I can’t do anything. Do you know what it’s like, to be unable to move? Unable to get out of bed? I can’t make coffee, I can’t hug my boyfriend when he leaves for work. I can’t pick up the phone. I can’t watch a movie. I can’t brush my hair. I can’t ride my bike and I can’t go for a walk. I can’t get in the car and go. I can’t cook dinner, and I can’t meet friends for a drink. I can’t get drunk anymore. I can’t eat a burrito. I can’t sing. I can’t laugh. I can’t speak. I can barely feel a thing. I haven’t spoken to my parents in ages and I know they’re worried—theirs are the phone calls I don’t pick up. But I can’t bear to answer and I can’t pick up the phone and dial their number and say, hello, I love you and I miss you. I can’t go to class and I can’t read books. And I can’t fucking stand looking at pictures of a smiling blond girl who is totally unrecognizable, a different me than the one that struggles, listless, through each day.
My phone lights up with a text message. On my way, it reads. I was supposed to meet my friends at a bar a few blocks away a half hour ago. I am still in bed, a book open in my lap, naked. I can’t focus on the words, and I have this awful feeling—I’ve barely been able to move all day. Everything take a whole lot of effort, lately.
Finally I gulp the last of my tea and drag myself out of bed and get dressed. It always takes a while to choose an outfit I won’t feel totally uncomfortable in. I consider a pair of heels, but I realize that if I wear them, I’ll tower over all of my girlfriends and probably some of the boys, too. I can’t bear to have people look at me, so I settle on flats. I wave a bit of mascara over my eyelashes and dab my lips with gloss, and I don’t like the way I look, but I guess I’ll have to do.
I put my things in a purse—just the essentials: wallet, phone, lip gloss, and I’m on my way out the door when I realize: I can’t do this. My heart starts racing and I think of all of the people there, the noise, and the awful drinks, and the way the tanned boys will leer at the girls in low-cut tops and tight jeans. I know that if I go, I’ll be sitting alone at a table in the corner while my girlfriends do a lap, and another, around the bar, looking for boys that aren’t too awful to wrench a drink from. And the terrible music will make my head ache and my outfit is all wrong and the beer tastes like water and I flop down in bed, flats and all, because there’s no way I’m leaving my quiet home tonight for that.
An ambulance is pulling into my apartment complex just in front of me. Lights flashing, sirens off. I follow it to my building, where the ambulance stops. Two other ambulances are there, and a fire truck. Lights flashing, sirens off. The engines have all been left running and it’s louder than you might think it would be. It makes my head hurt. Somehow I get a strange feeling that they’re there for me. My windows are dark and I’m sure I’ve only just come home from the coffee shop where I work most nights, but anyway the thing is that everything is a struggle right now. Nothing is easy. I imagine the EMT’s climbing the stairs, knocking on my door. Maybe the super will let them in. I wonder where they’ll find me. I wonder if I’m going to be okay.
And I’m just standing there in the cold, without a coat, and a fireman walks toward me. You okay, miss? he asks. Am I okay? I ask him. I quickly say yes. He asks if I live in that building and I tell him I do. It’s the guy in apartment 210, he says. Heart attack, probably.
I live in 209. 210’s my neighbor, a real piece of shit, if you ask me. Walter, I think. Anyway, I don’t want to go upstairs—not knowing a guy’s just had a heard attack next door.
I decide to get a hotel room for the night. Strange, maybe. But there are some cheap hotels up near the highway and I figure forty bucks for a peaceful night won’t be too bad, and anyway I could use a change of scenery. His name’s Walter, I think, I tell the fireman before I leave.
I drive back out of the neighborhood and the noise from the fire truck and the ambulances slowly fades away. My heart is racing. Everything feels wrong.
The guy working the counter at the hotel gives me sort of a weird look when I ask for a room. It’s nearly midnight and my eyes are a little bloodshot. Truth is, I haven’t been sleeping lately. Truth is, I can’t do much of anything these days. The room’s cheap, and it’s not too awful. Dingy wallpaper, but the bed seems clean and there’s a television. I don’t have TV at home. I turn on a Seinfeld rerun and I take off my clothes and get in bed. It’s a funny episode, I guess, but I don’t laugh. I could have sworn the ambulance had come for me. I wonder when they will.
He had sort of told me he loved me before—collapsing into bed when we came home drunk, or after a long three weeks apart, over a milkshake at our favorite diner. But of course I’m too shy and strange and, even at twenty-five, I’d never been in love. Before him. I resolved to tell him, the next time he offered the words first. I didn’t want to say: I love you too. I loved him all on my own, without qualification or need. Only I was scared to let it float there in the air, all on its own. And so, I would wait.
It didn’t happen how it should have. I am hysterical, sobbing in a Starbucks—and we’re not Starbucks people. We’re visiting his friends up north and I need to be home, now. I couldn’t take it, meeting new people and smiling and laughing at their jokes and making my own. It was too much and I am fragile and broken. I’m looking for a way back south—a train or a flight or a rental car. I can’t stop crying; I’m making a scene. People look at us without trying to hide their curiosity.
I don’t think he knows what it really is to be sad. In a way, that’s really beautiful, but it’s hard. And he’s looking at me with a worried expression, but he is almost smiling. We’re just people on this earth, baby, he tells me. We’re just living. He kisses me, and then: I love you. And my eyelashes are matted with tears and my nose is running and I have never felt so miserable and so happy all at once, and I try to say it back, but the words won’t come out and I am lost and I am falling and I am in love, but I’m not sure if it matters.
I’ve been sleeping a lot lately. It’s mostly all I can do. I fall asleep by nine, usually with the lights on, and I’m up by seven for tea and breakfast, after which I go back to sleep. I catnap through the afternoon and have whiskey for dinner and then it’s bed by nine again. This is the extent of my days. I don’t pick up the phone when it rings. People who are calling me: My mother. It’s not healthy she says. She asked if I needed to be put in a hospital and I laughed and said of course not, but I wonder. Erin, the only friend I’ve really got left, calls every week or so. She leaves a halting voicemail. I hope you’re okay. I haven’t heard from you. We’re going to that new bar on Windsor tomorrow if you want to come. I always reply with a text message: I’m fine won’t make it out have fun xo.
I don’t think my boyfriend cares enough to notice that something’s wrong. While I’m sleeping, he’s playing guitar, or at the gym, or sketching plans for the restaurant he thinks we’re going to open together. At night, he moves on top of me and I stay mostly still until I come, and even then I’m quiet. Afterward, I cry in the bathroom for all that I don’t feel.
I don’t think that anything can save me: Not medication, not love, not worried phone calls. I think I’ve already given up, only I don’t have the energy to do anything about it. It’s all I can do to lay in bed and think about how I’ve managed to fuck up my life so disastrously.
It’s really fucking hard to look at someone you care about and tell him that you hate yourself. It’s been a sort of mantra for me for more than half my life: I hate myself. I want to die. And it’s only just dawned on me that that’s probably not a normal thing to think.
We’ve just ordered hamburgers at a little diner a half hour north of town and I haven’t stopped crying since the waitress told us the burgers would be right out. He says all of what should be the right things: You’re amazing, he tells me. You have changed my life. You are so special. It makes the whole thing worse, somehow.
Because I know he doesn’t understand how I feel, doesn’t understand how someone could be as fucked up as I am, because I need him to see it, because he is saying that I am sweet and kind and good, when I know that I am far from it—because of all of this, I tell him: I am worthless. I’m nothing. And he hangs his head and I am worried that he will cry, too. The waitress comes by to refill his coffee and she asks if I’m okay. I’m not, but I say yes. She leaves and quickly returns with a stack of napkins. Here, doll, she says. She glances suspiciously at the sweet boy sitting across from me. As if it was his fault I’m crying at a diner at eleven-thirty in the morning.
I don’t touch the burger when it comes. He can’t eat, either: I’ve ruined the meal for both of us. I go to the restroom and in the mirror I see a hideous girl with red, puffy eyes and a complete look of terror on her face. I hate myself. I want to die.
I walk mostly aimlessly through the city—it is beautiful, sure, but all I can see is him. It’s nearly the new year, and I do not want to spend New Year’s Eve alone in a dingy hotel room sipping prosecco nor vodka. It’s all planned out in my head, our first New Year’s together. I look stunning, for once, in a little nothing of a dress. Burgundy, maybe. My hair is pulled back, the way he likes it. He’s wearing the shirt I bought him for his birthday a month ago and as everyone begins counting down to 2012, he pops a bottle of champagne and we duck outside. The din grows quieter. 6…5…4… He pulls me close and my body goes weak, I’m so happy. 3…2…1… He kisses me: A long, lovely kiss, better than any in the movies. Wow, I say.
I don’t think anything could be more lovely.
And then suddenly my life is characterized by a stark loneliness. Everything is quiet. My phone doesn’t ring, and anyway I’ve turned it to silent. I don’t put on music because nothing seems right for the way I feel, which is mostly okay, but a little dazed. It seems far away now, and I can barely remember it: the bars, and the boys, and taking pictures with my girlfriends. My eyes usually betrayed the number of drinks I’d had, half closed. Tongue out, chin tilted upward. I wonder if I was really happy, then.
It feels like the whole city ought to have gone dead now that it’s lost its hold on me. I imagine that downtown, the bars are empty and the people that were once my friends stay home, too. But I know that their world will go on without me, that there will be parties that are mostly the same as the many that I’d attended, except that I won’t be there. Probably no one will have a sense that something is missing, though this whole thing has left a little hole in my heart. Everyone will break your heart.
She watched me put my things in the car from the window. It was raining that day—pouring. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help looking up at her. Her eyes were wide and her fingers were pressed against her lips. I couldn’t tell for sure if she was crying—knowing her, she was—or if I was merely seeing the raindrops splashed against the windowpanes. I didn’t have much with me; I hadn’t had much when I came here, either. A duffel bag and a backpack, my guitar. A year ago, I had met a girl with blond hair and an easy smile and I had decided to stay, which wasn’t something I had ever done before. But the roads would be getting bad out west soon enough, and I heard the Rockies calling my name. The world is bigger than a girl, I figured, even one who laughs at all your jokes and tells stories that make your stone heart ache.
Alex and Brianna broke up after Thanksgiving. Brianna had taken Alex home to Westchester to meet her parents. She told me about the fight that precipitated the break-up over drinks soon after we got back to school. I couldn’t really follow—something about three years and him not caring and she was the most beautiful she would probably ever be. Brianna always spoke quickly, but between sips of her vodka soda, she was babbling so rapidly that I hadn’t the faintest. Brianna darling, I haven’t the faintest, I told her. She sighed, impatient. Then she scanned the bar, looking for a suitable guy to give her number to. Excuse me, she said.
Anyway, because of the break-up, everyone had to pick sides for all of December, though we knew that on New Year’s Eve, Alex and Brianna would get back together. She’d be in a sequined dress, with thick black eyeliner swooping out past the edge of her eyes, and he’d be especially fucked up for the occasion, and as we counted down to another goddamn year, they would sneak off into a bedroom. The next day, after brunch, but still horribly hungover, Brianna would call her mother and tell her that the whole issue with Alex was forgotten, and that he was a great guy, always was. I don’t know what I was thinking, she would say.
I went to this awful Christmas party with Brianna and the guy she picked up to replace Alex. His name was Keats (for the poet, he said, and I rolled my eyes), and he worked at the record store downtown. Brianna’s mother would absolutely kill her if she knew Brianna was dating a townie. We usually spent Saturday nights at Alex’s apartment, a well-appointed three-bedroom where he threw the best parties. He kept expensive champagne on ice for the girls, and he and his friends drank scotch and played poker. Brianna always sauntered over just when Alex had his best hand of the night. She had a peculiar knack for that. Sweetheart, the girls want to go downtown. Aren’t you almost ready? And she’d pout and sit down on his lap and he’d call the game over. Shall we? he’d say, and the guys would begrudgingly throw their cards down.
Here, in some random apartment, girls in slutty Santa outfits were drinking wine coolers and keg beer out of red plastic cups. Hip-hop music blared through someone’s laptop. I poured myself a drink—cheap vodka and orange juice—and downed it.
Hey, a voice said from behind me as I poured another drink. I spun around. A tall guy with brown hair hanging over his eyes was looking at me expectantly. I hadn’t the faintest. Hi, I answered back. You’re in my English Lit class, he said. Suddenly it clicked—he was vaguely familiar. I’m not taking English Lit, I told him. It was a lie. I didn’t want to be talking to the sort of boy that chips in for a keg at a party like this one. You’re a little overdressed, don’t you think? he asked. I was wearing a black cocktail dress and red tights. Festive, classic. Jeans and t-shirts aren’t really my thing, I said, looking pointedly at his shirt, a tee that told me he played baseball for our school. I get it, he said. Have a nice night, okay?
I found Brianna laughing with Keats at some doubtless awful joke he had told. Brianna, we need to go, I said. She shot me a look. We’re having a good time, she said. No, I’m not, I told her.
Why don’t you call a cab, darling? she asked. Keats’ll pay for it. Won’t you, Keats?
I don’t think she realized that boys like Keats don’t pay cab fares for their dates’ friend.
Keats reached for his wallet. Don’t worry about it, I said.
I walked outside, my head throbbing from the loud music. I fished through my bag for my phone and called for a cab. I hated it when Brianna and Alex broke up.
