Twelve Plastic Chairs (1/2)

The messages keep piling up in my inbox, a smattering of love across social media. 

How are you doing?

Hey, let’s Skype!

Saw this and thought of you.

I scroll past them but leave them unread. Correspondence is just one of the things I can’t handle right now. Not even with my parents, who know that when I go radio silent, something is very wrong. I can’t deal with the Pandora’s box that will inevitably open. For once, I can’t muster the strength or the good will to fake what I should be feeling. All good over here!!!! How about YOU?????? :) :) :)

These past couple of months have been hell. I’m meant to be a writer (or at least, I write), but I can’t describe this period of my life any other way. Nothing else does it justice. When I swapped depression meds to survive the black hole of the summer, I was permitted a single, solitary week of perfect bliss before being plunged headfirst into the seventh circle. The oppressive heat trapped in my face, in my head, finally lifted. I was pure and fresh and clean inside and thought I was fixed for now, maybe even for good. I slept and ate like normal people, ran a 10k race in blistering heat, obliterated my old records. But then the walls caved in and the bottom fell out of my world and it was all my fault. I stayed in bed with earplugs in and a mask plastered over my face because sleep was my only refuge. If I was awake, I was crying. Every time I moved my head, changed the position of my eyeballs, my brain lurched in my skull and my heart lurched in my chest and my stomach did a manic loop-the-loop. When I needed the bathroom, I travelled palm-to-palm along the walls to stay upright. The apartment burned, but the windows had to be sealed to block the children out: I couldn’t stand to hear them wailing even at play, because it cut too close to the core. Children can’t express in words what hurts them; they just weep with full-throated grief, aching from the weight of the world, a pure unadulterated grief that is terrifying in its immensity, its intensity. For the first time in my life I understood them perfectly, and I was terrified. Singing lessons were cut short, my voice trembling too close to the bottomless pit of despair. I was furious at the sudden betrayal of junk food, which no longer brought me dopamine and joy when consumed in vast quantities; at my mother for criticising the shape of my body last Christmas; at until-then suppressed memories of an anorexic colleague who sneered at my “beige” lunch choices years and years ago. Slights and scorn and vitriol seeped upwards through the cracks, poisoned groundwater. It was entirely too hard, holding back this mighty tide of emotion, trying to keep it all contained in a vessel far too small.

When I call my therapist on Tuesday, he immediately urges me to check myself in. But I’ve been there, done that, got the loony bin T-shirt (the kind you need supervision and tokens just to launder). I can’t and won’t do inpatient again. It isn’t due to shame. It isn’t denial. I just can’t. I haven’t got it in me. He doesn’t understand. What do you mean, “verkraften”? 

I mean that I’m not ready for my most vulnerable self to be laid bare to judgmental strangers in a foreign country, the psychic equivalent of a prison strip-search. I mean that I don’t even have the words for the enormity of my feelings in English, let alone German. They go beyond, they fully transcend language. I mean that sometimes when teetering on the brink of sleep, I still see the roommate they wheeled in unconscious after shock treatment, without warning, strapped down to the gurney. The way she rolled her eyes at me when she woke up and I tried to express sympathy, offered to get her a drink. This isn’t new to me. I’ve done it a million times before. And, above all, the way they told me over and over again at night meds: You’ll be fine. You’re not even very sick. You don’t really need to be here.

But I’m too tired to say that. So I say I’m scared to go. 

He says, Well, I’m scared if you don’t go. 

I hang up, let him think I’m going right away, because it’s easier than fighting. 

I don’t go, but I take the following day off work and do the next best (?) thing. I dress appropriately: low-effort, bare face, one extra layer, because the weather is mercifully cool, the judgmental sun distracted and glaring down elsewhere. There’s something especially cursed about being suicidal in summer, when everyone else is merry and blithe and beautiful in floaty dresses. I can’t remember the last time I was out of this stinking nightgown, let alone the house. I brush my teeth (the one hygienic act I never neglect, no matter how bad I feel), then expend extra effort to perform the basic courtesies of washing my face, doing a quick shameful underarm swipe with baby wipes. Even that is exhausting. The day is but young and I must conserve my energies.

It’s too early yet to decide how bad I feel today. I just know I feel heavy. I have tunnel vision. For self-preservation, I don’t put on my glasses. They make everything too real. I want the world to be soft, soft. 

It is confirmed that I am indeed unobtrusive and scruffy enough when the builders yakking on the pavement on my way to the tram stop, half a day’s work already behind them, pay me next to no heed: the ultimate litmus test. On both trams I stand by the door so that I can let the tears fall if I need to. There’s no feeling behind them, or perhaps a feeling that runs too deep to identify, but they still form. Walking from the tram stop to the clinic is heavy going. I’m a human sack of potatoes. I keep dragging myself on, but my destination gets no closer. I am tottering, weaving like a bumblebee, steps all over the pavement. I picture how they’d look if they were painted: a fun playground mural, rainbow footprints with five round toes.

I look up and I’m somehow at the reception desk. A quick scan returns no data; all the female faces are alien to me. My regular male doctor is out until October. One of the strangers calls me a name very similar to but not the same as my own. I was Lucy when I worked at an Oxfam bookshop, too. That was a happy chapter. I fleetingly picture the life of this not-me-almost-me, wonder if this Lucy character is happier than I am. Whether she would even need to be here in the first place. How her story ends.

They give me options: wait for the foreseeable future in the all too familiar white room at the end of the hall, or make an appointment for Friday. What day is it now? I ask. It is Wednesday. The prospect of another two days stretches out before me terrifyingly like a desert, no end, no oasis in sight. Too many hours, too much plunging woe. I have spent too long alone in the abyss. Here, at least, I cannot hurt myself or anyone else. Besides, I’ve already taken a sick day, I burble, the words too loose in my mouth dribbling formlessly down my chin. I don’t want to have to call out again. Too many appointments lately, too much potential for suspicion, for speculation: about my miraculous one-day flu-fever-migraine-period recoveries, about the potential occupation of my womb.

So they suffer me to wait/wait for me to suffer. 

Twelve plastic chairs, two already occupied by elderly women, are neatly arranged in two opposing rows. I take the far corner seat, hunkering down, knowing I’m in for the long haul. Even when I come here with an actual appointment I have to account for an extra half-hour, forty-five minutes. That’s not their fault, I decide, sinking into a gentle stupor. Nothing is anyone’s fault. Exhaustion on every plane renders the plant pot next to me fascinating. I look through slitted snake eyes at the potting material: a bed of strange cracked peanuts that remind me of Christmas markets, the struggling bamboo-like plant with one branch snapped clean off. Time ceases to exist. The only temporal demarcation is the whirring of the printer, vomiting out prescriptions at reception.

A young Middle Eastern man takes a seat opposite me. He has come fully packed for a far less fun version of summer camp, clothes neatly folded into a crackly supermarket tote. He has a two-litre bottle of water. More fool me; I didn’t think of bringing water to the desert. I’m not thirsty, but I know that people with bodies are supposed to drink, and I know that I still have a body, even though right now I can’t feel it. The man oscillates between stupor and agitation, cradling his head in his hands, jerking upright to glance around with dark, scandalised eyes. He breathes like a baby, snuffly with long pauses, then a few quick pants in a row, stamping his feet as though experiencing a bitter inner cold. I get it. Occasional shivers run through me too, making my arm hairs stand on end. 

My brain is a broken radio, slivers of communication from my old self filtering through the death crackles. They tried to send me to the psych ward, I said no, no, no. A little bit sacrilegious, a pinch of humour. Then the signal is gone.