Sign number one: She’s listening to John Williams. That’s not so unusual, except that when Ruth is in The Pit, she feels words like barbed wire. She once told me that sometimes when people speak, it’s like broken glass in her bloodstream. Which means that when she’s in The Pit, even David Bowie and Freddie Mercury—her music gods—are out. She can’t stand the words. So she listens to the Saving Private Ryan soundtrack.

Sign number two: She’s wearing socks. Again, not so strange, except Ruth likes bare feet. Hood for her head, but nothing on her feet. Ruth’s an enigma like that. This changes, of course, in The Pit. On the really bad days, her feet are so cold she could stick them straight in a fire and they’d still be frozen. I guess socks are the best she can do. She hasn’t told me this directly, but when she goes into her bedroom and emerges hours later with a deeper, hurting heaviness around her eyes and the quarter-note socks on her feet, I know.

Maybe socks and orchestral music aren’t bad things, but they mean sad, hard things are happening in Ruth’s head. Tender, painful things happening with her depression. Sometimes dangerous things. When her medicine isn’t working like it should. When words start hurting. When she stops being able to sleep and no food tastes good.

The thing is, depression can look different for each person. And treatment can look different too. Before Ruth went to see the doctors, before she started taking medicine, it was like all her thoughts and emotions piled up in this swirling chaotic wave until it all became too much, tidal, crashing down into numbness. And it took lots of tries with different kinds of medicine and different doses before the doctors and Ruth found one that calmed the whirlpool going on in her mind. There were some that didn’t really do much, or maybe even made it worse. Some gave her headaches when the dose was too high. Some seemed to work at first, but then it all came swirling back, along with extra nausea. But after experimenting, they found one that worked, and the right dosage to help Ruth think and feel a little bit more like her healthy self.

Ruth told me some of this herself—the tidal waves, the crash down to numbness. The rest is what I’m trying to learn from watching Ruth up close, trying my best to understand something she can only express in metaphor, trying to figure out what an inside hurt looks like on the outside.

I’ve tried to learn the signs. Her signs.

I want to watch Ruth’s face when we find our old box and open it up and see the shells she put inside, and her favorite necklace, and the pictures I took of her. Pictures of us dancing and playing pirates and all the times when we were happy Treasure Hunters. Because I think that will be a good day. A really good one.