This was my world as it existed, a little world made of glass.
The ending to my stories didn’t matter as I didn’t picture them. Right now my mentality was to take one day at a time and that’s all I could manage. Thinking about a future where the Blackhole was still in my bed was unimaginable because I imagined nothing and that frightened me beyond all belief. The time in between my life at university and my life at home wasn’t consumed by the Blackhole, rather the long and tired battle against it. This time was just as exhausting and uneventful as my moments of reality. I didn’t have hobbies and my pervious interests just seemed pointless. I had loved music, Miranda still did, yet my violin lay dust-covered in its case under my bed in familiar company with my camera. I no longer exercised, swimming and running were beyond me and I had allowed my gym membership to lapse at the start of last year. Rather, my war against the Blackhole was spent sitting in my desk chair, staring blankly at my laptop screen and watching, but never absorbing, shitty television. This was my life was and that is the saddest thing I have ever admitted. My life had been consumed by the Blackhole, it was eating up every piece of me and no matter how hard I fought I couldn’t escape the darkness as there was nothing to replace it with. I felt as if I was perennially flipping through a TV with nothing good was on. I was trapped in the snow screen, watching the channels on either side of me play out, screaming in the deafening static of frantic dots which didn’t even know I was there.
If I had to rank the moments of reality which I enjoyed the least, family dinners would be at the top. It was like that horribly sweet and sticky pink medicine you had as a child; it was completely revolting but you swallowed it because, in the long run, it made you feel better or at least you hoped it would. I used to love dinner, it was my favourite time of day and for Miranda it still was. It wasn’t the prospect of food or the socially accepted abandon of work that had made me look forward to this evening ritual. Rather it was love of my family that had made me treasure the one time of day where we all sat down together to eat. Family dinners in our household were always aligned with the conventional, pre-dated ideas of the perfect family unit. At my mother’s insistence we all sat down at the table, Dad sat at the head and the rest of us filled out the sides. We had talked and laughed and yelled. The atmosphere compensating for my mother’s lacklustre cooking, which had never appeared as bad as it was until recently. We had never been afraid to be ourselves and I distinctly remember not thinking; not thinking about what I was saying or how tired I felt. Not thinking was glorious, just being there and completely at the mercy of others and their conversation. My first experience of a family dinner not conducted at the dinner table was when I had slept over at Laura’s house when I was twelve. We’d sat down, alongside her mum, step-dad and younger sister in front of the TV. Where my family dinners were loud and raucous, Laura’s were the exact opposite: dumb and boring. Their television acted like a buffer, a social control which regulated and facilitated their time together.
“You may speak now.”
“What did she say?”
“Shut up!”
“What?”
“I missed that.”
What made people so afraid of being together? I mean I get it, people terrify me but at least I’m honest about it. Oddly the one pretext I don’t put-on is the one of being social. People are glued to their TVs, their computers and their phones. Social interaction carried out through media and I suppose it does its job. Interaction is meant to serve a function: you say one thing and receive a reply. We pretend that an emoticon or an “x” at the end of a message conveys the same feeling as a smile or a hug and this widely-accepted ignorance allows us to get by without feeling too bad about the fact that a part of us just doesn’t care. Social media was numbing us to ourselves and to others. This is why kids were so despondent these days and why we struggled to show emotion. We had forgotten how wonderful raw interaction could be; those truly mad moments where you found yourself caught somewhere between illegality and serious injury. The aching moment of clarity when you finish crying and take in a deep shuddering breath that stretches out your lungs to bursting. That feeling of hugging someone tightly and being hugged back even tighter so that neither one of you wants to let go from fear of showing you don’t care as much. Yet perhaps the most beautiful moment was laughter. When did you last laugh properly? The type of laugh that makes your eyes sting with tears, your cheeks hurt from grinning and your side tighten with a stitch, leaving you short of breath and forced to snort in a lungful of air which immediately sets off another round of rapturous guffawing. Laughing to the point where nothing else escapes but silent breathless wheezes from your shaking body. What had happened to that?
These days not even the obvious lure of food made me look forward to dinner. My constant snacking throughout the day had made me forget what hunger felt like. What dinner had become for me was a form of social service, a task which had to be completed in order to remain socially accepted and invisible. So when my family actually enjoyed a dinner, when my mother let go of her sensitivity, my Dad his offensiveness and where their three children actually conversed, my smile and laughter no longer became forced. Smiling became something I couldn’t help but do and to hide it would be the reverse of the predicament I was in. Being unhappy didn’t make me unreasonable; I wasn’t going to hide any genuine smile, even if the only thing it did was strengthen my performance. At the very least then I could say it wasn’t all completely fake. Peter had this effect on family dinners for the next few nights. Night’s where my cheeks were stretched sore from grinning like an idiot and where I felt sick from laughing so hard on a full stomach. These dinners didn’t make the Blackhole go away, it was still reliable and always waiting for me in my bed when I went to sleep, but they did grant me just one hour where unhappiness was unwelcome. Yet if something gives you that feeling, when it is taken away there is nothing like the desolation it leaves. It’s a simultaneous surge of betrayal and anger for allowing yourself to believe it would last. It’s perhaps even a little childish; I was the naughty kid in the corner who’d had their favourite toy taken away. On this particular night the removalist was my dad. Peter and I were having a discussion on bias and reasoning. As part of his degree Peter was forced to participate in a mandatory philosophical unit and while my brother was brilliant, when it came to understanding a concept he believed to be wrong, his astuteness became his undoing. Right now he was struggling to articulate an argument which I sensed was about a subjective human mind being incapable of “correct” free will. It was marginally entertaining to watch him stutter out words his mouth refused to surrender.
‘But what happens when you don’t know you’re flawed? I mean, what happens if your subjectivity makes you incapable of realising that objectively you’re not normal?’ Peter’s tone was almost pleading and he was growing frustrated. He struggled when explaining himself to other people; I suppose he was worried his social awkwardness would lead people to think he was stupid. ‘Like, what’s that word for when you’re depressed but you don’t know it so you don’t try to make it better?’ he asked, attempting to clarify his point using an example.
Dad, who Peter and I didn’t even realise was paying attention, much less listening, suddenly moved his lips in such a way that they seemed to form my name. I heard it; it hit me like a bullet in the centre of my chest. I sat there silently as my mind slowly put together that Dad hadn’t meant to call my name, but rather use it as an answer to Peter’s question. You may think it ridiculous that something so small could have such a devastating effect, but what made it worse was that it wasn’t a hurtful comment or slur that made the walls of the Blackhole rise up and a torrent of unhappiness well up inside them. It was my own name. The walls were erected and the depths of the hole filled in such a speed that it escaped time. One moment unhappiness had left me and then it was back. The sickening, numbing darkness came back like a flood swallowing that temporary light happ
iness had lit.
Did you miss me?
I heard my family’s laughter before I saw it but then I looked at their slack-jaw mouths opening and closing idiotically, like some gross puppeteer was pulling their jaw down while tilting their head up. Dad had said my name as a joke but I couldn’t see the humour. What made it worse was that it had been my dad who had said it; he was someone I loved as much as I could and someone I thought was convinced by my exhausting performance. It appeared my little glass world was just as transparent to everyone else as it was to me. The thought that people could see my Blackhole made me feel sick and just as my happiness retreated into the depths of the hole, I retreated back within myself. On the outside that meant I sat silently back against my chair away from the table, watching my family laugh at my expense. Desolation doesn’t stay with you for long. It seems to light a “vacancy” sign when it enters so another emotion gears up to take its place and this time it was anger that got there first. Being angry overwhelmed me. I didn’t yell or scream or fight, I sat there seething as my body worked like a combustion engine, reacting the anger with all available stores of reason. I was angry not just because I had failed in the one thing I thought I was doing well at in my life; my façade of happiness. I was also angry in a very true sense of the word: my dad had offended me and he had used it for the entertainment of others. Dad had no idea how hard it was. How this godforsaken hole just wouldn’t stop sucking everything from me and how hard I tried to make it stop. I would give anything to make it stop. Nobody chooses to be unhappy. It’s not a box you tick on the life-plan. Sometimes a hole just rips open inside you and you’re pulled in. By the time you realise what’s happened you’re already six feet under and so numb that you honestly don’t know what happiness is anymore. How can you fight something when you don’t know what the weapon is? I’d spent so long searching for it I’d become desperate, all “happiness” did now was make me slide further down the slippery walls. Right now I was experiencing first-hand the effects of ersatz euphoria and all I could think about was running away, escaping to the Blackhole in my bed where I could peacefully fall apart with no one watching.
‘Can I be excused?’ The voice that I think belonged to me sounded pained, completely unlike me but at the moment that was my least cause for concern.
‘Have you anything else to tell us?’ my mother asked.
Yes, you can all go fuck yourselves.
I shook my head. ‘No.’
‘Then you can go.’ I was already standing before she uttered the last word. I didn’t bother bringing my plate into the kitchen; consider it their punishment for what had been said. My dismissal from the table had the effect of making me invisible and my family quickly merged onto a new topic of conversation. It appeared what my dad had said, and the effect it had on me, had gone completely unnoticed. It was totally unimportant. Nobody had taken it seriously.
6
I’d like to think I’m an optimistic person. Not literally of course, but I’d come to realise that the Blackhole wasn’t without its advantages. It’s comforting to consider that even in the desolate space of my mind it still actively sought to make good of the situation; on some subconscious level I wasn’t giving up. You know that saying “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, well consider it like that, but I suppose that would make me more pragmatic than optimistic. One of the perks of feeling nothing was that in situations of stress I remained disconcertingly calm; any panic I did feel was now purely psychosomatic. I stood there absently, watching the flurry of people around me stress about little things, big things, things that mattered and things that didn’t. What made people stress? It was all emotional of course – panic with a little bit of expectation.
Assignments are one case where some experience of stress is almost inevitable and rightly so. Today failure is considered a death sentence, especially when you’re my age and in my situation. We’re told that our entire life will be a reflection of a particular piece of paper and that our success will depend on a single letter. I’d like to think that it was because of the Blackhole I didn’t care about how I did in my assignments but truthfully I wasn’t quite sure if it was to blame entirely. Undertaking a course which you find so completely boring and predictable makes it very hard to care. Any care I did possess came from one source and one source only: Miranda. It wasn’t that I used to be a brilliant student, quite mediocre in fact. I was never smart, any intelligence I could claim as my own was the result of my own hard work. Nevertheless I always pulled through when it mattered. I remember that feeling of shaky relief mixed with utter elation when I received my TISC results and learnt I’d passed economics by a meagre 54%. My parents couldn’t understand why I was screaming, they’d probably thought I’d gone mad from all the stress I put myself under, but that 54% proved I was capable of something other people had told me I wasn’t. It proved that I had some form of belief in myself. Where had that gone?
I was sitting across from Abby in one of the library’s study booths and she was giving me a confused look. I think it was because I was telling her how stressed I was, well rather lying about how stressed I was and she was struggling to comprehend how I could be so stressed without looking any different on the outside. I suppose I just always look terrible. I hadn’t planned on being at university today. I was more tired than usual and was looking forward to spending the day watching bad TV when I received Abby’s text summoning me and my brilliance to the library. I had considered giving her some lame excuse as to why I couldn’t come but the only one available was Peter’s arrival home and considering that was over three weeks ago, it no longer seemed viable. I hadn’t even bothered to shower and the heat made me feel grimy, like the grey-striped T-shirt and jeans I had pulled over my body had been lying at the bottom of the laundry basket despite the fact they were clean and fresh out of my drawer. My exhaustion made me irritated and indiscriminately so. I found myself staring at Abby as she mussed the side of her head resting it on her hand. Unlike me, Abby’s appearance made her state of stress abundantly clear. Her usual perfectly coiffed appearance was sloppy to the point where it was almost offensive, though I really wasn’t one to judge. Abby had almost finished her assignment, I suspect the only reason she had text me was because she wanted to run her ideas by me. Like in every other aspect of her life, Abby always required someone else’s approval and I was sorry that she only had me to turn to for that. I had lied on the spot when she asked me how my own paper was going. In truth I hadn’t even started my paper and I wouldn’t until the day before it was due. I didn’t know why Abby was stressing; she always received a distinction so her neediness just aggravated my already petulant mood.
A quick movement downward onto the pillowed seat was the first indication somebody had sat down next to me. Sluggishly turning my head in that direction, it was Doug’s lazy smile that greeted me. He looked tired and was wearing his work uniform from the chiropractic clinic, which made his smile all the more disarming.
‘Hey,’ he said softly and I couldn’t help but smile.
‘Hey yourself,’ I replied. ‘You look awful.’
Doug chuckled and Abby looked up.
‘Hi, Doug, how are you?’ she asked.
‘Good, tired and feeling just as awful as I look but all-in-all can’t complain,’ he answered. Doug was sitting on the booth like he was melting into it; his tiredness pressing his body into the plush red cushions and tilting his back like his neck had given up supporting it. His arrival was unobtrusive, it was obvious he was content to just sit in the silent company of Abby and I while we worked and I was more than happy to oblige him. Doug’s presence seemed to make my foul temper dissipate, like he was drawing my frustrations focus away from Abby and I found myself suddenly empathetic. My assignment question now appeared answerable and it became easy to find what I wanted to say. I began to type, offering Abby tiny pieces of information as I went along; not enough to give away my idea but enou
gh so that if she was clever, like I knew she was, she could figure it out. I managed to get a good third of my paper done when Abby’s kick under the table made me look away from my laptop. She nodded her head in the direction of the library wing entrance and I spotted two young men walking through it. One was tall and broad shouldered with a shock of black hair while the other was considerably shorter, mousy haired and whippet thin. The taller one noticed me staring and waved, I moved my hand upwards in a pathetic attempt to wave back and the two walked purposely to where we were sitting. Abby had leant away from her screen; she looked close to packing it all in.
‘Hi,’ Abby mused sleepily as the two men arrived at our table.
‘Hey,’ the taller one replied, while the shorter one appeared to be transfixed by Doug’s slouched position and, glancing over at Doug, I realised he’d fallen asleep. I nudged him softly on the arm, which managed to rouse him slowly and, glancing around, he laughed, embarrassed.
My Bed is a Blackhole Page 4