Today marks the fourth anniversary to my losing my mind.
Halloween 2009 was the worst day in my life. I waited months for a reply from a woman I was very much in love with and had foolishly prepared myself only for good news. And in reply to my page of heartfelt adoration - got a three sentence Dear John style reply that broke my brain. I may not have beat my head against a wall, but I understood why people sometimes did that when under duress.
Only two people saw me at my worst and its such a sensitive memory, I don't want to detail much of it. My emotions were completely out of control the first 24 hours: I had lost the ability to use words, sobbing so hard into my best friend and her sitting there knowing there was nothing to be done about it. I shook, I cried, snot ran freely. I was a hopeless bag of flesh; not quite a man, quite nearly a thing. She held me and after a time, said nothing, noticing that the words meant less than just being gripped tighter. It was strangely, deeply intimate in a way and its a favor I still feel I should somehow repay to her. I don't like being the vulnerable one, even less so to that degree.
The months that followed were a rolling fog. In hind sight, I probably should've gotten better help than being alone or even had myself checked into a mental health ward. I would come home every day from work to scream-cry on my couch, sometimes to the point where I'd end up dry-heaving into the toilet. I'd shake uncontrollably: my hands, my legs, the kind of feeling in your guts tremble under your skin. I'd have to go through this for hours every day, just to release all that tension, just to be able to fall asleep. Weekends were the worst since I was left to sit by myself in the dark. And though some days were easier for others, it would eventually crest once again and I'd be back where I started. It made my soul sick to be housed in such an emotionally-ignorant body.
Thats when I started writing about it:
And I know she still thinks about me. And I know she still feels for me more than she dares let on. You don't get close with someone with those kinds of words in an ankle-deep world and then just let go or forget or walk off. But shes with someone else now and I sit in an empty apartment scattered with beer bottles and loose change. A pile of struck matches around the cheap scented candles and the stabbed out ashtray. The bedding needs to be changed though its never been slept in it. The empty refrigerator. The cold linoleum floor. The TV tuned to a dead station. The hot, grimy intuition that shes thinking of me right now.
But that doesn't even matter. She's with someone else and she'll probably marry him and that is what wakes you at night and makes you look over at the little black velvet box sitting on top the nightstand. She'll get one like it from someone else.
And writing did help. It was a valve that helped me discard all the collected tension in my chest from days and weeks and months of waiting and suffering and wondering. But even writing can only do so much, words can only go up to the point of the incommunicable. You hit that barrier between language and experience: you can't step through it. And so, left at an impasse, I was right where I started before writing.
By this point, I had considered taking my own life. The memories, the feelings, the unresolvable madness of questions unanswered were pushing me toward that permanent silence. I didn't quite plan it but I was pretty resolved in doing it. I started writing individual letters to people, tidying up my affairs as it were. I began writing about her, about the cancer in my chest from all the thoughts I had had for months, in the hopes that it would not only explain why I was going to do it but have someone have some appreciation after the fact. "I understand why he did this" was what I wanted to hear.
Then I had the dream. A dream that scared the hell out of me. I was in a small glass enclosure, like a phone booth. This booth was floating around a fog of sorts and I saw all my dearest friends going on about their lives - being happy, having children, growing old and satisfied with living. I was banging on the glass, screaming as loud as I could but none of them could hear me. I was trying to warn them about death: that it was one-sided. That you'd float forever, able to watch but unable to interact. That the short time you had was it and that after that, you became a permanent spectator who was alone in his own little glass cube.
When I woke up, I realized that the subconscious part of my brain had basically solved my recent problems for me; that there was no guarantee of peace in death. That there is no contract, no reasoning, no universal agreement or proof of peace in the Great Beyond. That if I had killed myself in that brain-state - who was to say I wouldn't be locked in that place forever? A glass coffin for a ghost without a grave.
So, now what was I left with? I went back and started reading (the worst stuff you can read during major depression) Satre and Hesse and anything basically existential and provoking. I started watching The Fountain once a week; I started to mine myself for all I was worth by overexposing my soul to anything that could touch it. And it helped. Well, it helped a bit anyway. I was trying to squeeze as much blood out of the stone while I could.
And it took over a year to be more or less back to myself. A lesser version of myself - that woman strip-mined everything I had been for 30 years and left me shallow - but myself none the less. And every once in a while, that feeling of her loss creeps up on me. It never comes on fully, it simply passes by and keeps going. Because truth of it is, I won't let it come around to stay anymore. I can't. It crippled me once, and I'm afraid a second round might kill me stone dead.
And I know a lot of friends who pat me on the back and tell me I made it through a bad ordeal and that I'm stronger for it - but the other side is that you're left to wonder if everything is worth surviving? That you're so changed after an event like that, you know you can't ever go back to who you were before, so you're lost even in yourself. The thing is everyone tells you time heals all wounds, but no one mentions that the scars can be disfiguring.
Would you really want to walk through Hell to prove any point? I wouldn't suggest it.
But I'm here now. And she married and had a couple more kids and I definitely think I dodged a bullet in a lot of ways. I don't regret what we had when we had it, simply how we decided to end it. It was a callous way to bring that amount of closeness to an end. And the experience has made me gun-shy: I've all but dismissed the idea of dating ever again. The best way to explain it is that wonderful exchange in 1991's The Rocketeer:
Peevy: You got a good thing goin' on with that girl, Clifford. And I'm tellin' you right now, if she flies the coop, it's gonna be your fault.
Cliff Secord: Aw, what do you know about women, Peev? You haven't had a date since 1932.
Peevy: [wistfully] Flora Maxwell. There wasn't any point datin' nobody after her.
But I'm a little more solid now, a little more on an even keel, a little happier not chasing after a skirt for the first time since high school. I'm practically disinterested in dating now and happy with that. I'll stay with this mindset for as long as it suits that happiness, despite the looks of concern from friends and terror from my elders.
Lets try this out for a while, shall we?
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