“Oh,” Roman will say, when he sees the new haircut. “It’s short.” But that’s the most he’ll say about any of it, and the entire thing makes me feel safer. Safe from other men’s gaze, but still valued in Roman’s, because if he hates the hair or the clothes or the flattened body, he never lets on. Which is lucky because in my obsession to disappear from other men’s view, I never did consider his.
* * *
The exam table paper crinkles as I shift my weight. I don’t look the doctor in the eyes. “So you think you have HIV?” There is heavy skepticism in his voice.
“See, feel here?” I say, my shaking fingers pressing to my throat. “Swollen lymph nodes. And my throat is sore and I have a fever—”
“A very mild fever.”
“Yeah, but it can just start with flu-like symptoms.” That’s me, WebMD PhD.
“But you’re not having casual sex?”
“I’m not, I’m monogamous but…”
But. But men looking. Men touching.
“If you would wait here for just one moment,” says the young doctor, trying to be cheery although I don’t know why, because doesn’t he know I’m dying? And no one is going to believe me when I say I got it from a guy who touched my skin in the bar, they’re all going to say I’m lying, and Roman is going to leave me, because of course he is, and they’re going to say this little story of mine is just a way to hide that I’m a dirty little whore. All the same fears circulated on repeat.
My fingers flutter up against my throat, behind my ears, and in the time allotted I examine my nails, check if they’re strong, then roll forefinger against thumb, checking the dexterity of my fingers to make sure I don’t have ALS. The doctor comes back mid-ritual. I didn’t even get to check my balance yet. I’m annoyed at the interruption, file the habit away at the back of my brain to finish later, so I can feel well and hopeful for a few minutes, like I always do once a ritual is successfully completed.
The doctor stands to the side to let someone else pass, and an older woman strides into the room. She looks at me in my thin hospital gown. She sighs. I sigh. We know each other well. She’s the head psychiatrist of the women’s clinic, who had sat there with a slightly tilted head, listening to me cry over fears of rabies from a bat bite. Then when a puppy’s tooth had scratched my hand in passing and I didn’t ask the owner if it had its shots because I knew how crazy that sounded, and I thought I could handle it, but then I couldn’t. And she had sat me down eventually, after there had been the MS fears and the ALS terror incident, and said, “I think you need to be on medication.”
I had blinked at her, taken aback. I knew what kind of medication she was talking about: SSRIs, antidepressants, which are an intensely different beast from the anxiety-reducing benzodiazepines that don’t seem to be working for me anymore. “For how long?”
“Maybe forever,” she said as she collected her stuff and walked out the room, passing on that information to my regular psychiatrist.
I know she’s going to say this now, with that same tilt to her head, clinically sympathetic, and I don’t want to have to say that I’m a writer, that writers can’t be on SSRIs, or have to remind her that I’ve done my Google research and artists say it kills the craft, the need to create, and if I’m going to be a mindless zombie who can’t write, I’d much rather be dead. Let it kill me then.
We’ve had this conversation before, round and round we’ve gone, so she sighs. I sigh. Then I leave.
* * *
I know what PTSD is supposed to look like, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be like this. It should be a textbook response. Boom. React; hit the floor. I’ve seen it a hundred times in movies. I understand that, even when I don’t think it’s mine to have, a fear I didn’t earn. Standing in a bar, the press of people causing me to spiral inward, gripping my drink too hard, marking the exits over the masses of heads and bodies and hands and eyes, taking an extra swig of that drink because it makes it a little better: that I understand, too. They show this in the movies, on the television screen. This is what they talk about, when they display PTSD. But I don’t have this kind of PTSD, not exclusively. Mine has bred into something different, something far more insidious, and if I’m going to have PTSD, then goddamn it, I want normal-grade PTSD, the Hollywood version, not this batshit-crazy variety that has no lines running back to combat. It makes no sense to be terrified of bats and rabies, or MS and ALS. I was the girl who once dropped a cookie in Iraq, then quickly scooped it out of the dirt, dusted it off, and popped it into my mouth, sand and all. “A girl after my own heart,” one of the sergeants said with a wink, and I grinned, because it’s just dirt.
It’s just dirt, and now I can’t even run my hand down a banister without fear of contamination. The fears don’t add up. None of this can be PTSD, because I don’t see how it can be traced back to Iraq or the rape. Maybe I was always predestined to go crazy. Maybe when I was first formed, God scratched out the word insanity on a Post-it and stuck it to my forehead. I feel like a fake, sitting in the VA hospital women’s clinic office, recounting to a psychiatrist terrors that have nothing to do with the military. Fucking Dostie, soaking up tax dollars with a grade of crazy that was all her own to begin with.
And so I don’t like to show my crazy. If you saw it, you wouldn’t call it PTSD, so it’s better that you don’t see at all.
* * *
I graduate from the teaching certification program the summer of 2012, the summer of my mental breakdown. I start work as a long-term substitute English teacher in New Haven. I expect this to be like the infamous mental break of 2010—three months and done. I can buckle down and take this for three months, I think, even as I pace rooms in the dark, twisting, twitching, decomposing. But it’s not months. It’s years. There’s no interim, no moment to gasp for breath, a perpetual scream lodged at the back of my throat and I see no end to it, every day on repeat, everything on repeat, like a score permanently on loop and if I want silence, I think I’m going to have to kill myself.
I long for the fight in me, the rage that once made me so invincible. This fear has gutted me, chipping away at who I am, bit by bit, and I’m haunted by the terrifying awareness that silence can be bought with the Kel-Tec .380 handgun in the nightstand, nestled comfortably against loose pens and forgotten books—and the thoughts scare me. It’s too tempting. I don’t know how I avoided this in Iraq when here at home the thought trails behind me like a steadfast puppy.
I gobble down two milligrams of lorazepam—one prescribed, one extra just in case. I lie on the couch, curled on one side, hand dangling down onto the floor. If I could, I would muster the strength to run fingers through Freya’s fur. A little drool creeps out the corner of my lips.
My dreams are dead. I see nothing behind my eyelids as I sleep. I’m comatose but it passes the time. That’s all I want—for the time to pass. I am in purgatory, this place in between, and maybe if enough time passes I’ll finally make it to hell or heaven.
Roman comes home, accompanied by a cold blast of outside air and smelling of fireman gear. He takes one look at my mismatched stare, hears my words heavy and halting, then he goes into the kitchen to cook dinner.
My incompetence burns.
The lorazepam slows the whirling reel in my head, and I can sit on the couch, I can half focus, half see. I can eat, even though I don’t want to, I can speak, even though I have nothing to say. And when I go to bed, I down another milligram, knowing that it will block out the nightmares. I slice another pill in half, licking the white powder off my thumb with a dry tongue.
I bob and weave my way up to the bedroom. I don’t have to look for sleep; it slams into me like a sledgehammer.
* * *
The VA eventually gives me a 70 percent disability rating for PTSD, after all. Congratulations! You are this fucked up. It’s a victory and, also, most certainly not.
“It’s possible,” my psychiatrist says slowly, “that you might not be able to work full-time right now.”
>
I’m cracked in half, fingers digging into my eyes, elbows on knees. I groan.
“Stress both brings on and exacerbates PTSD symptoms,” he’s saying and I’ve heard this all before. My brain is no longer wired like everyone else. A few cords have popped free and overlapped, shoved back into the wrong places so that now simple stressors become overwhelming. I get how it works but can I not even do this? I’ve gone from ancient history professor to English teacher to…what now? I’m dragging myself across a crumbling road, reaching up for handholds and only getting fistfuls of loose brick and mortar dust.
The Breaking Point
One night, when I come home after a few martinis with my cousin at dinner, Roman pauses in the kitchen, tilting his head at me as I laugh at Freya. “Did you drive like that?” he asks.
“Like what?” I say. “I’m not drunk.” I knew I’d be driving, so I was careful to keep my stomach full, to evenly space my drinks.
“You definitely had something to drink,” he accuses.
“Yeah, but I waited to drive,” I shoot back, angry that he’s killing my buzz.
“Okay, whatever.” He holds up his hands and retreats.
And—much like the American in the Irish bar, the bat, or the man’s hand on my back at the casino—that should be the end of it. Instead I wake up in the morning with a familiar sense of dread. What if. What if I did drink too much? What if I blacked out and I didn’t know it and during that blackout, what if I hit someone? What if I killed someone?
I scoop up my phone, immediately searching local news for any information about a hit-and-run. There’s nothing. But maybe the news hasn’t gotten the story yet. I run outside to my car, barefoot. I crouch in front of the bumper. Not a bump, not a scratch. I painstakingly examine the front, the side, the grille, underneath, for clothing, or blood, or bits of hair. Could you hit someone and not have any mark on your car? That’s possible, right? It’s not impossible, surely.
I scour my brain for any time missing, for any holes, and I can’t find any but would I remember if I had blacked out? I hop into the car, still barefoot, and drive the route, from house to restaurant, then back again. Nothing. And yet…I grill my husband on how I looked when I came home.
“You were a little flushed is all,” he says, as I follow him around the house, stuck to his heels. “You didn’t seem that bad.”
What is that bad? Can “bad” be broken down into fractions? Isn’t any bad bad? If I was bad at all, shouldn’t I be punished? Shouldn’t I be in prison for the rest of my life? How much worse would it be that I couldn’t remember something so monumental, so horrific? I’d have to kill myself, I realize, with sudden clarity. I accidentally killed an innocent person and now I have to kill myself.
All roads lead to suicide.
* * *
Even if I can’t prove I killed anyone with my car, right now I know for sure I’ve been raped and I don’t remember it. I think I’m pregnant but Roman and I have been so careful, so clearly the next logical step is to assume that I’ve been raped by some guy and I just don’t remember. I momentarily glance down to check my jeans, as if I’ll find them unbuttoned or torn. Everything is perfectly in place but I’m convinced somewhere between breakfast and now, I was raped. I just don’t know it yet. I try to trace back time, find any moment where I could have had a blackout. But I drink less now. Can you black out while sober? Is that a thing that happens? I agonize over the possibility that I’ll bring home a disease, infect Roman, and no one will believe the truth because I’m a dirty little whore—the same anxieties that have churned through me for years, since that first night in Ireland, with only slight variations.
But at last, at last, I understand this. There is a focus here I can finally grasp, casually pointed out to me by my psychiatrist and how had I not seen it earlier? I can pull at these strings and follow them back to one event, years prior, to a rape followed by a command who refused to believe me. This is PTSD, not insanity, not something I was born with. This isn’t hypochondria or OCD, it is a result, not a cause. I don’t know why it took a decade to catch up to me. I’d managed to outrun it for a while, somehow staying just ahead until suddenly I couldn’t. And the realization is good, it brings a sort of comfort to know my own mind, but I’ll still require an extra push before I’ll do anything about it—a final straw needed to break the camel’s back.
* * *
They call them delusions, but I don’t think of them like that. They seem too probable; too absolute. So one day it suddenly seems both probable and absolute that my husband is cheating on me. I’ve never caught Roman so much as look at another woman. He doesn’t get any strange text messages or late phone calls. He doesn’t work more or later. In fact, his behavior hasn’t changed at all, except I’m certain he’s cheating on me.
Roman is in the shower. I sit on the couch in the dark, because the sun set without me noticing, stuck here, staring into nothing, listening to the delusion go round and round and round again in my brain, to other delusions, to things I’ve never said out loud, not to anyone, because I know how they sound and I won’t admit them here, not even for you.
I scuttle off the couch and half crawl across the hardwood floor to where his phone sits on the table. One ear trained on the shower, I tap the screen. The phone comes alive. I know his password. That’s how open he is, how unafraid, and yet I’m flipping through his text messages, pausing to read some, even under men’s names, because come on, that’s where it would be if you’re going to keep your mistress’s number in your phone. But there’s nothing here—why is there nothing here? Must be in the emails. Or browser history. I’ve never done this before. Not in all the years we’ve been together. Roman has never given me reason before, and it’s only when I find nothing, when I carefully lock the phone and place it back where I found it, that I realize he’s not given me any reason now.
I slump back against the leg of the table. This is how marriages end. I know the difficulties of living with someone who has PTSD. I’ve heard the stories of marriages disintegrating, decaying from the inside until they split open and spill out lines of rotten bonds. I had always assumed it was from fighting, one soldier screaming at the other in a fit of rage, lost in anger and war. But this is a silent killer. I realize it will creep up on me like this, breaking down his trust, his ability to deal with my moodiness, my irrationality, the way I interrogate him when he takes the dog for a walk or sits in the car too long. This is how it will end.
I move back to the couch, both hollow and heavy with realization. I open my laptop and email my psychiatrist, telling him I’m ready to start antidepressant medication. It’s an immediate decision. I can’t do this anymore. This isn’t normal. And maybe these pills will kill my creativity, my writing career, but goddamn it, I can’t let my marriage go down like this.
Interim III
I stretch out on the truck hood, staring up at a blanket of stars, a silver flask of Spanish liqueur resting near my mouth. I wind one arm under my head and abandon myself to the quiet music of the desert night.
“This is the life,” I sigh. It’s the summer of 2014. Josephine leans over and plucks the flask from my mouth and takes a gulp, the sharp scent of orange and alcohol lingering between us. Our white, waterlogged bare feet swing together, rubbed raw at the edges from eight hours in The Narrows of Zion National Park. We had hiked miles in the Virgin River, shaded by the high gorge walls, sometimes holding our bags up over our heads as the cold water hit our chests, pushed our thighs, demanded we retreat, but we didn’t. My muscles already ache, the arches of my feet screaming from slamming into wet stones and rolling rocks.
She hogs the drink. “You’re already living the life, remember? You’re getting paid to write.” She pauses to take a sip. “Living the dream.”
I wrestle the flask away from her fingers and grin. “Yeah, and I only had to go crazy to live it.”
She softens slightly. “You’re not crazy, hon.”
“Dude, I’m fucki
ng nuts.”
She snorts and leans back, her profile slowly dwindling as the last of the daylight drains away. “If you’re crazy, then so am I.”
“Sisters in madness,” I joke. The military has left its mark on Josephine as well, prying apart her brain and searing its brand somewhere deep inside the nodes and synapses. Maybe that’s all our stories.
But right now, I don’t feel mad. Right now I feel good and whole and bright. This is what the medication has given me—quietness and lucidity. The SSRI jump-started my brain and there is silence in here now. I’m doing well in the MFA program that Tim Parrish helped me get accepted into. I can still write; creativity still burns inside me. I’m almost high on the excitement of normalcy. I feel that shiver there in my chest, the delightful wings of ambition. I feel good.
She drains the last of the liqueur and then yawns, heavy with sleep and alcohol. Her yawn is contagious. “I needed this,” I add.
“I know.” Solidarity in two words.
I prop my head on her shoulder and close my eyes, heavy and happy and calm.
* * *
This is what the medication does: It hands me these weightless moments, the ability to enjoy. I grin because I can. I feel normal.
I’m terrified that will change. I remember that dark self and she scares me. I want nothing to do with her. It never occurs to me that one day I’ll have to stop taking my medication. That one day I will pee on a stick that will show two blue lines instead of one and the decision will be made for me.
I sit in the doctor’s office chair, staring at the woman behind the desk, my fingers interwoven with Roman’s as he grins at her, grins at everything and everyone, and I’m fighting the bubble of anxiety in my chest, remembering the me who was dangerous to herself, the feeling of being stretched to the point of fracturing. How far down the rabbit hole will I tumble this time? Will this finally be the time I don’t make it? The fear keeps me taking that pill every day, even though we have to go for extra ultrasounds, Roman gripping my hand as they probe deeper, checking for holes in our daughter’s tiny little heart. I feel the shame of this danger, the weight of it, mine alone to bear, but I’m so afraid.
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