Letting Go

by Carrie Lange

  There were always conditions associated with everyone else’s love. Sometimes the conditions were subtle, hard to see, but they were there. Quiet little expectations that required careful tending.

  But not with Sean. With him, she could relax, be herself, and tend to nothing

  And although he was still living in this run-down neighborhood, maturity had finally caught up with him. He had a good job as an IT specialist, enough money saved to finally start college, and enough ambition to make it happen.

  Sean was not a ‘druggie’ per say, and he didn’t use hard drugs like cocaine, or heroine, or crack. But he did thoroughly enjoy the benedictions of recreational drug use. Harmless, he called them.

  Sitting on the couch in his apartment now, she didn’t give a rat’s ass if what he handed her was harmless or not. She didn’t even care if the damn stuff killed her. She just wanted something to make the pain go away. “What is it?”

  Sean smiled. “Ecstasy.”

  She considered the small red pill in her hand momentarily. Hello there, little guy. What do you have planned for me this evening? “What’s it gonna do to me?”

  “It’s gonna make you feel better.”

  It didn’t make her forget. It didn’t take away her sadness. It didn’t cover up or even dull the pain. Yet somehow it made her body and her thoughts feel so good, that she didn’t mind the pain any more. She just rolled through the waves of heartache, smiling as she rode up and down over the peaks and through the valleys of her despair.

  She hadn’t talked to anyone except Rale. She had never been much of a talker before, always the listener. But the drugs coursing through her brain had a magical power. The words flowed out of her, unbidden. They seemed to bypass her brain altogether and come straight from her mouth, as if born there. Or perhaps they came from her heart.

  ~~~~~

  Sean had known Anne would be trouble when she showed up sophomore year at the small, Catholic high school. He had just gotten himself established, and did not want anyone messing it up.

  Before freshman year, Sean had never set foot in a church and had attended public school. The emotionally damaged child of an alcoholic mother and father, he was easy prey for the ravenous pack animals that hunted the grounds of IPS #52 in the dilapidated neighborhood known as Stringtown.

  If he had a hard time fitting in at public school where he was beaten and cursed at, he found it impossible to fit in at Holy Trinity High School, where the blood soaked shroud of a tortured and crucified man draped over everything.

  He could not identify with these kids and their kneeling, and praying, and confessing. And so, he found a new identity.

  “Satan worshipper,” the kids whispered.

  “One time Stan was making fun of Sean, so he put a curse on him. No shit, I saw the whole thing. He drew this pentagram on a piece of paper with Stan’s name and then ripped it up and ate it. And then Stan started, like, bleeding from his mouth. He had to go to the hospital and almost died. No shit.”

  “Oh yeah, well once in Religion class, he was reading the ‘Satanic Bible’. For real. I was there. Sister Agnes flipped and wouldn’t touch it, so she made Sean put it in the trash and take it down to Father Rick’s office. And Sean started talking in, like, this demon language, and Sister Agnes started choking. I thought she was gonna die. Thought Sean was a gonner for sure, but he was just suspended for, like, a week.”

  Sean was comfortable with his new identity. No one beat him or cursed at him. A few gestures and innuendos, mixed into the imaginations of the sheep around him, and no one made fun of him anymore either.

  He even managed to make a few friends, like-minded outcasts who could never quite fit in and railed against the sheer mediocrity of their surroundings. So, when one of them said “Hey, that new girl’s casting runes, or telling fortunes or something,” he sensed trouble.

  During lunch he watched her, the din of voices occasionally pierced by the clanking of dishes and the clunking cycles of the industrial dishwasher. The smell of damp french fries and body odor curled around the warm air of the cafeteria and clung to his clothing.

  Numerology. Of course. That would impress them.

  Anne’s pencil danced across the paper, effortlessly trailing an intricate tapestry of shapes and numbers behind.

  She’s good.

  Students gathered around her, oohing and awing, waiting their turn. What would the numbers tell them?

  Idiots.

  Sean watched her, the scowl on his face flushing red with anger when she glanced his way with a smirk and winked at him.

  God damn it.

  He clawed out a piece of paper and began drawing his own intricate pattern. Later as he left sixth period Literature class he quietly slipped it onto Anne’s desk and gave her a wink of his own.

  “He’s cursed you”, he heard whispered as he left the classroom. “I told you not to mess with him.”

  The next day, as he walked past Anne’s desk, she held her arm out in front of him, blocking his way. She stood and handed him a piece of paper covered in numbers.

  Taking the paper without looking at it, he shrugged. “What’s it say?”

  “It says you’re full of shit.”

  Her sweet little smile never wavered as she held up the paper he had given her the day before. Fancy pentagrams and oddly shaped letters crookedly gathered around the evil eye in the center. She ripped the paper into strips and started eating them one by one.

  Sean smiled and fell in love.

  ~~~~~

  Sean had always been more of a talker than a listener, but he understood through his own haze of Ecstasy, that it was his turn to listen. He had to be careful with this stuff though. It had a damnable side effect of causing a person to open their mouth and reveal their deepest secrets, especially if those secrets had to do with love or passion.

  He had never stopped loving her. Through all of the years, and all of their ups and downs, good times, and bad, that had never changed. She was the immutable ‘One’ of his life.

  Shaking his head, Sean tried to focus on her. What could he do for her? Nothing. Except give her more drugs, numb the pain, provide some relief.

  Now definitely wasn’t the time to profess his undying love for her.

  Dan, you’re such a dick.

  He had never seen her like this. Actually, he had never seen anyone like this, and it scared him. Anne looked fragile somehow, like she might fall apart at any moment.

  Always the strong one, Anne had never carried her emotions on her sleeve. Getting her to open up was a delicate procedure which required patience and careful timing.

  But he had patience for her. They were kindred spirits. They had been two troubled children who had stumbled their way into adulthood together. So many times, they had needed each other.

  They spent the entire night taking Ecstasy and GHB. Anne smiled, and giggled, and ground her teeth until her jaw ached. Sean gave her a sucker and told her not to bite down. “The Ecstasy makes you clench your jaws, and it makes your mouth dry. Just suck on the candy.”

  Anne lay on the floor and stretched her jaws wide open and shut a few times, her eyes wild and darting and free. “This is freaking amazing. How come people don’t do this shit all the time?”

  Sean laughed. She was so cute sometimes. “Anne,” he said, “they do.”

  Anne looked at him incredulously for a moment and then popped the sucker in her mouth and rolled over onto her stomach. “You know, it’s my fault Dan’s dead.”

  Here we go, Sean thought, this is part of the whole suicide trip, right? The loved ones blame themselves, and someone else tells them it’s not their fault.

  Sean blinked and realized he was that someone else. His job now was to say something comforting, to alleviate her guilt, to help her find some meaning in all of this.

  He sat next to her on the floor and put one hand over hers. “Anne, this was not your fault.”

  She pushed his hand away. “Yeah, it was.” The tone of
her voice was neither self-pitying, nor exaggerated. It was simple and honest, and it caught his attention.

  He lay beside her on the floor, his head spinning as he looked up at the ceiling. The stucco trembled and swirled around in little patterns, like ants marching off to war. “Why do you say that?”

  “After he cut his wrists, they sent him to the psych ward at that hospital. And when I went and saw him, I told him they were a bunch of quacks, and that it was all bullshit. I told him to just say whatever they wanted to hear, so he could get out.”

  That threw Sean for a loop. Although he was high as a kite, he was fairly certain that had not been the proper thing to say to a suicidal man in the hospital. Whoa. What the hell am I supposed to say?

  These drugs were like a truth serum. He shouldn’t have taken so much. The words rose up, with a will of their own, even as he tried to bite them back. They spewed forth through gritted teeth. “Why the hell did you tell him that?” Damn it!

  Anne was beyond noticing, or caring however. Perhaps, she hadn’t even heard him, for she just continued on like there had been no interruption at all. “The moment I stepped onto the floor of that hospital, I was transported back in time, to when I was a kid, and they sent me off to that mental institution.”

  Anne flung her arms out wildly, hitting Sean in the face with her right elbow. “I got this panicky feeling, like they were going to shut the door and never let us out. I think I had a panic attack or something.”

  Sean rubbed his nose and tried to remember what she had told him all those years ago. “How old were you?” he asked, “when that happened?”

  “Thirteen. Can you believe I was locked up for trying to kill myself? Isn’t that the craziest thing?”

  ~~~~~

  This was the part of Anne’s guilt that she had shared with no one, not even Rale. People looked at her with compassion. Compassion she didn’t deserve. If they only knew the truth.

  Sitting across from Dan in that fucking ‘day room’. God, they still used the same names.

  Fluorescent lights, institutional tables and chairs in dingy white hues, people in thin grey hospital robes playing cards. Some talked to themselves quietly, some stared into space. Stutterers and rockers. Smokers and nervous twitchers. The smell of body odor, stale cigarettes, and that singular plastic-y scent that meant locked doors, walls with no windows, insanity.

  Anne had barely been able to stay in her seat, expecting at any moment for him to pull out a collage that he had made in Occupational Therapy out of old magazines - little boxes cut out of pretty worlds, meant to represent his life.

  “God Dan,” she had said to him. “I can’t stand to be in this place. Just get the hell out of here. They can’t help you. Tell them whatever they want to hear. Just get out.”

  “All right, Anne,” Dan had said, “I will, I promise. Just calm down. I don’t really know how soon I can get out. Believe me, I’m trying. All this psycho-babble is a bunch of crap that I don’t need. But still, it’ll be a few days at least.”

  “Just do it. I absolutely can’t stand the thought of you being in here. And Dan...I’m not going to be able to come visit you. I’m sorry. I just can’t come here again.”

  Anne realized - too late - that she had made it all about herself. What a self-centered little shit, I was.

  ~~~~~

  Anne and Sean simultaneously turned their heads to look at one another. As she turned, Sean just caught the reflection of a shadowy figure in her eyes. The shadow moved. He looked quickly behind him, but there was nothing there. He shrugged and looked back at Anne. “Tell me again about the hospital you were sent to.”

  Chapter 29

  I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

  ~ Antonin Artaud

  ~~~~~

  Fifteen years had passed since, what Anne thought of as her ‘lock-up’. Being in that hospital with Dan had brought it all back to her.

  Doors closing. Locks bolting. Pounding. Screaming.

  More than anything, the screaming.

  She was thirteen years old, and she tried to commit suicide by overdosing on her prescription migraine medicine. She didn’t remember much from the actual incident - flashing red lights, gauzy faces, vomiting blackness over and over.

  She woke up in a hospital bed. Lots of people came and went, all wanting her to talk. Talking, talking, talking, blah, blah, blah...She had just wanted to be left alone.

  After four days, they sent her to a different hospital. A doctor told her it was because she wouldn’t talk to anyone. For some reason, that meant she wanted to die.

  Anne thought an overdose of prescription medication meant she wanted to die.

  Go figure.

  She spent almost seven weeks at the Saint Vincent Stress Center. Most patients only stayed four. She had her fourteenth birthday there. She smoked her first cigarette there.

  Every day they gave her pills, and every day she hid them under her tongue and then in the pocket of her coat. She didn’t know what they were supposed to do, only what she hoped they would do - finish what she had started.

  Every day her pile had grown, every day a step closer to death. But she got impatient, and swallowed them all.

  Too soon.

  It didn’t kill her, but the next morning she thought it had. The muffled sound of someone calling her name woke her. She tried to get out of bed but she couldn’t move or see.

  The voice became more insistent. “Anne! Get up!”

  Losing her balance, she fell out of bed, cracking her head on floor. In complete blackness, she crawled to the door and leaned up against the wall as she made her way to morning check-in.

  At the very least, she must have looked drunk as she wobbled her way along, sliding down the length of the hall. Unable to see, she held one arm out in front of her and supported herself on the wall with the other.

  There was some sort of disturbance at morning check-in, when they took her blood pressure.

  Shouts over her head. Someone shaking her. Being carried in strong arms.

  The woman who yelled at her apologized later. “I’m sorry I forced you out of bed, Anne. I didn’t know what had happened.”

  It was the only time anyone mentioned “what had happened”.

  But after that, they checked her mouth for pills at morning check-in.

  For her next attempt, she ripped an aluminum soda can in half and cut her wrist with the jagged edge, proud of herself for being so clever. But she wasn’t able to cut deep enough.

  Tears spilled from her eyes, not from pain, but frustration. They were coming for her. She saw them out of the corner of her eye. Soon they would be there, grabbing her, stopping her.

  Over and over she cut, blood running down her arm. But, she realized - not enough blood, not enough time.

  To die had become her obsession.

  They grabbed her, they stopped her, and they strapped her to a gurney, and put her in the ‘quiet room’. The quiet room had padding on the walls, and a video camera in the ceiling.

  How funny, she thought. She didn’t think padded rooms were real, and she wished that she could touch the walls, maybe even bang her head on them. Hold her hands over her head, scream, and sink slowly to the floor.

  They left her there, calling out for what seemed like hours. She knew they were watching her through the camera in the ceiling. She cursed them, she banged her head, she pulled on her restraints, she begged them to let her go to the bathroom.

  Finally, she wet herself. But still they didn’t come.

  Irritation.

  Humiliation.

  The urine spread out under her on the slick surface of the metal gurney, soaking her arms, which were strapped to it. It mixed with the blood seeping from her unbandaged wounds and burned.

  A man came in
. Someone she didn’t know. He looked at her, silent.

  “Let me out of here, you stupid son of a bitch!” She screamed at him, jerking on her restraints, banging her head on the gurney until she saw bright little flashes of light. “I’m bleeding, mother fucker, let me out of here!”

  “You shouldn’t talk to me like that.” He brushed the side of her face with his fingers. “You’re all tied up.”

  She relaxed for a moment and considered him. A certain kind of insanity crawled around in his feverish eyes. She had seen that look before. “Fuck. You.”

  He smiled, watching her a moment longer, and then left her to lay in her discomfort.

  At the time, she thought this the lowest point to which her life could possibly sink. But of course, she had not met Dan Smith yet...or Larue Carter.

  ~~~~~

  Larue D. Carter Memorial Hospital.

  When they couldn’t fix her at the stress center, they sent her to the mental institution.

  Anne came to realize that its main purpose was not so much healing, as it was storage.

  This place was the ‘final step’ for its inhabitants. A place to hide away all the troublesome patients. The ones who just didn’t fit in at the stress centers of the world, where things were comfortable and orderly.

  At the stress centers of the world, they had art deco on the walls, soft recessed lighting, plush carpeting in mauve, and meditation classes. They had art rooms, and library rooms, and living rooms. They played quiet relaxation music over speakers which were cleverly hidden in stucco ceilings.

  Mental institutions had bright fluorescent lighting that flickered. The light glared on shiny floors and concrete block walls that were always cold. Day rooms, plastic furniture, windows with bars. Their padded rooms didn’t have padding on the walls.

  On the Children’s ward, small red squares were taped to the floor. When the children misbehaved by laughing too loudly, or running in the hall, they were sent to ‘square’, which meant they stood in the red square until they were told to come out.

  Anne spent a lot of time in square. Feet aching. Vision blurring. Hatred boring into her soul.