Coming Undone

by Terri White

  Less than a week later, I arrive home, to the room that’s really a box, and there, proudly, defiantly, in the centre of my bed is my weave. I look down the hallway: there’s no sign of the landlady. I look around for clues. And there under the bed is a pair of purple knickers I don’t recognise, that aren’t mine.

  The hot madness inside our apartment in the sky continues to build. I wake up one morning with tiny red bites on my body. I scratch my body, the bones that have made an appearance. ‘I think the apartment has bed bugs,’ I say to the landlady.

  She reacts furiously: ‘You must have brought them in!’

  I struggle to remember why I’m here. I feel like I’m serving time, but I’m not sure for what. I work as hard, harder, than I’ve ever done, but my job leaves me feeling exhausted, emptier still. The women I meet smile and slip their hands into mine, the corners of their mouths never moving to meet their ears. The conversation stops when I enter a room. Words are said quickly, with sharp edges that cut, when I’m out of rooms. The person I’ve come here to be remains further away than ever before. I used to be able to see the outline of her, just ahead, but she’s long gone now and I walk alone.

  I’ve lived with loneliness before. I was a lonely child, a lonely teenager, a lonely adult. I have spent the majority of my life alone, mute, hiding. It’s so soft and quick off the tongue, so easy to claim, romantic, even. But it becomes clear in this city that I’ve never experienced true loneliness before, not the kind that you wear like a cloak of invisibility. Loneliness layered upon loneliness until you wonder if you are, in fact, not just invisible, but dead already. Your existence snuffed out, suffocated.

  I walk down Eighth Avenue and I believe, right down to my toes, that I can’t be seen by a single person around me. The end result of the disappearing act I started a few months before. Now I’m in the air. In the sewers. In the spit on the sidewalk. Everywhere but in my own body.

  When I was a kid I thought that the world was watching me – that human existence was me, and everyone else was just watching me. That the world started the minute I walked into a room, and stopped the minute I walked out. That I could communicate with the world through the mirror. That when I spoke into it, they listened, they saw. Now I’m not sure if I’d ever existed. That me, Terri, my consciousness, is a figment of someone else’s imagination – maybe my own, if that is even possible. I try to talk to strangers just to check I’m there, here.

  ‘Hello?’ I ask the woman in a trench coat hurrying down Broadway on a Saturday afternoon.

  ‘Excuse me?’ to the man jumping into the cab I’ve hailed.

  Neither so much as flinch in my direction.

  I feel my identity, my sense of being crumbling. Who am I? Where am I? What am I? Am I? Maybe company will bring me back to life. I crave it: the look of recognition, familiarity in another’s eyes. The fingers attached to the man in the bodega graze mine when he hands me my change after I buy cigarettes one night. The hairs on my arms stand to attention as 350 volts flood through my body. It’s the first time I’ve been touched in months. I miss it so much. I miss feeling something, anything so much.

  The drinking, the pill-popping continues. One night after a party at a friend’s apartment, I take a handful of sleeping pills, half a handful more than usual. I feel myself drifting off, on the warmest, softest wave, and as it laps at my eyelids I think this may actually be it. It’s not the first time I’ve felt this in recent months, but it is the first time I’ve so joyfully welcomed it. The relief as I sink further and further into the thick blanket, the arms of someone I love. I’m woken a day later, when my friend stops by to check I’m OK, still breathing, when I don’t respond to his messages.

  The cycle goes on, the darkness chokes, even in this place in the sky, in the light. Eighteen months after I left London, I decide it’s time to go home. If I don’t, something bad, something worse is going to happen to me. And it won’t feel like that when it comes; it will feel good, like something better. It will feel like sweet, sweet escape. I quit with no job, for the first time in my career. For the first time, I choose life.

  CHAPTER 20

  I’m home, back in London. Within days, he appears, seemingly out of nowhere. But from the first half-moment, the first apparition, I know he’s been there all along, moving as I move, forever just out of my eyeline. He’s the one who was meant to find me, who I was going to come together in the hands, under the eyes, of.

  He has a partner. I know this without asking or without him telling. I find it strangely, shockingly irrelevant. My usual concrete moral core barely flinches at my transgression: the joining of our bodies, his mind folding into mine.

  His partner has nothing to do with me and certainly nothing to do with me and him. This isn’t a convenient psychological dodge, a flinching away from the light so I can stack my guilt and regret neatly in dark corners. This isn’t a belief that he doesn’t love her, not really, hasn’t touched the softest bit of her thighs in years. My obsessive imagination doesn’t think about those moments beneath their sheets, the fact that they share sheets. She never intrudes on my mind. Sometimes I try to see her, force myself to conjure her from wool and fingernails and hair. See her hand in his, the joining of warm, familiar skin.

  I believe he probably does love her; in fact, I’m sure he does. Just as I’m sure that his hands still find her body, pull her close in the middle of the night with an ache of tenderness and stab of desire. It’s irrelevant. We exist elsewhere, as something else. There’s no name for it, no words that can adequately articulate what and who and how it is.

  The first message arrives out of the blue, but with the feel of an old friend, one that belonged to another time, another you. We make an arrangement, the very first one: we’re to meet in a pub with flowers tumbling around the front door. And as I wait for him, knees tightly clenched, jaw set, I know, even though I can’t possibly know, that this man has stained me. It starts to spread, tendrils pushing outwards, probing the holes and spaces in me.

  He walks into the pub. The familiarity in the wave of his sandy hair and the arch of his blue eyes makes me ache. The first thing I feel is a sense of shattering loss that pulls my kneecaps tighter still. The loss of myself, of who I am, had been. Never has so much altered in so few seconds. On either side of a blink sit the old and new versions of me, of my life. After a second blink, I’m cascading over the other side into an unknown that feels known. The details of that first meeting are a blur: what we say, what we drink. Do we laugh? I’m steadfastly concentrating on keeping the loss to myself, but it’s everywhere – splashed up the walls, walked into the carpet, soaking through the cushions. It seeps back in through my skin and what will become a cycle begins.

  When I sit, I think of him. When I sleep, I dream of him. When I walk, he’s in my stride, in the bend of my elbow as an arm swings. He’s invaded my brain and I can’t get him out. I don’t want him out. He’s a stranger whom I know every inch and crack and crease of. The familiarity hums in our DNA.

  There are more meetings packed with heat and longing; more dreams, texts, emails scratched out in the agony of absence. I gladly offer up my jaw as the yoke is fitted around my neck. I feel so in love and so insane. So desperate and deranged. Every sound is loud, bouncing uncomfortably off my ear drums; every colour I see burns through to the back of my eyes, turning the sockets black. I read about a woman who has her tear ducts cauterised, scars forming over and closing the pinprick holes shut. I want to burn my own to keep all of him, the chaos and ecstasy, inside me.

  What can we do? What can be done? We can’t be together – he says he’s unable, unwilling to leave his relationship – but the very thought of the alternative tiptoes around a spiral I fear. The madness, frenzy, builds and builds, and just as all seems so desperate and lost, I’m offered a job back in New York, the city I’d left just weeks before. A job that I couldn’t have sketched in my wildest of dreams. And just as I knew that if I stayed in New York, worse would happen, I kno
w now that if I stay in London, worse will happen. To him, to me, to us.

  I have to leave. I know I’m doing the right thing, am utterly convinced I am, but everything about it feels wrong, feels desperately like I’m doing something that will never ever be undone again. The hand at my back continues to push me away.

  We decide to spend the weekend together before I leave. On Friday night, we meet in a pub where we think no one knows us. I spend the blurry hours and days before imagining the moment he walks in, the shot of endorphins hurtling through me, the electric shock that runs up my spine, makes me arch my back and bare my neck; I rattle on the wooden stool.

  Then, as if I’ve summoned him from my imagination by chanting his name over and over again, he’s there. The air escapes from the room through the open door and then he’s by me, on me, fingers in my hair, his mouth on mine, fitting exactly as I’d remembered but still couldn’t believe it ever did. The room swims and spins; lights blur and whirl and settle somewhere around the lines that sit in the pouch of skin between his thumb and first finger. I push my lips, my tongue inside, need the taste of him to take me away, away, away.

  The next night, I wait for him in a hotel room, put on my favourite black dress that I hope is his favourite too, smooth it down, look at myself in the mirror, still shocked by how different I feel, look. Who is she? Where is she from? He knocks on the door, comes inside with a kiss. I keep opening my eyes to see if he’s still there, still real. I can’t believe he’s a person in my hands; I touch him, constantly, trying to make him stay whole. But as I fill out beside him, he’s disappearing next to me, becoming a ghost.

  Hours later, I wake up, the sun is yet to rise and he’s straight as a board next to me. Barely moving. Staring straight ahead. Panic strains, floods the sheets. He has to leave; he can’t be here; he can’t breathe; he can’t handle this. Daylight comes and the words are the same. He has to leave. I know he has to leave. I know that he can’t stay but I can’t speak to tell him this. I know if I open my mouth, I’ll gag or scream or any of the things that my body feels compelled to do. The life I’ve been finally given, the life that should have been mine all along is being ripped out of my arms.

  I can’t breathe. I want to ask him to stay. I want to beg him to stay, on my knees, hands on his thighs, but I can’t. Instead I dress, stand, back against the roll-top bath, fingers gripping. He tells me he can’t, he’s sorry, he won’t. He must go back to where he must be. I grip harder and harder until my pink fingers go white. Staring at the carpet, the swirls start to dance as spots blur and bend, becoming a dancing, writhing mass of bodies and brains.

  As he’s speaking – sounds that are noises, but not words – I feel part of me splinter and float up to the ceiling. She watches both of us as the scene plays out. She thinks I’m pathetic. The way I look at the floor, tears burning my eyes, the way I swallow and grip, try to drill my emotion into the ground so that it sinks into the concrete and escapes him. She watches as the shutters go up, keeping me safe from what is happening around me, from what will certainly kill me.

  I don’t look as he shuts the door behind him, nor do I move. I stop feeling anything at all and I’m grateful for the numbness. I want my insides to be scooped out with a cold, steel spoon and dropped down the drains for the rats to ravage. Minutes pass, maybe hours. I don’t move. I’m scared if I do I’ll start to feel again.

  Eventually, the sun starts to dim and there’s nothing else to do but move. One foot, one hand, stretches out in front of the rest of me. I’m incapable of moving my body in one smooth motion, a movement that I recognise. One step and I’m on my knees, towels in my fist and then in my mouth. I’m choking but that’s better than crying, than begging, than screaming his name.

  When I’m dry, I pack my overnight bag, refusing to look at myself in the mirror as I move around the room and bathroom. I walk out of the door, unable, unwilling to turn around and take one last look at the room where we spent one night, the sheets still tangled and balled.

  I walk down the hall, walls guiding me. I get in the lift, just big enough for two, press the button for the ground floor. I get out and approach the desk.

  ‘Hello,’ I think I say. We have a conversation, though I can’t remember the words that pass between us as I pay the bill. Just seconds later, I’m out on the Soho street staring at the sky, at the lives being lived behind each tiny window. I feel it. He’s gone.

  Two days later, I’m on a plane to New York. I cry the whole way. The next morning, I’m up at four a.m., my sleep taken, too. I walk the streets of the Lower East Side as club kids fall, laughing, into yellow cabs and bodega owners in thick hats and vests cut through the twine holding stacks of newspapers together. He’s 3,000 miles away and I’m more stuck inside him than ever. And now, without him, I don’t know who I am any more, what’s left. I wish I’d never met him. I can’t imagine my life without him. I can’t believe I existed without him. What do I do now?

  CHAPTER 21

  I know that my only salvation lies where it always has: with work. With this job that I’ve spent my life dreaming of. The career that has saved me every time I’ve been sucked into the sticky depths. It’s also a chance to right all the previous wrongs, to prove that the city didn’t defeat me. And that I’m good enough, smart enough, that I’m enough. For something, for someone.

  It’s a job working with a big, talented, suspicious, hard-edged team. I stand before them, the Empire State Building stacked in between buildings out of the window to my left, to tell them how great it will all be, how great I will be, as they stare hard in my direction. I’m in the office twelve hours a day, then tapping, chest tight, from home, or a bar, for several hours more. I pour every bit of my brain and energy into it. This will save me. This is who I am.

  I pray that the pressure and constant thrum of stress will take my mind away from him. That I’ll find sanctuary in the strung-together seconds when I no longer carry him around. I wait for the smallest sign – an email, a message, a picture, a word – a hint that I’ve spread inside his life like he has mine, that he too is altered. I hunker down in the dark, under the covers, scrolling, looking, waiting.

  I write the first of many letters that I never send. Full of longing, lust and utter, desperate sadness. I write each one on the same paper, in the same blue ink, tearing the pages off when I’m done, folding them four times until I can’t see the words, in the hope that they won’t touch me. When that doesn’t work I put them inside a plastic bag and turn that over four times too.

  I think that he loves me. I know that he loves me. Each day bleeds to night, gives way to day, and it happens over and over again and I don’t know when I’ll see him again.

  I dream of the day he means nothing to me, means less, when every single waking moment isn’t owned, claimed by him. He squats inside my chest and I hate him and love him and want to cough him up out of my mouth and spit him into the air but he won’t budge. I imagine what he’s doing every minute of every day. I dream of him at night; he stalks my dreams; some nights he tells me it’s OK, others he tells me it’ll never be OK and I wake up gripping the sheets in my tight fists and I hate him more than ever. I want to kill him.

  Saturdays, I pace Sixth Avenue. I try to keep in a straight line by putting food in my mouth and my feet on concrete but my mind flies away, out of my reach, across the sea and land, like a watchful bird, as he lies with the one he’s with. He says he loves her; she says it back. It’s no longer irrelevant.

  I’ll resign, I’ll come home, we can be together, I plead from across the sea.

  No, he says. You can’t do that.

  I can’t do that. No.

  I carry him on my back, across my thighs, around my neck. The weight is suffocating me. I can’t breathe.

  Being back in the city, the plague of before is never far away. I’ve been broken afresh, and in the seconds I can’t control my thoughts, I feel apart from myself in a whole new way. My mind sitting so far away from my body. The wo
rld moving around me as I stand perfectly still, without comprehension. The wound is fresh, the dampness of new blood feels known, dangerous. Once again, within weeks, I’m burying myself in booze. The familiar clink and slosh comfort me while it chokes me.

  Then, one night, I almost get arrested. I’ve been somewhere in the city, drinking alone. I flag a yellow taxi, climb in, share my apartment’s cross streets before my head is lolling against the back seat as we speed home. I’m woken by the cab driver knocking on the plastic partition, announcing we’re there and I need to pay. I scrabble around in the bottom of my bag: nothing. I try again. My purse is empty and there’s no card – just loose change in there. I start to panic.

  ‘I don’t have my card,’ I say.

  ‘You have to pay,’ he replies.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know where it is.’

  He shakes his head. ‘If you don’t pay I’ll call the police.’

  I panic, the panic of a drunk immigrant who knows they can be deported just for being arrested.

  ‘Please don’t,’ I say and start to cry.

  He locks the doors and calls the police. Several minutes later, there’s a flash of police lights and a firm knock on the window.

  ‘Miss, why won’t you pay the driver? We’ll have to arrest you if you don’t.’

  I continue to cry, my hand searching through my bag as they start to radio it in. Suddenly, it’s there at the end of my fingers: the card that I was too hammered to find the other fifteen times I’d looked. The police keep their eyes on me while I pay, laughing.