Far from All Else

by Tom Lally

  I understood what he meant. Frustration is an understatement. When my symptoms would return, I would always wonder if they would leave, the same way I thought sunburn never would. Some days are better than others, but waking up in the morning without knowing how my stomach was going to feel or what thoughts would be in my head ate away at me.

  “Anyone else want to chime in?” Dr. Phillips asked.

  I thought for a second about doing so, but instead of contemplating the consequences, I decided to just go for it.

  “Yes, thank you, Drew,” she said when she saw my hand raised.

  “Well, I know what you mean, Harlan. I’ve been struggling with depression and severe anxiety for a few years now. Some days I feel fine, but other days I wake up and I think that I’ve regressed again. That strange shift between feeling fine and sinking back into the past is really annoying to deal with after a while. It’s not something that can be romanticized either. It’s just a pain in the ass to deal with. Kind of plain and simple,” I said.

  It felt good to talk in the group. I had feared how others might think about me if I did speak, but I’d realized that I wasn’t here by mistake. I was there just like everyone else. We had issues that none of us could hide from.

  “Yeah,” Harlan said, “It’s not like everything goes away. Those feelings always come back at some point. It isn’t like they disappear. It makes you wonder if you’re getting better.”

  “Yes, you are,” Dr. Phillips said. Her voice acquired a serious tone, “Please, everyone, do not let yourself believe that you can’t get better. Bad episodes will come back occasionally. That’s not unusual, but treatment will get you to the point where these are controllable. Granted, you will think about them, but you won’t be greatly affected by them like you were in the past.”

  After we ended, Harlan came up to me.

  “Drew,” he said.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “How’re you doing?”

  “I wanted to say sorry about the past week. I’m not trying to avoid anybody or anything. I’m just fucked up sometimes and shit fucks with me,” he said.

  The anxiety released me from its grasp and I smiled, happy to know I was not the reason he was feeling the way he was. Rationally thinking, I didn’t know what I could have done that would have made him behave the way he had, but that rationality didn’t affect my emotions.

  “It’s fine. I wanted to make sure I didn’t say anything that got you upset,” I said.

  “Nah, you didn’t do anything. I just have these weird spurts where I get in a funk,” he said.

  “Well, good that you’re feeling better now,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess I do,” he paused. “You wanna mess around with the guitar?”

  “Yeah sure,” I said.

  I followed Harlan to his room after he asked Natalie if she could grab the guitar from the arts and crafts room. She did and we took turns messing around with it, but mostly talked with each another. We talked about anything other than why we were here. We covered everything from music to books to movies. I enjoyed being around Harlan again. Like the first time we’d hung out, it felt nice to forget where we were and what we suffered from. Instead, it was strictly bullshitting without the slightest care that we would have to explain this to others for the rest of our lives.

  Natalie came in later and told us to go downstairs for lunch. Harlan and I continued talking when we went down to the cafeteria, even when Jared came forward to yell at us for not hanging out with him at his table. Our respective smiles and polite disagreement made us laugh once he stomped away.

  Leighton joined us. We’d eaten together over the past week. She’d gotten tired of sitting with the gothic girls who constantly threw their food or threw it up the second they finished swallowing a single bite. They still sat in the back of the cafeteria, but they had started to get through their lunch without outlandishly reacting, though I would still see tears forming in their eyes while their forks shook uncontrollably from the tremors running through their hands.

  After lunch, the three of us started walking upstairs to the common room. We hoped to get up there before the others so we could watch television at least for a few minutes. Natalie followed behind us since she still had to accompany me everywhere. I didn’t like knowing she was always a few steps behind, but thankfully, she would hold herself back a few feet so her presence wasn’t stifling.

  Once we got upstairs, I was about to follow them to the couch when Natalie grabbed my shoulder.

  “Dr. Phillips would like to see you now. Sorry, I forgot to tell you she wanted you in after lunch,” she said.

  “It’s fine. Let’s go,” I said.

  Natalie led me to Dr. Phillips’s door, which she knocked on. Dr. Phillips opened it and politely ushered me in while Natalie smiled before walking back to the nurses’ station. Her eyes met mine as I waited for her to tell me to be seated.

  “Drew, you can just sit. You don’t have to wait for me to tell you to do so,” she said as she closed the door.

  “Oh, sorry, just a habit, I guess,” I said.

  I sat in the chair and sank into the cushion. Dr. Phillips went to her desk and opened a drawer. She picked up a stack of papers held together by a rubber band. Her hands twirled the band around so it snapped onto her wrist. I let my eyes peer over the desktop accessories, the mug full of pens, the snow globe circling around a small scale Yankee Stadium, the bent neck of a tabletop lamp, and the beige folders with typed names glued to the top right corners of each.

  She turned the papers vertically and banged them on the desktop so they lined up evenly before holding them up to me. I grabbed them from her gently and started to read. I saw the title page and recognized it immediately. Sprawled across the top of the masthead read ‘The Last Eight Months’. I then read my name that was inked into the center of the page.

  “I asked Dr. Merriweather to send me some of your stuff. He sent me this,” she said.

  I glanced at her momentarily before searching through the pages. I re-read the words that once sounded so good. Now I felt they were choppy and lacked any potential for a career in writing. I’d come to that conclusion years ago, but this was an unpleasant reminder of what I could never achieve.

  “Did you read it?” I asked.

  “Yes, I did,” she said as she finally sat in her chair. “I must say it is good. I know I should have asked, but I was intrigued by it. Dr. Merriweather holds your abilities in high regard.”

  “Thanks,” I said unenthusiastically.

  “You don’t sound convinced,” she said.

  “What is there to be convinced about?” I asked.

  “The work. It really is good. From our job standpoint, Dr. Merriweather and I cannot lie to you. We’re not allowed to. I’m not saying this to get you out of here. I’m saying it because it’s the truth,” she said.

  “I understand. Dr. Merriweather told me the same thing. For whatever reason though, I still don’t believe it,” I said.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “It just doesn’t feel real to me.”

  “When’s the last time you wrote something? Anything? A journal entry? A story? A poem? A joke?” Dr. Phillips asked.

  I thought back and saw my notebook, collecting dust on top of my dresser. Cobwebs were laced through the metallic silver spirals while a pen sat atop the notebook with the bookmark strap ripped into two strands. I thought about my drawer in the bureau near my nightstand lined with journals, loose pages covered in notes, and old short stories I never showed anybody.

  I missed how the free-flowing movement of the pen sounded as it marked loose-leaf pages with a sharply curled ‘g’ and a bubble ‘r’. It’d been a long time since I’d had that feeling. I knew I missed it, but it didn’t miss me. The pages I held in my hands told me I would never be good enough to become a writer, but I wished they spoke just so I could prove it to everyone else.

  “It’s been awhile,” I said.

&
nbsp; “Awhile as in a month or six?” Dr. Phillips asked.

  “Now? Probably seven,” I said.

  “Why’d you stop?” she asked.

  “My dad never liked when I did it, but once I started to feel worse, I had a hard time getting back into it,” I said.

  “By ‘started to feel worse’, you mean dealing with depression?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you feeling better now after getting used to the hospital and such?” she asked.

  “Yes, I think so. I still have bad days like I said during group, but it’s not as intense as it was before,” I said.

  Dr. Phillips sat quietly for a moment. Her eyes looked into mine. I tried to avoid them by looking away.

  “Well,” Dr. Phillips started, “I’m going to do two things. One is I’m taking you off suicide watch…” she said.

  “Really?” I interrupted her.

  My eyes widened and a strange expression crossed my face. It was one of joy and confusion. I didn’t know how to react to the news. It was a strange phenomenon in a way. Similar to being honored as the greatest minor league baseball player or the world’s richest poor person. It was an achievement of sorts, but a rather dubious one.

  “Yes,” she smiled. “I think you have adjusted nicely and I don’t believe you’re a threat to yourself or others. I believe your attempt at ending your life was a response to a really bad day, to put it shortly,” she said.

  “To put it lightly,” I quipped.

  “Yes, that too. And secondly, I am going to have you write something for me. This can be anything from a poem to a joke to a story to a novella. I do not care whether it is good or not. I just want to see something that you’ve written,” she said.

  I looked at her and swallowed the saliva that had built up in the back of my throat. My fingers danced against my leg and I could feel my toes tapping against the floor.

  “How do you feel about that?” she asked.

  “I think I think about being good at writing more than I truly am good at it. I think I find myself sleeping more when I try to write or think about ideas. I get tired and then fall asleep, no matter what time of day it is,” I said.

  “Do you love writing?” Dr. Phillips asked.

  “Well, yeah, but I don’t think others like my writing,” I said.

  “I’m not worried about that right now. Drew, you might not think this, but you are talented. Dr. Merriweather told me about his goals with you, the first being get you to write because it will help you,” she said.

  “It just makes me angry though,” I said.

  “Drew, I love my job and sure there are times it drives me nuts, but I love what I do. You strike me as someone who wants to do what they love. Am I right?” she asked.

  I nodded my head.

  “Okay, and if you love this, you need to chase after it. I cannot promise you anything in the future, but I can promise you this, if you don’t try, you’ll never have a chance,” she said.

  Her words were effective. They weren’t sugar-coated, they were curtly true. The thing I enjoyed most about chasing it was its solidity. Silence numbed by chain-smoking cigarettes or playing records allowed me to relax.

  Sometimes, it felt like I’d be able to shape my destiny by using the pen in my hand or my laptop, but soon I’d fall asleep and then read what I wrote the night before. The words which looked like gold only a few hours prior looked ugly and trite. And the rejection letters from various magazines only validated my fears.

  But when housed in a psychiatric hospital for some time, something about it seemed less fatalistic. My pessimism was waning as my mood swings became less common. Boredom had already taken over my free time. Besides those features, though, writing was something that would never leave my mind. Ideas always swirled within my head. I kept telling myself that one day I’d pick up my laptop and write for hours on end, but instead, I’d watch YouTube videos, look at player stats regardless of what sport, or open a Word document to a blank page and falter at the idea of having to fill several pages.

  “Okay,” I said, “I gotta try something.”

  “Great,” she said. “This is progress, Drew. Major progress.”

  Afterwards, the nurses summoned some of us to the arts and crafts room. It looked like a normal elementary school classroom. Paintings hung from a clothesline in the back of the room. Apple stickers with adjectives written on their red skin were stuck to the bulletin board on the wall. We all sat down at one of the four oval tables stationed around the room. Leighton sat next to me. We were the only ones at the table. Helen walked to the front of the room while everyone continued to take their seats. The group only held five of us. The others went to their group therapy sessions with Dr. Phillips. I saw the man wearing his usual beanie at the other end of the room. The cigarettes in his hat looked slightly crushed like he accidentally fell asleep on them. He turned to the empty seat next to him with his index finger pressed to his lips as he tried to get the invisible entity to stop making him laugh, but he only cackled louder.

  “Okay peanuts, today we are going to do something I call psychiatric art. Everyone, draw a face. And then, I want you to draw smaller faces of every emotion you have felt in the past week,” Helen said. She then walked around the room giving out sheets of drawing paper and dull, colored pencils.

  “What’re you gonna draw for the faces?” I asked Leighton.

  “Typical ones,” she said.

  “Okay cool. I’m not alone,” I said to Leighton’s amusement.

  I was never much of an artist. I knew how to draw a face, but I looked over periodically at Leighton’s drawings. Short bursts of pencil hit her paper and she quickly sketched a face, shading in certain areas to create the illusion of it possessing large dimples and a cleft chin.

  “That’s really good. I didn’t know you were an artist,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “How long have you been drawing?” I asked.

  “Awhile, I used to work in Bryant Park, drawing portraits of people and stuff,” she said.

  “Really?” I asked. “That’s awesome.”

  “Yeah, it was nice in the summer. In the winter, I tried to send some of my stuff to galleries and exhibits, but I never got in,” she said.

  “You will eventually,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she replied.

  I watched while attempting to follow her lead, but my face was a circle with oval eyes and a squiggled ‘W’ for a bottom lip with a slightly curved line to make up the top one. I looked over and saw her created face. It looked just like her without any hair, possessing soulful eyes and small lips. She guided her pencil across the paper, which made that sweet sound I’d heard whenever I wrote in script using a pen.

  “Who’s your favorite artist?” I asked.

  “Monet,” she said.

  “Garden at Sainte-Adresse,” I said.

  “You know that painting?” she asked as she turned to face me.

  “Sure,” I said, “I did a project on it in high school. I saw it in the Metropolitan Museum.”

  I was lucky that Monet resonated. My knowledge of art history was poor and though it may have seemed to her like I knew some, I felt strange pretending to be something I’m not.

  “I used to go there when I was younger,” she said. “Do you have an artist you like?”

  “I remember Monet from school, but I don’t know much more than the basics. I’m more of a reader,” I said.

  “I had a feeling,” she said.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “I saw you reading Bukowski in the common room,” she said. “Ham on Rye?”

  “Yeah, you read it too?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I really liked it,” she said.

  This shocked me. Chapters were dedicated to Henry, the main character, learning about his bodily fluids through jerking off into a test tube, not to mention his disjointed relationship with his overbearing father and an older woman who s
educes him.

  “That’s a surprise,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It’s kind of…” I paused, “graphic, I guess, is the best word,” I said.

  “Art can be just as graphic,” she said.

  “Fair. Never thought about it that way,” I said.

  “Do you write?” she asked.

  “Not very well,” I said.

  “Do you do it often?” she asked.

  “Reminds me of Dr. Phillips’s conversation,” I said.

  “She did the same thing to me. I couldn’t finish a single piece for the first two weeks I was here, but she started making me come here every day and giving her finished pieces,” she said.

  “She wants me to write something,” I said.

  “What’s it gonna be about?” she asked.

  “No idea,” I said.

  “I’d love to read something you have,” she said.

  I looked at her and smiled, but my grin didn’t conceal the anxiety building in my stomach.

  “I don’t know. I think it will bore you to tears,” I said.

  “No, it won’t,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I looked at Leighton and her eyes stared back into mine. The sorrow she felt was palpable and I didn’t want her to be doing this out of pity. I wanted to speak, but she beat me to it.

  “How about this? I give you a piece of my work and you give me a piece of your writing,” she said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think mine will compare. Just based on this,” I pointed to her paper, “I don’t hold those odds in my favor.”

  “I doubt that,” she said.

  “I would if I were you. I’d love to see your stuff though,” I said.

  “Only if I can see yours,” she said.

  I sat silently for a few seconds and considered my options. I thought about the drawer at home filled with stories and ideas no one would ever see. I didn’t want to be rude to Leighton, but I also didn’t want to humiliate myself either. Leighton’s eyes and cute smile, however, imparted a sense of confidentiality that lessened my trepidation, but I still had my doubts. I suddenly remembered those words I’d told Dr. Phillips in her office.