  
The moments where we cradle the present with the desperation and gratitude of someone who’s body is bubbling like burnt stew from the inside.  
 I think it’s all of a person’s grief cremated and spread to the sky to be reborn as a mother’s love. So if that’s sad, then yes, I am sad.  
 
My father told me he would drive my mother to her chemo treatments.  
 He would call ahead to the radio station to play love songs he needed her to hear, and she would listen with her eyes closed.  
Until the day he died, he played those songs over and over again, as though it was her blood circulating, her voice telling him to turn it down, as though the volume of the music and his longing would be enough to break through the veil of life and death.  
 Now I gift playlists to people because this is the ultimate way to show them a spectrum of love, and longevity beyond what you can hold in your hands.  
And yeah, I guess that’s pretty sad.  
 
But that’s not the point.  
I am not sad for Sadness sake.  
I am sad because these sad things are the jewels I wear around my crown and wrists to remind myself on the days anguish lays its coarse bricks upon my throat that I am lucky to have so much Sadness.    
Sadness hands me my pen.  
 She brings me places both uncanny and profound that some may never see.  
Sadness teaches me how to love another sad person from the center of my ribcage where Sadness often builds itself a haunted mansion.  
Sadness is sister to Survival, without whom I would not be here to tell you that Sadness can breathe life into you the way a last breath gives birth to it.  
I roll the red carpet out and applaud Sadness.  
I leave an offering, meet my eyes in the mirror, and Hail Sadness.  
 
So maybe the Wednesday Addams thing isn’t that far off. Reductive. But not far off.