Truth be told, you were all that was on my mind most days for the better part of two years. Not in a pining, bullshit-fairy-tale kind of way, no. Not anymore: by the time the winter semester rolled around in January of 2017, I feared for you.
As professors scratched Expo markers over whiteboards and students clogged the hallways of Fisher and sweated their demons out in the Young Building basement gym, your face skidded its ghostly blur in and out of my mind, illuminated by those opaque ocean-deep eyes. The truth’s always in the eyes, Claire, and yours were tear-swollen and vacant with the kind of emptiness that only sadness can bring, a sadness that no one else can quite understand as it yields to surrender. You tried to surrender, and if there’s one thing I want you to remember through all of this, it’s to never, ever surrender. Let nature do its thing. I understand that this will be as hard for you to read as it will be for me to write, but please, never, ever surrender, ever again.
The biggest lie we tell ourselves as the black well of depression landslides itself away from distant emptiness to downright frightening, impish nuggets of devilish decorum is that taking care of it—a bullet in the head, a mangled shadow dangling from the loft rafter, however you do it—is the only way out. Know that it’s a fucking lie. It’s not the lesser of two evils, and it won’t make it better. The most it ever does is hand the pain to the living, but let’s be real here: who really lives? There are a handful of moments in our lives that we look back on and can honestly say that we really lived through. The rest is robotic resilience, unless a slot of the day—every day— is devoted to digging deeper, and I know you’re just like me: most of the time you don’t have the energy to do it, and when you do, you don’t like what you find. But repetition builds resilience. You might not like it, but in time, you learn to tolerate it enough to change some of the results.
I don’t look back on those years of my life with regret or sadness, or even remember the freshly fallen snow that hid the tarmac on that cold January day you attempted surrender. The truth was this: if nothing else, fear did its deed, giving me a reason to live and bleed as it picked away at the muscly meat of a heart while it bled out, bright red in the freshly fallen winter snow dust. The truth was this: you didn’t want to die. Not then and not now. You needed an out, a reset, to tag up and catch your breath.
So did I.
Fear kept me alive, fear killed me, and fear lit a firecracker under my ass just in time.
When no one looks
There are few people I respect more in society than those with invisible illnesses, people who appear to the eyes of passersby to be like everyone else, and are, in all ways but one. What sets them apart is how hard they fight, the war behind each smile, the shields thrown up in laughter, and the tears they shed when no one is looking.
I’m a yeller, or at least I was back then—a real piece of shit of a human being at times. I’m still that way now. If the spade is sharp enough, shit can always be dug up, even if you’re the damn pope.
Like many people living with or near mental illness, eventually I stop noticing things: the leaves changing colour, the spewing rumble of the number 14 bus as it pulls away from the stop outside the Jubilee Hospital. How, I think, is this the same person who was stuck in bed a week ago, in the back of a cruiser the week before that? Blue strobe lights flash red as I watch you on your morning promenade that, in every sense, speaks to cohesion: morning coffee, double splash of cream, two sugar, eggs; dip the toast in the yolk; avocado and orange juice to wash it down. Eyeliner darkens bright eyes, lip gloss glistens, and high heels tap. This is a person who—today—is unstoppable by bigot bosses and tall twisters that rip farmhouses from prairie ground in the height of summer.
But tomorrow always comes.
No matter how much pain anyone in your life is in, somehow, you have to show up to work and pretend it’s all okay. The next day, you call in sick. You’ve told me stories of past suicide attempts, but so far so good: it hasn’t gone beyond a few days in hospital, and I’ll take good care of you, love. I will. It won’t get to that. As I head off to work, I feel like a right jerk for leaving you behind in peril. At a stoplight on Finlayson, a seagull shits on my windshield. Fuck you, it seems to say.
Just before quitting time, I get a call. Words are lost in inaudible pools of syllables; tears, gasps, and fits of snot crackle into yellow-tinted Kleenex crumpled to the size of a small ping-pong ball. I catch no words, only emotion. I tell my boss I’ll finish the day from home, and on the way out I wonder, if my job were inflexible, whether self-sufficiency would be learnt.
There are no thoughts that night given to anyone but you, and it has to be that way. It is a matter of safety, of love, of white-knuckle determination channelled through empathy’s damp, dark caves of self-neglect. I sit next to the tub and put a meditation app on full volume as you plunge yourself into cold ice water. There’s a system to this, and you submerge yourself with a certain rhythm and conviction that flows out of you. It tells me you haven’t lost the will to fight, as the best of us sometimes do. But not tonight. You fight harder than a Spanish bull choking on cigars and rancid cognac finding the red. You’re a beautiful work of art of a human being, always smelling faintly of chamomile-spearmint and a mischief managed; what kills me most on nights like these is that you can’t see one ounce of the gallons upon gallons of unpasteurized beauty. But it’s there, love, and tomorrow it might let you find it.
As the sun falls, I give you an anti-psychotic, a sleeping pill, too, then take my own meds.
We’re both a little broken, and that’s why we’re a well-oiled machine of compassion.
“Thank you,” you whisper, your eye patches perched on your forehead like a skier’s goggles. They remind me of the many days of positive adventure to come.
When your breathing slows, I kiss your stringy, thick hair goodnight and get out of bed. Before I set out to do the night’s work, I stand under a streetlight and smoke, thinking of the strange sense of calm focus that comes after crisis, like caffeine setting in when sleep is scarce. The vibrations that reverberate up my spine, down into my lungs, and die in shaking forearms tell me that I’m in too deep.
Atonement. Corrupt morals. Selfish prick. A thousand self-deflating thoughts are flooding my skull on the way to work the next day. The morning is spent starting at a screen, pretending to type now and again. I can’t eat lunch. At noon, you see your counsellor for an hour; like clockwork, I get a call at five after one telling me you’ve been admitted to the Jubilee psychiatric unit.
There’s nothing to fill me now; no reason to leave work. No one there when I get home except the dog. I take her for a run to blow off steam, but she won’t budge an inch past the threshold of the driveway, not without her mom.
“I know, girl,” I say. “Mom will be okay.”
The dog’s soft brown eyes shut, open, and shut again. She looks to me, then back at the door, and whimpers.
A select few
The elevator dings. At a glass door with brown trim, I press a finger to the intercom button and wait. It’s just after dinner and the smell of disinfectant and bad decaf coffee erodes plastic cups. The intercom turns from red to green. A lock clicks with my boot heels. Linoleum shines and lithium lingers; most of these people are the mark of survival fading. But there you are, in your blue Island Health jumpsuit, a sheepish smile resting at the corners of your mouth. I know you’re sorry for being here, and I’m sorry for letting you be. But there is no place for a discussion around failed love when it comes to mental illness. I didn’t fail you and you didn’t fail me, not once.
“A few days,” you say, when I ask how long you’ll stay. “Just a…”
“Reset?”
The sheepish smile grows. “Sure.”
I move your blue diary from the armchair and put a hand on your leg, the same way I always do when we’re driving down the highway on a hot summer day, windows down, and a top 40 playing on the radio. I catch your eye, and for a moment, just a moment, we pave a highway of our own, right here in the ward.
Get through the bad, focus on the good. That’s my motto. It’s gotten us this far and it’ll get us farther.
That night, as the fans blare and the moon stares, I start to cry. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I hope those hospital nurses are being good to you, in every way you deserve. The dog hears my broken gasps and moves up close into the banana bend of my withered figure.
A siren blares, coming up Blanshard Street from downtown. When I think of others in this city who are in crisis, my breathing slows. There’s nothing overly special about me, about us, but there is about you. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can still manage to look half decent in a jumpsuit.
I wonder where we’ll be in five years. Perhaps riding bicycles in the French countryside, back tire baskets full of cheese and baguettes, or on a Maui beach, dancing our way through a fire-lit luau. Or maybe we’ll be idling in the parking lot outside Emergency, adding another Jubilee parking stub to the growing dashboard collection. Either way, we’ll be together. I won’t give up on you, like everyone else but a select few seem to have done; the fact that they’ve all given up on you is far sadder than any number of hospital visits, nighttime tears, or French countryside fantasies that, from the get-go, seem a little too far off.
The finish line
I’m in line at By The Books next day, adjacent to the library, and thinking of how much of a sucker you are for puns when my phone rings. One thing about this business is that when your phone rings, you damn well answer.
“Right now,” I say.
“Don’t you have class?”
“I can skip.”
You don’t give an answer, and I see now that you didn’t want me to. I did lots of things you didn’t ask me to, and lots of things you didn’t want me to. There is a difference between being a nice person and a good one, and being good to others doesn’t always mean being nice to yourself, and vice versa. And I don’t doubt that you didn’t need me to do the things I did. Just because someone struggles with mental health doesn’t mean they can’t be self-sufficient, lead a normal life, and give as much as they get.
No one ever gives anyone enough credit. The subtext of skipping class seems now to be nothing short of an insult, as though you require a babysitter 24/7. But you don’t, not any more than anyone else might on a bad day. Caregiving is a marathon, not a sprint, and I often catch myself thinking that if I hadn’t exhausted myself so early on we might have made it to the finish line.
The truth—two years later
It’s pretty easy to blame the alcoholic for the divorce, the crook for the crime, the cook for the bad meal. It’s easier to feel anger than it is fear, especially when you’ve never had to be scared before in any real sense of the term.
Truth be told, I broke us up more than your illness did. Truth be told, I started acting like a prick because I couldn’t bring myself to leave you for something that was out of your control.
Somewhere along the line, the morning routine got hard. Silence stung and seemed to follow like a sickly ghost in sandbag barricade everywhere it went. I stopped making your eggs, and you stopped asking for them. You left hours early for work.
“Because I can’t be around you,” you said when I asked.
If I didn’t have to be, I wouldn’t have been either. When I talked, I yelled, and you didn’t deserve it. Not once, not even the first time. When I yelled, I didn’t speak; I forgot how to do that, in a proper interpersonal way. I just yelled and waited. I stayed too long, and it got too dark.
It’s hard to remember the end; I think I blocked most of it out in self-preservation, but I remember the yelling. So much so that my throat was sore for a portion of most days.
No one deserves abuse; even Satan himself doesn’t. Now, I’ve learned to keep quiet, to dig deeper into myself, and to smile.
I waited too long, the way everybody does.
People hate waiting. We’re horrible at it. Yet we choose to do it constantly: fiddling with the radio in rush hour, waiting until the cough brings phlegm before phoning the doctor, and leaving love.
It was a rainy October morning, and I had followed you out to the driveway in nothing but my underwear and socks in a steaming blackout rage, bellowing so loud that crows vacated nearby branches.
“Don’t follow me out into the driveway,” you had said, but I did. That’s the last thing I remember. I was a real prick.
Something about being too tired to go to the grocery store, I think, was the start of the fight. I was awful to you in our final months; I’ll give you that. The logistics of mental health will shatter any boundaries of molten brick and stucco, and I yelled at you too much for not being able to vocalize it. I deserve to rot in hell for what I said to you; I really do. I was really yelling at myself for not respecting myself enough to get out before a shard of broken glass found an artery. Who says loyalty, forgiveness, compassion, and empathy aren’t sins?
I was strong enough to stay, to leave scars that shone under thick, snow-heavy skies, and to tread water on the summer days when I fell wakesurfing behind your dad’s boat on the lake; but I never swam, never even tried to, and for that I’m sorry.
We had our tough nights, and often stared out at the pebble beds that surrounded the backyard as the morning light seeped its shards of blood into the fading darkness of another night. Darkness always fades; that’s one of the best damn things about it. I wanted nothing more than to make you breakfast in the dark one last time, hug you, feel you, catch you, thrill you; but you weren’t the one in need of catching. I yelled, and couldn’t stop, as if the intense release of energy was the last tot of rum below deck. If I stopped, I’d have to feel the fear of coming home. I steamrolled downwards into barren ground and thought of the incredible things, of each moment, I was tearing away from us.
I don’t look back on it now in injustice or indignation because I see it for what it was: an incredible, fearless trial of the heart. Two people who gave all they could to each other, who got trampled on, and now, have gotten back up.
I could focus on the shame hiding behind the facts—that I was strong enough to stay, but not strong enough to leave in time—or I can focus on how blind and dumb and fearless we were, and laugh with you about it now. The shot we took was a good one, a fierce one, a loving one, and those three things are the best anyone can really hope for when they wake up each morning beneath the sun. The chances we take as humans is something I think about a lot.
When it’s all said and done, I can say I’m thrilled to have taken the shot, thrilled we’re both still here, and thrilled to remember all of it.