by Terri White
‘Miss, are you drunk?’ they ask.
‘No, sorry, I’m just tired,’ I say, continuing to laugh while heavily tipping the driver so he’ll lay off. The police finally let me out and I try to not so obviously weave through the West Village as they look at my retreating back.
While at night I battle with myself in the shadows, I’m reconciled on the outside during the day: the magazine has never been better, everyone agrees. What a great success. I’m finally enough.
The gap between these two halves of me grows. I reach upwards, outwards, push harder, straining, as the crack beneath me widens. I exist in the gap and it’s wonderful. I sit in absence, in complete isolation and I’m made steady, almost completely frozen by the singularity of it. This, I can understand. Here, I think, I can be. Here, I am nothing real. I don’t feel, and when I do, I stamp the last orangey embers out under my boot.
I go instead, most nights, to the place where you pay to feel for three minutes. I can’t remember when and how it first seemed like a sensible avenue for treating my madness. It does, after all, go hand in hand with my drinking, like a pair of intimate sisters, fingers slipped into a warm, soft palm after the correct number of drinks (four, by the way).
My apartment in the East Village is just three blocks from a karaoke bar, which is itself another five or six from another karaoke bar and so on and so on. There are so many karaoke bars in New York that you could navigate the city by the bright, flashing, sticky neon squares of abandon that light your path alone.
My favourite bar, the one that I became a weekly, twice-weekly, thrice-weekly visitor to is on St Mark’s, up brownstone steps and inside high-ceilinged rooms. On the odd occasion I manage to convince someone to come with me, but more often than not, I go alone.
The staff know me by now, pitying looks in their eyes. The sad, drunk girl back again. I always sing the same songs: ‘You Oughta Know’ by Alanis Morissette; ‘It’s All Coming Back To Me Now’ by Celine Dion. Melodramatic songs of loss, regret, rage, betrayal. I always play the same trick: slipping the unamused bartender a twenty-dollar bill with each song request, barely registering that I was dropping, in total, about a hundred bucks per night. Or that it really seemed to make no difference to when my song was played. Still, I folded the bill in four, slipped it into her hand underneath the song slip I’d filled out, clutching her hand for a moment as I pressed it in with a smile and a raised, knowing eyebrow.
I always drink the same drinks: a beer and a Big Apple (an apple martini in a plastic glass with a few cubes of sticky ice). I sit at the bar, waiting for my turn. When I’m up, I leap to my feet, clasp the microphone with both hands like my life depends on it, which it basically does. Sometimes I pull the air into me through my fists; at others I bend my knees, before my body lurches back upwards; on the worst nights I fall to my knees, head bowed towards the concrete floor as I pray and sing.
I never remember leaving. I wake up after each karaoke night at home. I can’t tell you if I’d walked the blocks or got a cab. I can’t tell you when or why I ordered food when I got home – curry, burgers, chicken, a cheese toastie – the detritus in the morning sometimes in a pile on the couch, sometimes stuck to my thighs, sometimes under my head and squashed into the pillow, sometimes scattered across the sheets like wedding-night confetti falling out of underclothes.
The next night, four drinks in, I walk through the door at the top of the stairs, the heads of the staff who pour the drinks and cue up the songs jerking back, recoiling in recognition. And it begins again.
I imagine that I’ll find solace in the space between the songs and the sadness and the drinking. I’ll find myself, crouching from view. I think that the songs are a path to the emotions I can no longer access naturally, only through the spit and shriek of public singing. In those moments, I feel full; I feel love, hate, fear, lust, anger. The feelings building, swelling and shrinking as the music moves. When it ends, fades away, the emotions leave me, leave my body, and I stand as empty and cold as the moments before it began.
The darkness is back, in full song, draining colour and life from everything.
CHAPTER 22
Karaoke was a doomed saviour, but one I sought out, because my condition was worst in the evenings. As the sun set, hope swirled away to be replaced by deep, cellular fear, my entire body erect and alert. Growing in dark corners, like the night-blooming cereus, waiting for the moon to peel open her petals and welcome life in. But I’m not welcoming life in. I’m welcoming the absence of it. I know every night I lie spread wide: everything is at stake again. Will I make it to the other side? To the rising of the light again? Will I be happy that I have?
Trying to place my arms, even my hands, around the fear is not just difficult – it’s impossible. It’s a totality I can’t comprehend. But I can see and identify and speak to shapes, fragments of the fear.
The fear is this: that I’ll never live happily and quietly, only violently and in pain.
The fear is this: that I’ll never love, truly, never be loved, truly.
The fear is this: that I’ll never be stitched together; my secrets, my indignities, my humiliations, my violations, my shame will flap, slap noisily against the loose bones that rub my skin red, rub my skin raw.
The fear is this: that the fog will snake and choke, trapping my breath. That I won’t wake, won’t stand and put my left foot upon the floor. That the moment will have swallowed me whole, swallowed me alive.
The fear is this: that the fog won’t snake and choke but choose to let me breathe. That I’ll wake, that I’ll stand and put my left foot upon the floor. That the moment will pass, as it always does, before blooming in my belly, curdling as it swells.
Every morning sees the beginnings of hope, the promise of growth, and then every night it turns inwards and withers all over again. Once the taste of death has been under your tongue, lodged along the edges of your gums, it never leaves your mouth. Ever. It’s not always the first thing you smack your lips at when you wake up or the last thing you savour before your senses shut down for the night. But you can hack and rinse and spit as much as you like – it always remains and it takes little to bring the taste vividly into the present. The sight of the sea through a window. The sound of waves crashing against rocks. A butter knife glinting in the sunlight that hits the cutlery drawer as you open it.
I sleep very little, just lie unconscious for a few hours, so spend hours in the dawn light imagining the various ways, the minute intricacies of the methods on offer. The fantasies set my pulse racing, my heart skipping: I stick a pair of scissors in my neck, mouth pulled tight, silently screaming at the cracks in the ceiling; with all my strength, I pull the blade of the knife down, across and around my throat in a circular motion as the blood shoots out and the fatty skin swells and contracts. I feel the thick rope between my fingers, see my body standing on the bed to loop the rope around the light fitting, feeling the rub against my neck as I place my head within its jaws. I taste the pills as they speed over my tongue into the back of my throat, falling down into my belly. I stand on top of the cliff, wind whipping my hair, and close my eyes as I jump: first my right leg and then the left trailing a little behind. They flail and whirl as I fall fast, my body breaking into pieces as it hits the concrete water. I steal a red pick-up truck, loop a pipe from the exhaust, wind the windows up tight, turn on the radio and sit and wait, breathing in the end.
I read about a young woman who threw herself off the George Washington Bridge, leaving her Xanax and her handbag behind. I follow in her path. Step into the footprints she left behind her retreating frame, across the brow of the bridge to the spot that she’d chosen to jump to her death.
It becomes an obsession that coils around the insides of my mind, tainting everything it touches until my brain is flooded by thoughts of suicide. There is no room for any other thoughts, any other dreams.
I find a website that lists all methods of suicide, rating them for pain and statistical likelihood of su
ccess. I rank my preferred methods, praying for the intersection of little pain and high chances of success. It tells me that for each one successful suicide attempt, there are thirty-three unsuccessful ones. It assures me that ‘for anyone committed to killing themselves, achieving the goal can be straightforward if a reliable method is chosen’. This makes me feel comforted; it makes me feel rational. I’m applying logic to my decision.
There is, as it turns out, no painless way to die. I measure the presumed physical pain against the mental pain I am currently collapsing inwards under. If the latter is unbearable, would the former be bearable because it would mean the end of what I couldn’t take? And how much does it hurt? How much pain is there in a bullet speeding into your brain, your heart? What do you know, feel, before you know and feel nothing? If hanging doesn’t break your neck, and you die by suffocation, how much pain is there and for how long?
I’ve written five, maybe six suicide notes in my life. It strikes me as something you should probably remember: the specific number of times you’ve put your final message to the world on paper, in ink, in pencil, in last-resort lipstick, the precise set of circumstances around each one. To give it the gravity, the weight it’s supposed to hold, if nothing else. The smooth barrel of the pen between my second and third finger; the faint blue lines marking out the path my words are to travel; the bone in my right wrist scuffing the paper as they creep across in single file.
But that’s not how it works. It’s snatches, shapes, sounds, fragments, shadows, small sharp stories of despair and, at the very middle of me, of it, five or six notes saying: I’m sorry. I can’t. I won’t. And, now that I think on it, it may well even be seven. Not that it matters especially, even if it should.
The time I will come closest to succeeding and dying, I won’t actually write a note at all. Not a word. Not a second in which I pause with a pen or scarlet lipstick tube ready to load and fire. For there will be no thought at all, only doing, doing, doing, until it is done. Well, almost done. Almost.
The reality is that if I had the presence of mind, the gathering of mind, to write a note, or the time to herald my thoughts into a linear enough line to begin to produce one, then that, right there, was an opportunity for doubt to invade, ants marching in a line through the cracks. Once inside, they make a home, thatch and nest, sprout wings out of the line in their backs and duplicate over and over until you can’t see, feel, the cracks of my mind. They’re obliterated by a marching, bobbing crater of bouncing black, the doubt made fear.
Each time I failed – I survived, I lived – it was the fear that was to blame. Not the fear of death, of not existing: I feared the living experience of trying to die, of the process of suicide. The fear that it would work, kind of, but not quite well enough. I’d be left trapped inside the shell of my still-functioning body, unable to speak or move or talk or walk but just conscious enough. That I’d be myself, just physically broken, stuck back together with tape, never to get better.
The fear of causing my family pain. I could feel their sadness, touch their anger: the questions I’d never be able to answer, the guilt they didn’t deserve, hadn’t earned.
I knew how it would look. I knew what others would say. I knew how my obituary would read. They’d ask why, ask how they didn’t know, how I hid it. I was furious. How could they claim not to know? Could they not hear me? Could they not see me? I’ve always, always known that there is an exit, a door, just off to the left of me where others couldn’t see it. I like it. Knowing it is there, an option, if it ever feels like I have to step off, step out. My fingers brush against the door jamb, the edges, fingertips cooled by the draught that sat in the gap.
Each time I failed, I’d be ashamed that I hadn’t been strong enough, that I’d allowed fear to win. Why wasn’t I strong enough? Determined enough? Resilient to the pain, unflinching under its heat. Lying, spreadeagled, straight and stiff, jaw locked, teeth tight as the life was sucked out of me. Resistance giving way to relief.
It’s hard to live when you suspect your life ended at five. But was that even possible if I wasn’t even a fully fledged person by then? The years from then have been spent trying to give myself reasons to live. To say to myself: your life is worth something. You’re worth something. You’re worth trying to save over and over again. I will save you every time you need it. I will save you until you’re able to save yourself.
The hours of fantasy about how I will die are followed by hours of shame. Shame for what is filling my brain until it feels as though it will burst and shatter. My shame tells me that maybe I should get help, while my brain tells me that I should just get on with it. I realise that all I really know for sure is that this, this daily existence, even with the fantasies, has become unbearable. The pain of limbo – of living a life which is wholly concerned with death – is bending me in half every day.
I let my shame take the lead. I run my insurance details and ‘problem’ through a website that gives me a short – very short – list of doctors whom I can see. However, if I’m willing to go outside my insurance and pay, I can see almost three times as many doctors. Each one describes a specialism: PTSD, eating disorders, sexual trauma, self-harm, addiction issues. I try to rank my problems in order of importance. The most pressing one + my insurance + a doctor on the island of Manhattan = the answer.
I end up choosing by the next available appointment, convinced if I have to wait a week, I won’t make it. The next day, I have an appointment with a fifty-something male doctor on the Upper East Side. I step out of the elevator onto the floor of his office, where a thin-lipped secretary sits tucked tight into the corner. Her job seems to be equal parts charging your credit card and welcoming you to the office. A brown and beige office on the outside and inside. I sit on a chair against the wall, one of just two, waiting to be called through the door that’s touching my left shoulder. I run through what I should say in my head. How much of the truth should I tell? Do I tell him how I feel right now? Or how I’ve felt my entire life? Where do I begin? Where would I even end?
I’m called inside his airless office. It’s tiny and tight, little to no light streaming through the blinds that cover both windows. One is almost entirely obscured by the churning, chugging AC unit, covered in dust, spitting out lukewarm air. The other looks out onto another brick building. He looks at me through his wide glasses, weary but ready to hear what I have to say. The words that come out of my mouth are jumbled, jangling. Later I struggle to remember exactly what I told him in my five-or-so-minute speech but I think I talk about my drinking, my shame, my pain, my abuse, my self-harm, my bloodied arms and black insides, how everything goes bad, goes wrong. I think I cry.
He nods, writing down as I speak. He pauses when I eventually stop, spent, and says, ‘It sounds to me like you have borderline personality disorder.’ He says that my trauma wired my brain differently. He prescribes mood stabilisers and anti-depressants. I forget to ask any questions, take my prescriptions from his hands and I’m back in the hall, confused and relieved. Relieved that after all these years, I have a name for what’s wrong with me. I have pills that will make it better. Maybe they’ll even make me not want to die, I think. Or feel a little bit more like living.
I Google as soon as I’ve offered up my credit card, been dispatched in the lift and am back out on the street. There are generally accepted to be nine symptoms of borderline personality disorder:
1) Fear of abandonment
2) Unstable relationships
3) Unclear or unstable self-image
4) Impulsive, self-destructive behaviours
5) Self-harm
6) Extreme emotional mood swings
7) Chronic feelings of emptiness
8) Explosive anger
9) Feeling suspicious or out of touch with reality
I think of the blades I’ve snapped out of my plastic razors and taken to my skin. I think of the moments too many to count – when I’ve felt hollowed out, like at my very core is nothing but a
ir and space. I think of the rage that makes my vision blur. I think of the heart-stopping desperation when I’m left or in fear of being left. I think of the minutes when the feelings and emotions I can’t separate out reverberate off the walls.
I go to the pharmacy a couple of blocks away to get my prescriptions. Two orange bottles containing my hope. I take them home and put them on the white bedside table unopened. I choose not to take one that day. I don’t ask why. The next day, the same. By the third day I know that I’m saving them. Two full pill bottles could be the answer to a different question. Knowing they’re there makes me feel safe, makes me feel that it’ll all be OK. They’re the way out when the time comes. And I know, instinctively, that the time is coming.
CHAPTER 23
At the same time that my mind is breaking, my body begins to buckle. I stop eating. I lose half a stone, finally arriving at the weight I’ve always wanted to be. My legs spasm. My brain feels like cotton wool. My skull fuzzes from the inside as what feels like volts of electricity run between the left ear and the right. I have pins and needles in my hands, my feet. I fall over in the street. I feel anxious and absent and out of sorts. Something is wrong, I know it. I’m coming undone, bone by bone, muscle by muscle, organ by organ, cell by cell.
The doctor bangs a small hammer against my knees and elbows, shines a light in my eyes, asks me to grip her arm, hard. Due to the luck of my insurance, I’m sent for an MRI the next day. I tell the doctor that I’m claustrophobic, can’t breathe in small spaces, won’t be able to spend what I’m told will be forty-five minutes lying in a tube in a machine. She reassures me that they’ll give me Valium and ensure I’m comfortable. I arrive at the imaging centre, referral in hand. The woman behind the desk takes it brusquely from me.