yesnothankyou

March 2015. I haven’t gotten a prescription for an ssri yet and I can’t stop thinking about dying. Not about wanting to die, about it happening to me. I think about it constantly. I'm all soft inside, I have panic attacks in the middle of grocery stores. I cry in a parking lot and half way through start laughing because none of it makes sense. I wipe the tears off my cheekbones, still laughing, and pull out the lot finally. I don’t ever write about any of this. For two years I barely write anything.

I see a therapist for a few months and it's only getting worse. She thinks I’m getting better. I tell her I’m doing great. I smile real big, show all my expensive teeth. I stop going. Dylan tries to help hold the heaviness for me. and every time anyone I love helps me I feel so much shame, so I bury it instead. I see this old Greek doctor who is quiet and kind and runs every test I ask him for. He tells me “your heart looks real good.” And I laugh, I’m thankful. But that night I’ll think he missed something. I'll think maybe it’s not my heart at all, maybe there’s somewhere we forgot to look. I start making lists of where it hurts the most. I tell one of my friends about the tests and they say "Wasn't it so good to know none of it was real?" And I say definitely. I'm lying. I'm lying through all my expensive teeth. All of it was real for me.

I get my dosage upped for the third time and I'm finally driving without panicking, I'm doing alright. I get a job making coffee with a bunch of strangers who accidentally become a brief family. I work a twelve hour shift with my friend Liz and we drink beer at a bar after and it's like a weight releases. It's the first time things start to feel like they could be easy. Me and my friend Vadym drive around the city sometimes and we sing along to songs real loud while he shifts gears haphazardly. He takes me to my first NBA game and we sit close to the court. I feel the cheers of everyone rattling in my rib cage and I think I'm probably going to be okay again. We climb rocks at state parks, we make fun of trust fund kids in French cafes, I make him hold my hand whenever he's mad at me. I have a lot of stories like this about people who didn't know they were helping me.

My friend Seth, he calls me mouse, he says “mouse, I used to like all this but I don't think I do anymore." We're sitting on the hood of his car after a bad shift and it's years after I started taking zoloft. I tell him something about how nothing's forever and isn't that nice sometimes? He says another thing about being half way there and knowing you’re getting close to something, but I can't remember it well enough to quote. I talked to him awhile back about it, how it feels when you finally see a way out. He's got a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth and I sit in his smoke. I tip my head up, listening to the teenagers speeding through the lot around us, feeling glad I'm not one of those teenagers anymore. We're both about to quit that job soon.

There's something about doing better than I ever used to hope for and the way I almost never even think about it. It's probably the only reason I can talk about it now. I fucking broke through, you know? I think about that old picture Jenna took of me in the backseat when I was nineteen, my hair whirling in the wind. I loved that picture because it was one of those moments when vastness inverted for me. I'm still trying to figure out how to keep doing that kind of thing in other ways. I think about how the truth is never as generous as I am. I think about how I love my heart and it is such a stupid, tender thing. I think about the years I spent thinking only about survival. I think about all the ways there are to live past retrograde.