* * *
—
I jump when I hear the sliding door creak open.
“Hey.” It’s Meg. “You all right?”
“Yeah it’s just…a lot going on in there.”
She nods in agreement and steps out on the patio and stands next to me looking out at the bay, passes me a bottle of gas-station champagne.
“Happy New Year!” I say obligatorily, raising the bottle before swigging from it.
She puts her arm around me and we stay, just breathing.
“Can I tell you something and you promise not to get mad?” she says eventually.
Jesus, this is a triggering question.
“Um, I guess,” I say quietly, passing the bottle back.
“I read your essay, from Mr. K’s class. The one about the Black Panthers and Rosa Parks?” I start to bury my face in my hands.
“Oh God, so embarrassing!” I creak as she goes on.
“He gave it to me to hand back to you while you were out, and I promised I wouldn’t read it, but I did, so I’m telling you.”
(This is a story about how my body is a brown paper bag getting crinkled. I know that becoming a writer would require other people to read my writing, but I thought I’d just figure that out later. Right now, I’m too mortified of all my feelings being exposed. So. Many. Feelings.)
“No, no!” she rushes to grab my shoulders and looks me in the eye. “You’re really good, dude.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, seriously. It’s like you put into words exactly what I’m thinking! You’re really deep, and you’re so good at explaining the Black History stuff in a way that’s actually exciting. Like, dang.”
“Wow, thank you. I’m so shy about my writing! That’s why I never shared it with you, even though my dream is to be a writer.”
“That’s so cool. I know you’re gonna do it. I can definitely see it. You have something to say.”
I chuckle a little, loosening up and unfolding my arms. It suddenly feels so cozy out here, on a stranger’s patio on the first day of the year.
“I have way more to say than you can even imagine,” I mutter with a pfft.
“What do you mean?”
I’m quiet. I want to say everything, start the New Year without the secrecy of last summer weighing me down. Over the past few months, I’ve watched my two best friends open up about their darkest secrets, but I still can’t talk, really talk about what really happened last summer? I keep thinking it’s not a big deal, but also, what if it is? That’s the pro-con loop ping-ponging in my head right now.
“Morgan?”
I didn’t even notice my eyes have welled up with fat tears. I didn’t even register Meg taking my hand. With my Kelly-green Chucks back on firm ground, the air misty on my face, I squeeze, blink back the tears, and inhale.
“Um. Well, you already know about my therapist, Susan…” She snorts at the name and nods for me to go on. It’s like I’m trying to formulate the sentence in Spanish.
“I started seeing Susan because last summer, it got so bad…” I feel myself getting choked up, but I push against it with all my might. I don’t look at my best friend, though I can hear her gasps and whimpers of concern while I talk—I focus on the beach. “It got so bad that I wanted to kill myself last summer. So, I have clinical depression and anxiety disorder, and I’m on medication for it, probably, like, for the rest of my life.”
I breathe in like I’m about to say more but realize—that’s it. That’s all.
“Oh. Whoa. Are you…doing all right?”
“Yeah, yeah!” I turn to her, knock the heaviness from my shoulders. “It’s not that bad anymore. If I take my pills. I guess it’s pretty common. But I hate it. I hate that I’m like ‘ill.’ ”
“Wow.” She takes a deep breath against the ocean air with a little hmm. “Since last summer?”
“That’s when it was really bad—I don’t talk about it but I, um, I tried to hurt myself. That’s basically ‘how I spent my summer vacation,’ actually.” I barely bother with the air quotes and the jokey voice. My nervous laugh borders on villainous, deep and knotted. “So embarrassing.”
“And no one knows this?”
“Uh, not that last part, nope.” I feel heavy, a syrupy mess of guilt and regret and shame.
“Oh, Morgan, I’m so sorry.” She pulls me into a close hug, resting her chin on the top of my head. “You shouldn’t be embarrassed! I just wish you didn’t have to deal with that on your own. You know we’re all here for you, right?”
Okay, so now the tears have busted right past the ducts. I wipe my eyes with the sleeve of my hoodie.
“Yeah, I know. It’s not your problem, though. And I didn’t want you guys to look at me different, like I’m crazy.”
“Psh, we would never. I care about you. Those idiots in there singing off-key Elton John? They freaking love you. Dude, we’re your friends.”
“I know. And it’s not that I don’t want you guys to know, exactly, it’s just…talking about it is scary even for me. And if I talk about it, if I say that I honestly wanted to die, like it was that bad, then it’s true. I guess I just didn’t want it to be the truth.”
Letting my head rest on her chest, I feel so incredibly safe. Finally comfortable, not at all anxious.
When we unlink, she lifts up the dregs of the champagne in cheers, and I accept.
“Hey,” she squeaks casually, “if it’s too hard to talk about, maybe you should write about it. Your depression.”
“Yeah,” I swallow. “I’ve been journaling about it.”
“No, I mean…Didn’t you say you have another feature story to write for the yearbook?”
The patio door groans open again, and James is posed in the doorframe, donning plastic 2009 glasses.
“Happy New Year!”
“Happy New Year!” We throw our hands up, giggling.
“So, our rando guests went back to their friends’ party down the street. One more shot, then we’re going to get baptized. Come on.”
“Yo.” I swat his arm on my way back inside. “What was the deal with that guy? I don’t even really know his name!”
James just scoffs mysteriously, shakes his head. What I decide to do next is let go.
Sean and David are sitting at the kitchen table playing drunk Jenga, which is just building weird robot figures with the blocks. David’s wearing one of those Conehead party hats, with DICK written on it.
Sean claps and rubs his hands together as we all crowd in around the pile of Jenga blocks, noisemakers, beer cans, and red cups full of floating cigarettes. “What are we drinking?”
I start clearing the cups from the table.
James buzzes around the TV tray we’ve propped up and called a bar. “Well, I think those girls definitely finished off the tequila. Captain Morgan?”
He turns to look at me for approval, and everyone giggles in their syrupy haze at the nonsensical pun.
“Huh?” I puzzle. Then, like a light switch, I remember where I am and who I am.
“Oh,” I gasp, “I hid a bottle under the sink!”
Everybody shouts in joy as Meg discovers it.
“Brilliant!” David claps. “To our sins!”
We traipse the few blocks to the ocean, drunk and giddy, talking too loudly, laughing at everything. I stop when we step onto the sand, awestruck.
It’s like that heroic orchestral ending to Bright Eyes’ “False Advertising” or those slow, steady guitar riffs closing in on the final perfect chords at the climax to the Best Weezer Album.
The world is enormous. It is incomprehensible. It’s the best argument for God I’ve ever seen. Or maybe, I think, this is God. This, not memorized proverbs or parables. This, real beauty, better and bigger than all of us. The fogged-over moon lights t
he surface of the water in a translucent blue-black. The waves are like every song I’ve ever loved.
I walk toward the shoreline. My friends are all distracted in their own ways. Sean and James stand together wading and talking quietly; David and Meg build sand mountains. I don’t know why, but I start taking off my clothes. It’s cold and weird, like my skin knows some parts of it aren’t supposed to be in the open air. I get a rush. I follow my own rules. I run into the Pacific until I am completely immersed.
IF YOU DON’T HAVE A MAP, MAKE A MAP OF YOURSELF
After that, it’s easy to write.
The next week, in the yearbook room, it’s almost eleven at night when I finish. I’ve listened to Modest Mouse’s entire discography, eaten two mangoes, and drunk a Venti mint green tea from Starbucks. I save the file and pledge not to think about it until it’s published. I know it’s not as dramatic, as big, as it feels to me. I know it’s brave, but I also know that the world is wide, that when I’m finally out of this place, when I finally get a good view, this won’t be much of a story. Nonetheless, here I am, five foot nothing, an individual, scared to death.
Darkness isn’t a bad thing.
Don’t follow rules you understand.
There is a lot of stuff that no one knows.
Anything can happen.
You can escape.
If you don’t have a map, make a map.
* * *
Soon it will be just another bright and annoying day, dogs and car pools waking, sprinklers showering manicured lawns in unison, everything in unison, daring you to pay attention and do something. This is a story about what happens after that.
If you don’t have a map, be a map.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: THE OTHER PART OF THE JOKE
That’s kind of it. I wanted to say Morgan gets the choice between two mysterious and interesting boys, and even though she knows one of them will break her heart, or she’ll break theirs, she jumps right in because this is what all the songs are about. I wanted to tell you she’s cured. I wanted to say that I figured it all out, and every single tear I shed had a triumphant purpose.
That’s not exactly what happened, but it’s what happened-ish. I went to Columbia and then NYU; I wrote some books. I kept being alive and grand and passionate. My depression is just part of me, and I talk about it all I want. I take my pills, I go to therapy and love it, and every breakdown is a tiny bit easier, because I know it will pass. It has to. Because that’s how you do this life thing.
Here’s the thing about time: we can’t see it. We understand the straight line that turns present into past and future into present. But what about déjà vu? What about the moments that seem to keep repeating—did they ever really end?
We are the continuous and swerving line. We are the present progressive. We are.
This year I’m turning thirty, and no matter what age you are, you’re probably cringing reading that, either because it sounds super old or because it sounds like I’m still so naively young or whatever. It’s a pretty weird age to be. When I was a teenager, I thought that at this age, I’d be typing away at some Great American Novel, gazing out at the Pacific Ocean from my beach house, wearing a white linen pantsuit with a satisfied, peaceful look on my face, and just behind me, in a gorgeous kitchen filled with stainless steel, my beautiful and caring husband is finishing up the dishes, and my two beautiful children are finishing their math homework before bed, everyone careful not to disturb Mom, the glamorous genius.
That is decidedly not what’s going on.
And maybe that’s why I had trouble writing this. Maybe I didn’t want to admit that, deep down, I’m still just as naive as I was back then, in search of a movie-script ending. I didn’t want to squash my young dreams or yours, my perfect and precocious reader, because that’s not how literature works.
(Right?)
This year I packed up my apartment and moved out of New York City, the huge, mythical place I’ve called home since I was eighteen. Moving is never not intense—it’s like a flashback montage of your entire life, but in objects. I had to take stock of every book I’ve ever read or pretended to read, every concert T-shirt and jean size I’ve worn, the person I was when I was wearing them. And as I was going through my “archives” (which are definitely not, as my friends would say, “trash of hoarder proportions”)—my yearbooks and essay assignments and the Yellow Notebook and my notes to Meg and James and Kelly and everyone—I began to see a story unfolding. I found the novel I’d been trying to write, and it turned out I’d been writing it for longer than I realized. All the stuff—scraps of paper and crayon drawings and lists of songs and pictures and so many feelings—if you take a step back from it, you can trace a kind of life.
I didn’t get the guy. There was no guy. I don’t even remember who I was talking about. They didn’t matter. They aren’t in the kitchen as I write this, kissing my children on their foreheads. I have no children at the moment. The guy could be cool, but he wasn’t really the prize. I mean, let’s be real. The stakes are higher than that. They have to be.
I also didn’t lead a social or political revolution. I’m not secretly Toni Morrison or Angela Davis. But I am sipping out of what could only be referred to as a goblet, and it’s pink, and I’m looking around at my apartment, which I inhabit all on my own, and it’s full of books and music and colors I love, and I know myself. I know where I’ve been, and I know what I want to say to the world. I know my flaws; I know what hurts me and why. And I know what makes me beautiful. Even when other people might not. When the world tells me I’m wrong, I know when to say nope. I guess that’s what I have now that I wish I’d had then: the confidence to know when my instincts were right all along.
I never got suspended and I never preached about the Black Panthers, because I didn’t know, when I was seventeen, who they were. Not the whole story. I didn’t find out the whole stories of Fred Hampton and Emmett Till before I went to college, and that pains me. I know their spirits were part of me, only dormant and waiting to be found.
I do know that I felt isolated, that I adored my Vans and Sonic Youth, and that every single feeling of sadness and hopelessness and ugliness was, and is still, true. That’s the part that I can break to you—the part where I’m still just me: hero and antagonist, hilarious and gross and flawed and well-meaning and corny and pretentious and obnoxious and thoughtful and complicated.
I saw “James” just last week. We both live in Los Angeles now, minutes from each other. In his apartment, late at night as usual, I uncorked wine and joked with his boyfriend while James finished preparing an elaborate three-course dinner. At the table, I couldn’t stop smiling at their PDA. Mr. K doesn’t teach anymore, and folklore has it I ran him off. My brother traded playing sports for music and social justice, and remains way cooler than me.
Everyone has fucked up. Everyone has been brilliant. Both of those things are true.
I saw “Meg” in Portland, Oregon, on my last book tour. I wore a full suit. Meg had purple hair. After my reading, we went to see our friend Luke, who isn’t David or Sean but who definitely drove me around playing Modest Mouse and wrote me heartfelt notes about how we saved each other, and how the music did. Luke had a party that night, and after a while, rolling our eyes at everyone there, the three of us slipped away to his room, video game controllers strewn all around, and fell asleep in his bed.
In the morning, Meg and I sat on his porch, hungover and waiting for cabs to different places, and he brought us coffee. We were almost adults. Meg said, “I remember what you said to me that one time when we were eighteen. I was crying, and I felt like I really messed up and you just took me by the shoulders and smiled and said, ‘Congratulations. One day this will all just be an anecdote.’ ”
We aren’t always our best selves. And even if we try to be, sometimes life is just too hard. But the thing is: we’re all still here. We still s
hared laughs and cried together and watched each other throw up and fall head over heels for the wrong person. We made dumb choices and then smart ones and then dumb ones again.
It gets better, but then it doesn’t, and then it does again. That’s the thing that’s not so interesting about living: it’s just living. That’s the story, and it’s actually not so bad.
Anyway, you’ll see.
ONE MORE THING: DON’T WAIT TOO LONG TO SAY WHAT HURTS
It will surprise zero readers that I have grown up to become the sort of person who holds up their own book-signing line (sorry!) to help someone find therapy resources (not sorry!); who shrugs off deadlines or my own care (working on it!) to spend a day researching psychologists for a friend in another state (not sorry!). What I mean is, I waited so long. Far too long. If there’s one thing I can say to anyone reading this: admit when it hurts. When it hurts like that, when it’s unbearable, the kind of bad that’s so bad you don’t even talk about it—you don’t have to go there by yourself.
I like to email folks what I call a little “therapy starter kit,” with a few resources I’ve used and some tips about how I search for a good therapist. It’s not extensive or official or anything, but it’s something. And when I can, I like to offer to help search or call doctors for appointments. Just, something. I know this is a scary thing. But I also know how bad it hurts. (And I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want to do when I can’t even get out of bed is call a bunch of strangers and tell them I’m sad.)
The point is, I want to keep you alive. But there’s actually no therapy cheat code or insider secret—we should all know where to turn and where to turn each other. So I’m going to put a little version of my note here. For folks who are struggling—and also for our parents, our siblings, our friends, and anyone, really. Because it’s that simple, that easy, to help each other keep being alive.
Who Put This Song On? Page 23