Once again, this aberrant behavior is back.

And it is always the same hen.

Olive.

She’s the only chicken in the yard that does this. This senseless ritual of sitting in the egg box, pretending to lay, and taking up permanent residence. For hours, and then days. Catatonic.

Eventually I push her out. She shrieks, with her orange prehistoric eyes glaring.

She gathers her feathers around herself like a shawl. She is appalled, mortified that I would remove her from her throne in such a way.

And when she gets like this, her body swells and she appears larger. If I try to lift her out and she puffs up and hisses. Stay away, leave me to crochet my silly thoughts.

She will rest in the darkness for two or three days. That’s what the chicken textbook says to do. To break her of this broodiness, this irrational tantrum.

I’m sorry, Olive. You can’t stay in the box. So into the garage you go, into solitary confinement – imprisoned in a dog crate, with a handful of cedar shavings and a toss of grain.

So I give her what she craves. I let her give in, give up, give over to the base instinct.

Like a nun in a cell to do penance.

But I feel you. I understand. This maddening instinct to sit in the dark, and stare. To plump down onto imaginary thoughts and worries. No desire to go into the light, to be with the others, to participate in the daily grind.

This is depression.

Rumination on an endless loop, my brain is also hardwired this way too. Like Olive, there seems to be no root cause. But my world is shrunk down to the size of a box.

Last night, before bed, I go back to check on Olive and she is huddled in the corner. She sleeps in the darkness, as if she were back in the roost with her sisters – no anxiety.

And tonight, her feathers are smoothed, her neck droops, beak tucked down beneath her delicate speckled breast.

And isn’t this the way for me too.

I can see the cracks of sun at the edges of the bedroom window, but something inside of my body becomes weighted. It feels like a familiar place, a place I’ve been to, but nevertheless always catches me by surprise.

It’s a madness and a part of my genetic nature.

And I don’t want to be pulled up, given advice, or remedied. This is something bigger, like the pull of the moon, a tide curling through my veins, swimming with salmon, desperate to reach some dried-up synapse in my skull.

It is like the worn dirt path beside the fence where the hens pace back and forth all afternoon long, craning their necks and yearning. For what?

Why aren’t they happy?

They have everything they need to survive.

And I do, too – family, friends, food, healthcare, a beautiful home.

And yet there is this dark thing, this black dread that I carry around from my childhood, a ponderous breast beneath the plumage – it mostly leaves me be, but now and again it rises and swells up, grotesque in the dark.

My primitive brain, some faulty wiring, a disconnect within myself. Like my little hen who is frantic in response to absolutely nothing at all.

Like Olive, I simply have to wait it out.