Dear You/Me

Dear You/Me,

It is no fun to wake up gagging and hungover when you’ve had absolutely nothing to drink the night before. You wonder if other people wake up this way. You wonder why the sadness seems to evaporate from others in time, and why it pools in you, and the pool simply gets deeper—toe-deep, ankle-deep, mid-calf. How high will it climb?

I watch you from my place just outside your skin, and from my place buried in your core. My heart goes out to you. You loathe victim mentality (and the phrase “victim mentality”), but at the same time, you are having a lot of trouble imagining how this story could possibly improve. If it were up to you, and no one needed you, you would crumple your life into a ball and hurl it into the nearest trash can. You would maybe take that risk, go out with too many pills, with people quietly murmuring: “Can you imagine?” “So selfish.” “She hid it so well.” “She had so much going for her.”

You would see if this “purgatory” solemnly defined by the Catholics actually exists. You are certain you would work hard to try to fight your way out of that grayness—with renewed soul-strength, finally released from the bills you cannot pay, the house, the people who do not understand how someone can go under so very steadily, for such a long period of time. Surely she’s full of crap. Were it not for your lovely, loved, loving daughters, you would risk permanent limbo, because words have failed you, your own love has failed you—miserably and colossally—and even new patched walls cannot make that better.

You think perhaps a tattoo would help. “Forward,” you would have inked on your wrist. “Only forward.”

Sometimes, you are afraid to leave your room. You would like to skip from bedtime to bedtime, with no 14-hour span of anxiety linking sleep to sleep. Your sleep is unhappy, full of the same sense of dread and loss that your days steep you in. With no money yet and no job yet and a mind that refuses to cooperate and the terrible fear that continues to get worse—you are not much of a candidate for anything bright or shiny or extraordinary or lucky. Luck is something for others, now. It no longer seems to apply to you.

You want it back. You want your luck back. You raise an eyebrow at people who say blithely, “You make your own luck.” Your gut insists that the playing field is not that even, but maybe your gut is not as wise as you once thought it was.

Except for your daughters—now that’s luck, and you did, in fact, have something to do with their making. You hit the jackpot there, and you know it. You have been blessed with bright, beautiful children who anchor you to this earth, and keep you from the gray limbo you’re almost willing to visit, to move into indefinitely. No one will ask you there to be out of the limbo in a few years. From what you’ve read, you can stay there, as long as you want, sometimes longer than you want. Extended visits are encouraged, they say, in the gray, liminal place.

You know your daughters need you. That is your best attribute and best shot at survival—recognizing this. You think you may be doing all right, as their mother. Flawed but honest, occasionally frustrated, firm, silly, audacious, smart and loving, sometimes even wise—this is not a bad combination of attributes for a mother to have. You are “good enough,” “better enough,” as a mother, and that seems to be working. Good for you, kid. Good on ya, kid.

But what to do with this unyielding grief? Today you woke up in a mess of tears. Might as well get it out of the way, as you pushing yourself to go out later today, and you know your propensity for bursting into tears in the wrong places, in front of the wrong people.

Today, you actually feel sick to your stomach, nauseous with loneliness and wanting to begin again, somewhere else, as someone else. You do not know how to reintroduce yourself to your female friends. Because you fear you will simply vanish again. It is better, you think sometimes, to disappear and not return, than to come and go and come and go. That seems unfair to them and to you, and it will only make you seem more flaky. You hate that word: flaky.

You expect that every choice you make right now will have a terrible outcome.

You are not sure how you could afford to go back to school, to learn a decent trade: ultrasound technician, vet tech, social worker. You are not having much success as a freelance writer—you are not having any success. You are stumped. Your mind is crooked and confused and too fast and too slow and not playing by the rules.

The medical bills—arising from an acutely strange, acutely painful physical condition, something you decided not to ignore, because you thought that was wise—are pouring in. You thought it was smart, not to ignore this. You were supposed to have had health insurance at the time. That was what you understood to be true. You have resubmitted the bills again and again, you have talked to the right people—and yet the hospital still wants its money, lots of it, from you. None of the promises that it will all be okay (and that you were covered by insurance) has proven yet to be true. You choked when you found five massive bills from the same hospital complex—thousands and thousands of dollars in bills—in your mailbox the other day.

The doctors say you need to go to another hospital for evaluation and treatment. You don’t disagree. But you don’t dare set that up until you figure out what is wrong with your insurance. You don’t dare, because if you get another batch of ridiculous bills, you will lose what is left of your coping skills.

Oh, for Christ’s sake—for your sake—you do not want to be a victim. You never did; it’s not your style. You wonder what the word is for someone who cries a lot while trying to manage difficult circumstances. You wonder what the word is for someone who wants to stop strangers on the street, to tell them she used to be quite strong, thank you very much. If you cried less, would that mean something better about you? Could you fend off the “V” word a little longer? You would like nothing better than to be a cocky, carefree, assertive, raging sonofabitch. You would like to be dripping in moxie and fabulousness and opportunity in the face of adversity. But the past five years have reduced you to someone nearly unrecognizable in the mirror.

You know you are supposed to sell the house eventually. You get that concept. You considered “resale value.” There was mold, water damage, peeling wallpaper. So you tried to be proactive and smart and spent precious money to fix it. The floors are splintering—you thought it would be wise to fix those as well. Was it? There is no one to talk over these issues with, no one to help you make these decisions. It is difficult to trust your own choices. You don’t know what is normal, what is wise, what you are allowed to expect from a house, from your family, from yourself. You realize you are afraid to talk to anyone for too long because you are starting to think no one can believe (as you can’t believe) the tears keep coming. Maybe they would not mind the tears, but you do not want to risk it.

You know who reads your blog from the visitor stats. You don’t understand what they are looking for or why they bother to keep checking it, if they have dismissed you anyway. You wish you could carve open your heart, split it like an avocado, present it to them on a plate. You wish you could let the entire story play out, flickering like an old-time movie on a screen. You wonder if they would be surprised, if they would reconsider their position on the small matter that is your life and the choices you have made.

You appreciate the honesty of the person who said, “I don’t read your blog. It upsets me.”

You don’t mind committing words to paper, to screen. You know that sometimes, what you write here, is helpful to someone else. You are not afraid that your daughters will read this someday and see that this time was hard for you. They already know you are sad sometimes, that you are working hard to turn this around, despite the fact that you don’t have the answers. They know that they are not the cause of your sadness. They know that you are doing your best and that you see them doing their best. There is a calm honesty and acceptance among the three of you. You know that to be true.

You want to be kinder to yourself, but this is difficult to do when you wake up gagging and alone. You have been feeling more fearful than you have for a while, since the man you didn’t know seized you in a bar, put his hands on you the way he did. You jump at small noises. You are grateful for your big moose-dog, who sleeps beside you every night and makes sure you wake up in the morning, with a large, gentle paw on your chest or your arm.

You have grown used to making your own coffee. The coffee machine does not keep the coffee warm, so thankfully, it gives you something else to do, two other steps in the long day: 1) walk to the microwave 2) reheat a cup of coffee. You recall reading that the number 42 is the secret to the universe, so whenever you have to microwave anything, you microwave it for 42 seconds—again and again, if necessary.

Kid—You/Me—listen to me: It was not supposed to turn out like this. We both know that. But what I know that you don’t is that nothing—nothing—turns out like it was supposed to. Maybe we can find a way to persuade you of that. I’ll take the reins until you can believe it.

Last night, you dreamed that you were alone in Paris, and that there was a shopping mall (chic, still, because it was Paris, after all) that was built open-air: half-inside, half-outside. Your friends left you, to pair off, to discuss engagements, love, marriage, happy renovations in happy houses. Meanwhile, you climbed solo to the top of a yellow curly slide in the mall. The top was very high up, at least seven stories. All around below you, people were in love, making promises, offering rings, making plans. You scooched your bum onto the top of this yellow plastic curly slide, pushed off with clammy hands, and sent yourself plummeting in wide curlicues toward the street a building’s length below. It was dusk, darkening quickly. The lights of Paris were gorgeous. You went fast, faster. You felt the wind on your face, your hair whipping behind you. The sadness was intense, but the exhilaration of your rapid, swirling descent in this bright yellow half-tube allowed a brief override of the grief.

At the bottom, amid all the lovers and promisers, you decided to climb again, to the top of the slide, to descend once more.

Still, you woke up crying and scared the dog, who is also woeful, missing his red sister as you are. But the yellow slide—keep that, yes, keep it. Trust me on this. Maybe if you ride it enough times, it won’t end in graying street, in stopping dead amid pairs of lovers. Maybe it will take you somewhere else. I can’t promise anything, and you wouldn’t believe me if you did. “Promise” is a sick joke of a word now, as is “love” or “unconditional” or “understanding,” I know. But there was something in the exhilaration of that yellow slide that mattered, matters.

Or so I believe.

Sincerely yours,
You/Me