Driving Fast, Through the Guardrail

“It’s horrible,” she says. “I can’t do it.”

She makes great strides, and then collapses. It’s all good, and then devastating. Two days ago, she drove to the hospital emergency room, to check herself in. She parked. And waited. For something, for it to pass.

Buoyed temporarily by the caring words of a friend, she retreated, back into the parallel world that runs along side the crazy, sad one. But it’s too much. It’s just too much.

She can feel her body closing in on her; elbows pressed hard to her sides, thighs forced together. The last time she released her arms and thighs to anything remotely good and loving is now impossible to recall, and the body withers. The body withers when it is not loved. And not even she can love it. Now, it turns in on itself, becoming detritus and stone. But still, the aching is there, like a car alarm that won’t turn off, and she can hear it in the distance, unrelenting.

“You don’t understand,” she says. “You can’t fix it. You can only love it and stand beside it, and when it’s most unlikeable, that’s when it needs love the most.”

How does she know this? It’s not something she practices herself. She despises it, for what it has done. It is a thief, someone who has broken in during the night and stolen the most valuable parts of her while she lay blissfully asleep, unaware. She searches. Searches. She witnesses her limbs, her extremities, as if they belong to someone else. Someone else just out of earshot, outside her peripheral vision. Someone who feels no regret at abducting the pieces that once held her together.

“The external silence is deadly,” she says. “The internal chaos, doubly so.”

She tries to be honest about what’s going on, as she is honest with the rest of her life. She tries to explain.

“I don’t want to live,” she says.

But her people cajole her, they tell her she can’t be serious, she has too much to live for. And then they wring their hands and say she would be missed. How could she do that to them? To them?

But no one listens, not really. It becomes a monologue of misery, mostly because no one asks her any questions. Real questions, about how difficult it is, about what is valuable, about what motivates and encourages. Not once has anyone asked her, “What do you need?” Or perhaps the most important question of all, “What is it like?”

“The good, pure me is in here somewhere,” she says. “If I didn’t believe my soul is kind and good and pure and loving, I would not have had the resolve to keep going. It’s fucking brutal. Do you know what it’s like to want to hurt yourself? Drive your car over the guardrail? To jump from the edge of a cliff, imagining those milliseconds before you hit the ground? Do you know what it’s like to imagine how easy it would be to wash down all the medication you have with a bottle of that ‘saving for a special occasion’ champagne? And then somehow, blessedly, be brave enough to keep going?”

She realizes that most don’t want to face the messiness of the internal demons that prey on the saddest, most vulnerable parts of the psyche. Most don’t want to know, afraid of what they might hear. Damn right it’s frightening. The invisible monster is always much scarier than the monster directly in front of you.

“We’re all afraid,” she says. “If you think you’re not, you’re lying to yourself. Everything falls apart eventually. We just need to work with the pieces we have left.”