she wrote, something like "we, as the depressed, are viewed as self-indulgently ourselves," and in this soft moment with myself, i can be honest. i can be direct. it's true. and her words sting because that is the way she and i view ourselves. it is a judgment we pass unto ourselves, a severity of misunderstanding because we cannot understand why we are so... dysfunctional.
and the truth is, i am doing well right now, but when i read her words, it reminds me of the pain i hold. even today, i hold it. it reminds me of the fear i hold. the fear that i will never be truly better and that i am destined to swing up, as well as down. and maybe he is right that by focusing on it, it will bring me right back down. and so all i must do is look away. keep focusing on the other.
but in this soft moment with me, i want to hold my depression in its hand and stroke my thumb against its wrist. to let it know that even though i am not looking at it, i feel it. it is being felt. and it is okay to feel it. i am not ashamed of it. all the years i have spent depressed, spent sad, it is not without empathy.
i spend so much of my time right now, running away from the signs and the symptoms. i say, "sorry, it's my depression that makes me irritable." i say, "it's my anxiety speaking." i say, "my triggers cause me to be lethargic and vegetative."
and in this flight, i forget to hold my depression in my arms and let it know that it is seen. it is heard. it is felt. because that is all it wants. it wants to be known. i am not saying that my depression is all that i am, but it is a part of me. and it still comes. it is not as severe as it used to be, it is not all-consuming and it is not destructive, but it is a part of me.
some days, my depression is so loud that it drowns out the music of the blue sky. some days, the suicidality sneaks into my veins and i want to throw myself in front of a bus. some days, the voiceless sobs crack my ribcage and suffocate my throat. and it is okay. i am within normal functioning. i am within the standard deviation.
and i do well to use my coping skills. i do well to know what i need and when. but i want to take this moment, to see my depression for what it is. i am sad. it is a sadness. it is a melancholy. and while not always a crisis, my brain takes to negativity more easily than positivity. my depression is a raincloud on a sunny day. it is wet but there is still brightness.
it is okay to be sad. you can feel sad. you can feel lonely. you can feel lost, unheard, unseen. you can feel alone even when you are with people. and you can crave it be different. you are allowed to feel negative. you can feel bad. you don't have to be good.
It glitters like gold and it shines like silver. It decorates the air with sparkling snow, cold and refreshing. Chimes in the wind. And it settles on him like morning dew. Sweet and salty. I can see the glow behind his eyes; I can see the pleasure set on his skin. Her funny words and the way they play in the wind; it's everything he ever wanted, everything he could have wished for. So, I sit in the corner.
You put your friends in your pocket as you carry them through life. A memory of them, of the last time you were together. You remember them as you walk. It's easy and it's breathless. But you know, if you forget to take them out of your pocket every once in a while, the friendship goes stale. It gets cold. The memory becomes a photograph. And it blows away in the wind, until all your left with is the shadow of a smile.
I imagine running into him at a friend's wedding. Neither of us talk to each other anymore. Not in a bad way, but in a "got-tied-up-with-life" kind of way. We say hi - excited "It's been too long"'s mingled with "How have you been?" Our words flubber and blunder into each other and we laugh it off, appreciative of the time to catch up. I want to hear all about how he has been. I want to know whether he made it to Africa. I want to know if he's finally met the girl he dreamed about. I ask him. And he asks me how my work is, whether I finally got the job I really wanted. He asks me if I still snowboard or rock climb. I laugh hard enough to tell him, "Only when I have time." He nudges me playfully and shames me for not having more ambition. Just like how we used to. We spend the night passing each other by like ships in a moor. Not spending too much time together, not lingering, but enjoying the space we held together at one point in our life.
Not forever, not for the future. Just for one night. Wake up the next morning, a bit hungover and a little embarrassed. We'd joke about the past, how we seem to have made a habit of these kinds of things. I'd throw his pants at him and tease him for always sleeping naked. We'd have breakfast and tea. We'd spend the early morning in each others' arms. And that would be it. We'd both leave to live the lives we already have. And we would forget to call and catch up. Just like we always do.
I wish I said the full truth and nothing but the truth: it does hurt. It hurts every morning when I wake up in empty sheets. It hurts when I pour coffee and I cup the warm porcelain against my chest. It hurts when the sun hits my face and my hands feel cold. It hurts like a machine with a loose belt, like a limping runner.
It aches and it churns. It tumbles and it breaks inside me.
Instead I said, "it hurts, but it's okay."
And that's enough of the truth that he needs to hear.
The window in my room is left half-open. The blinds half-drawn, the wind calmly whistling. I tell them its to let the air in, it gets musky in here. I listen the noise of my neighbors. The baby across the way cries, the car starting down the row, the open chatter of a business man in a business meeting. Half-alive, half-lives. I let them hear my calls to my parents, to the video game background noises. The window to my room makes me feel less alone. But I will never know them. Mutually existing in this atomic space, where we are forever alone, pretending to know each other - hoping to know without trying to know.
do you wonder if the older you grow, the more dull your emotions and sensitivities become? to the point where when the feelings of regret and anger come knocking at your door, you simply open it, give them a hug and sit them on the worn out couch of your living room.
She liked peaches. Especially the ones that were white inside, but she never bothered to remember their name. Some days, she would sit in the rose-covered gazebo in her backyard, watching the clouds, biting into the soft flesh white peach. Her mother always said that Ciare belonged with the clouds. It worried her. How often little Ciare would eat those peaches and stare wistfully at the shape-shifting expanse above her, as if she should suddenly disappear, called into the clouds by the trumpets of a sweeter adventure than this life. She would wring her calloused hands while she cooked supper, glance out the kitchen window and say to herself, “she’s only a dreamer.”
Ciare’s laugh was music. In general, laughing is like music–the purest form of music, the unbridled joy and delight. But her laugh was music. It was the notes before they were put on bars, before composers blindly imagined sounds, before joy could be confined by lines; her laugh sang those melodies long before they were put on paper. Music was blandly counterfeit once she had laughed.
She had brown eyes with green flecks soft as snowflakes resting on wet leaves on the first day of winter. People would look into those eyes and call them hazel or caramel or beautiful. Some young boys in the breathless height of pubescence would throw rocks at her window like they saw in the movies, thinking naively that little girls’ hearts could be knocked open with pebbles the size of skipping stones.
Anne of Green Gables. That’s what her father liked to call her. They would sit on the brown, rugged couch together and watch the witty carrot-headed child overcome and rejoice through all the wonders of life. His salt and pepper, thinning head of hair would shake at the idea that any Gilbert could be worthy of his Anne, and he chuckled to himself when brazenly awkward boys in too-big shoes and slicked hair came asking him for permission.
Oh, how she dreamed and dreamed and dreamed. She dreamed of bright lights and star lights and grand, wonderful visions of the future, tinted with silly lenses. Pink lenses like the roses of that old gazebo, white streak flares as bright as the clouds, pure as the flesh of her cheeks. But no matter how many futures or possibilities lay in front of her open, her innocent, her beautifully blurry eyes, the present can’t foretell the future as clearly as it can remember the past.
Ponytails and pigtails flew by her in the rush of springtime blossoms, only to be smothered by scarves and hats in the winter.
And so the cold, cold winter arrived in her bedroom, knocking on her window with pebbles larger than boulders, louder than hailstorms, harsher than acid rain, stronger than the wolf who huffed and puffed and blew her house down.
And sweet laughter froze in the wintry snow.
Hansel and Gretel stumbled into a gingerbread house; Jack wandered into a giant’s home; disasters don’t always come with the trumpets of a sickeningly sweet adventure.
It came in the shape of a car. A white, rusted 1999 Honda Civic. He gave her a single pink rose. He wrapped her in his jackets and blankets, suffocating her with his scent until it penetrated a young girl’s weak walls. It wasn’t exactly the white horse in shining armor dancing among the stars at night that she had told herself love meant. Snow could fall, but warmth was being wrapped in his arms. And so, there were shorter days and longer nights. Such long, long nights.
She didn’t tell anyone. Ciare was good at secrets. She had to be. Secrets could kiss you and love you and promise you starlights and Milky Ways and golden rings studded with diamonds, but they could also lick your lips with shame and fear and pain. Vise-like pressures behind velvet curtains whispering honey-slicked promises in pillars of magic and beauty. Secrets were nothing like the sweet, brilliant flesh of a white peach, but she grew to like them anyway.
Some day in the far future, standing in the kitchen window, her mother looked out at the rain and thought about Ciare. Her hair was grey and her hands wrinkled. She thought about how that girl had once belonged to the clouds. The girl had spent days and hours in that little rotting gazebo, dreaming of a future she would never have. Her little Ciare, up and grown, but so far from what she could have known. And here she was, cutting slices of peaches for nobody but herself. Was it really raining outside or was her vision just blurry?
Maybe it wasn’t a Gilbert Blythe but a big bad wolf with a beat-up car who stole that Anne of Green Gables away. It could have been. It could have been the dreams of clouds and brilliant starlights that drew her too close to the solar flares of gas-lit stars which consumed her.
She was sixteen. Her name was Ciare. She had laugh-like music. She liked white flesh peaches. She sat in gazebos and stared at clouds. She disappeared into a white 1999 Honda Civic in the wintertime and never came back.
Or she did.
But she was no longer that Anne of Green Gables.
No, Anne of Green Gables died in that murder of young girls’ souls when they are swept into a fleeting romance for naive hearts.
And so the laughter stopped. The peaches rotted. The snow melted. The roses wilted. And Ciare stared at herself in the mirror and blamed those green flecked eyes. Eyes that lured people in and promised and promised and promised. She should have said no.
She kept her secrets.
Her hardened balls of anger and hate that fester and rot and poison. Secrets of shame, disgust, guilt force fed self-hate down her pretty, little throat. A throat meant for calls of passion and frustration suffocated on poisonous air, as if once those black fumes entered her lungs, the oxygen ran to hide and left her soul to die. Day after day, she inhaled air she was taught she wasn’t allowed to breathe.
It was late that night and her parents slept in their unassuming bliss. Her phone chimed in a bursting of excited giggles because some dark horse had come to whisk her away into a red sunset. Her friends told her it would be magical, amazing, breath-taking because what did little sixteen-year-olds know about big bad wolves, other than they are always recognizable in the forest on your way to Granny’s house. They don’t surprise you in the hallways at school with love letters and flowers. But sometimes, the big bad wolf is the warm, musky scent of a leather jacket, whose teeth come out only when the clothes come off. Sometimes, they don’t get cut down by a passing hunter who notices a creaking car. A heart can be so weak and so strong.
And some nights don’t end with the dawn.
In the early sunrise, she slipped through the front door and sat down in front of her bedroom mirror. Her hair was tousled, not tangled. Her eyes the same brown they had always been. Her skin the same color tan in winter. Her blouse buttoned and straightened. Her jeans fit around her legs and curves in the same manner they had always hugged her. And so she stared at this stranger in front of her. Who was she? There was no dirt on her face, no bruises, no scars, no physical manifestation of what had changed, but her insides were cold. Those hands, those lips had been in dark places she could not think about. Like a bad dream she couldn’t wake up from. Nightmares that overlapped and melded into the moonlight, watching her body be stripped away from her grasp underneath fogging windows, ripping her laughter from her vocal cords until she couldn’t remember its music anymore. She touched the mirror with her right hand and tried to wipe away those shameful tears that came leaking out of her, but she couldn’t tell the difference between her skin and the cold, cold metal.
If only she had known; known that fairytales are not recipes for happiness, that shame can still swallow you in darkness long after the sun has broken out of its slumber. All the stories and dreams painted blue skies filled with glory, and guise cut deeper behind, with red glitter and lies. Her mouth was open, but that toxic shade had already seeped into her streams of blood, filling her insides with silent refrains. Tears poured out of her flat eyes, mourning a loss she hardly knew she could lose.
Later, she could know. Later, when she had the courage–or the terror–to tear apart her soul with the claws of her own mind. The body she had trusted, she had loved, she had given up. Hadn’t she been the one to follow the flowers into the forest? To walk into the lion’s den with nothing but stardust in her eyes? Hadn’t she deserved to die? She was good at secrets. Good at those secrets that fester and rot and poison and ruin. Secrets that built the mountains out of bloody corpses and filled the spring valleys with acidic water within her heart because she was caught, not to breathe the air around her.
And only later could she finally distinguish between the sweet flesh of her skin and the rotting memories in that dark car.
Later, when she learned to breathe.
The words will never come as easy as they did before, but then again she will never be the same as before. How can she be the same when her insides have been gouged out, her entrails silently pouring from the invisible holes. People will look in her eyes and see quiet defeat and pity her. Her beauty becomes the bewitched rose in a castle, wasting itself in silence.
But she will learn to breathe. Even when she was taught not to.
The blood in the sink will dry. The streaks of red will close into silver lines.
“Hey, my cousin’s going to be in town for winter break—is it cool if he comes to Tahoe with us?” I shrug, “Why not?” It doesn’t matter who comes. More people mean more splits; more splits mean fewer costs. When January arrives, I pull into the driveway.
His name is Stephen. This stranger of a friend’s cousin. He wears a bright orange Huff crewneck. An OnlyNY beanie. A tall 21-year-old with a toddler’s smile. On the car ride up, he sleeps in my backseat—his hat hair resting softly against the passing scenery. After dinner, we play games; I swish a bottle of yellow beer in my underage fingers. He sits next to me on the wooden bench. We talk about the representation of autism in a new Sesame Street episode—some article we’ve both read. His eyes light up, peeking out from the hair pushed flat underneath his beanie. We switch at some point, my hand-me-down NorCal beanie stretching softly over his dark hair. He leans over, “We can switch back when we see each other next time.”
On the car ride down, I tell him about my family, my plans, my fears. He tells me about his hopes, his dreams, his pains. It’s a two-hour drive back to Davis, but our tiny lives stretch across every second.
“Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong time period; all I’ve really wanted was to take care of a family.”
“My dad runs my family like he runs his business. He’s less of a ‘Dad’ and more of a ‘Boss.’ I’m the eldest son of the eldest son; there’s a lot riding on my success.”
Everything we say bounces, reverberates, resonates. In every word he utters, I listen for meanings deeper than the sounds that they echo. He leaves for New York in three days.
We spend the next three days tiptoeing that line.
“I don’t believe in long-distance.”
“I’m not in the mindset to even entertain a relationship.”
But we spend three days together, day and night. And we don’t cross that line.
“Sex just makes everything so complicated,” and I agree. It can tangle the physical, the emotional…but it can also end that wistfully painful wondering. I want it to end. I want sex to be the one-time-end-all answer because I feel high when I’m around him, like I can’t see the floor underneath my feet. And he’s leaving in three days.
“I’ve never been in love before, but I think this is the closest I’ve ever been.” His last words resonate between the bones of my ribcage as I watch the sliding glass doors swallow his shadow.
The next couple months are all screen-time. When we’re out, we’re on a call. I listen to him when he’s at work, on the subway, buying lunch. He makes friendly jokes with his favorite deli owner; I can hear the laughter 3000 miles away. He works on his senior design project; I hold his iPhone-5-inch face in my hands. The only photos I have of him are Live Photo screenshots, and as I hold down the photo, I can relive the 3-second moment we shared. I tell him about the communication theories I learn in class. There’s a Social Information Processing Theory. It says that you can get to know someone through computer-mediated technology just as well as face to face. It only takes longer. Three-hour phone calls become 10-hour Facetimes on weekends. We never stop talking.
One early morning, I come home drunk and open Facetime. The words tumble from my loose lips: “I miss you.” He smiles.
Two hours later, I have a flight booked to JFK.
The moment I land, he’s there, wearing that same bright orange Huff crewneck and a stretched-out California beanie. It doesn’t fit my head anymore, but his OnlyNY beanie still wraps my head perfectly. We tentatively hold hands at first, then his arms wrap around my waist, and it’s like we never left Davis—safe, soft, peaceful. The roar of the subway passes us by.
This time, there’s no holding back anymore, nothing to make complicated because it’s not complicated anymore. Because somehow, I’m in love with him. I would rather risk everything right now than never have him at all. It feels like the biggest modern-day Romeo-Juliet joke. And yet, here I am, falling in love with his face on my screen and his voice in my earbuds. Facetime calls, phone calls, text messages—we say we could make halfway across the world work.
But mileage is only one type of distance.
After his graduation, he leaves New York. He moves home. Home to his family. Home to his work. He starts calling his dad “Boss,” never again “Dad.” Phone calls go from three in one week, to one every three. Text messages are read and unreturned. My Facetime history runs, “Mom, Dad, Mom…” The playful, mischievous smile that once curled on his cheeks is replaced with taut lips and unflinching eyes. And we’ve only met each other three times.
The late June after-sunset heat lingers in my open windows. “We don’t have meaningful conversations anymore,” I say, staring at the ceiling, hoping for the answer to fill a yearning in my chest.
“I think you expect nothing to change, but I don’t think you understand the limitations I’m under.”
I hug a pillow to my heart and change the subject.
My mom sympathizes with him. She tells me that this is what it’s like when you start working: you’re tired all the time, you have no energy to spare. “It’s just hard because you’re not in the same place as him.” I hear that a lot.
Our relationship becomes a carefully planned outline of our future together. He says, “I’m building a future for us; isn’t that what you want too?” And I can’t say no. I form a to-do list in my mind of what I need to accomplish in my senior year. “Be my own person” is written on daily sticky notes in my agenda. I need to move towards being a good wife, a good mother. The words, “catch up,” echo in my head. We discuss the trajectory of our progress. We debate over parenting styles instead of T.V. plotlines. We joke about being 40-year old’s planning for married life even though I’m not yet legally allowed to drink.
He does go halfway across the world. He travels for months at a time. He tells me he feels guilty for being so busy. I tell him that I admire his dedication to his family and to his work. I keep track of the hours he lives by. When he’s free, we call. Otherwise, I’m alone.
When I tell my friends, they’re shocked. Some are disgusted. “You’re at the height of your youth!” “Don’t waste it.” “You could do anything you want; be with anyone you want.”
“Do you really want to be a stay-at-home mom?”
I just shrug: “I choose him.”
I want to make him happy. I want his future. I want to be a stay-at-home mom. But something inside me begins to revolt. I want to be free. I want to be young and bold. I want to choose myself instead.
By August, I can’t talk about him without crying. In October, my parents tell me they think it’s noble that we’re still together. My mom tells me that we’re a Millennial Couple: jobs, responsibilities, desires, hopes tear us apart, but we stay committed to the screens that tie us to each other.
I focus on school, on new extracurriculars, on new friends and old ones. I respond to his texts when I’m free, not when I see it—small steps to wrestle a feeling of control back into my life. I tell myself that I can support him and pursue my individuality at the same time.
“It’s only hard because we aren’t in the same place.”
But it unravels. In the early January mornings, I find myself staring at the ceiling, watching the shadows of sunshine and rain. My alarms go off, but I don’t move. My homework reading list gets longer every day, but the textbooks lie stiff. There are messages on my phone: I turn off notifications and roll over.
Something feels wrong, has felt wrong, but the words are buried under ‘I love you.’
Slowly, slowly, I pull at the sutures I’ve stitched with those three words. I feel the anger and frustration seep into the pores of my skin, the tears ripping their way through my chest. To ears—not his—my emotions pour out the pain I’ve held in for months. How I’m always alone when I’m not supposed to be alone. How I’m always, always, always one-step, two-steps, three-steps behind what he deems important. When it’s work, I wait. When it’s family, I wait. Why does being with him feel lonelier than being alone?
And the day comes when my words finally fall onto his ears.
He’s silent. I wait.
“I feel like who I have to be for my job, for my family, is incompatible with who I want to be for you, with you.”
My breath holds itself, cradling the bleeding wounds: “You’ve made your choice.”
It happens one month and a year past the day we met. His beanie is shoved into a drawer I never open. Orange sweaters leave a bitter taste on my tongue. But the sutured wounds are healing without those simple words.
It was amicable. It was mutual. We say it was bad timing. We promise to be friends. We promise we aren’t leaving, we’re only parting ways.
“If you ever need me, I’m only a phone call away.”
