There are things I wonder about, you know: Where will I go, and will I ever find a job. Will my boyfriend ever settle down, or will he always follow the sun west when summer rolls around, leaving me alone and frightened? Will we ever open the restaurant we dream of running? I wonder if I’ll ever write a book, if anyone will ever care to read the words that escape from my pen. I wonder if I will ever become beautiful, if the strange asymmetry of my face will correct itself, if I’ll stop wanting to cry when I look in the mirror. I wonder if I’ll ever have a baby, and if I do, will I be a good mother? Will I ever be able to stop taking goddamn pills in order to function?
I can’t imagine that I’ll ever stop feeling so strange in my own skin. As a teenager, I was sure that I would grow out of it. My twenties, I was sure, would be better. Now, I figure my thirties is when things will come together, but I’m beginning to think I’ll never feel quite right.
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.
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’m so afraid he’ll find out; that smiles and laughter and stupid jokes are just the veneer, that underneath it all, underneath my loud mouth and my crazy dances and a million kisses on his cheeks and face and neck, underneath that, and not very far below, I am broken and cracked and shattered. That I cry at the touch of a feather, when I don’t feel right. That I don’t feel right more often than not. That I cry and scream and panic. That sometimes I want to run away. That sometimes all I can think of is no more of all this. That looking in the mirror makes me feel lower than anything else in the world. That I mete out punishments for myself—no dinner tonight, or fingernails dug deep into flesh, leaving little red crescent moons for a day or two. For me, the saddest thing about feeling sad is the fact that I’m so fucking sad. That I hate myself. That’s not normal, and it’s not right. I don’t think he understands it, the way my body goes limp and the way I scream and cry and flail, the way I lose interest in everything. Tears are streaming down my cheeks and he asks me to kiss him and I can barely bring myself to put my lips to his.
My head is pounding and I don’t know why. It has been for days, weeks maybe. I don’t care to do anything. I sit in bed and I eat more than I should and I will probably get fat, if I’m not already. I never can tell. It feels as though my muscles have already begun to atrophy. I wonder if I will waste away—I always did think it would be so lovely, no bones, just a bit of skin. I’m ready to go, to get in the car with just him and the things we need, only what we absolutely must have. And I don’t even know how we would pay for gas, or food, but we could sleep in the car or in the tent and I bet if he played the guitar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans we could pull a little money together. I wouldn’t mind getting a job as a waitress or a dancer once we get where we’re going. Wherever that is.
On the west coast, it is three hours earlier. The day is still rife with possibilities. People are making dinner plans and the sun is still out and it is warm. They might watch the sunset at the beach. They are all very tan and slim and their muscles are toned. They are happy and they probably never have headaches. I am sure they go to trendy, beautiful clubs filled with trendy, beautiful people and they never have to pay for drinks. Those extra three hours, I think they could really mean something. I don’t want to wait, I want to go now.
I can’t stop thinking about it. About bashing my head against concrete again and again, until blood and brains seep out and I am just a mess atop a body. About going for a walk at night in my black coat, stepping out in front of traffic and hoping no one notices me, puts their foot to the brake and screams, terrified. I can’t stop thinking about all of the people who have died that haven’t deserved it, those who have died young and those who have been consumed by cancer and their good souls, their blissful smiles forever frozen in photographs. I wish I could take their places because I think my heart is black; I think I am a mean, evil, no-good person and I don’t think that I deserve much.
What do you see in the mirror? I have to look away when I gaze into it because I do not like what I see. My face is warped and hideous, and my body is so much bigger than I thought it was. My eyes are dull and they don’t convey anything. Even when tears stream out of them, soaking my cheeks, it’s as though I’m already halfway dead.
I try to remember that we are all much more to ourselves than we are to anyone else. I live in my head and my life is me, I am its central character. But to anyone else I’m just a strange, sad girl and someone they don’t think much of. Even my dearest friends, you know, we all have ourselves to think about first. Maybe it’s terribly selfish but I think that’s how it goes.
It seems sort of lovely, and I guess sad, to simply fade away.
You make me feel so lonely sometimes, and I know you maybe, probably don’t mean to, but it makes me feel so low and that makes you feel so far away from me and the whole thing is just awful.
I guess it’s the way that I really, truly like you, a whole lot, and knowing that I’m probably not enough for you; the way that you always talk about how great things were when you lived up north. The friends you had and the things you did, and I can’t compare.
And all I want is for you to feel truly, sublimely happy, with me.
It’s particularly bad one night. I’m feeling miserable and I can’t stop crying and you’re playing the guitar and you won’t look up at me, won’t even acknowledge me when I move a little closer to be near you. I go into the bathroom and I turn the overhead light on and tears are streaming down my face. I’m doing that awful, scary thing where I look in the mirror and don’t recognize the person looking back at me.
I wait a good long time and I’m still hysterical, but I wipe the tears away and blow my nose, wash my face. I pull on a pair of jeans and boots and I say, I’m going for a walk. You don’t look up as you ask if I want you to come with me. I say, don’t bother, and I don’t slam the door behind me, because it’s not my style. But I stand by the door for a moment, hoping you’ll come after me.
You don’t.
So I’m just a sad, lonely girl walking down the road, crying into her mittens late on a Saturday night. I walk for what seems like forever, and I turn back after almost an hour. I keep hoping you’ll call me, asking, babe, where are you? But I guess that wouldn’t be your style.
When I get back to our place all of your things are gone, and all I can think is, I wonder how you packed an entire life up so goddamn quickly.
