I read The Silent Woman first – a book, in this context of yet another close call for Jeff, about the ethics of telling your truth, while casting unwilling characters.  The biographers of Sylvia Plath at war with the Plath Estate – what to include, what’s necessary, the morality of peering behind the curtain.  And then telling the world.

You know this:  that I write to let people in, to have that peek.  To surrender the myth that I’m smiles and Sketchy Jeffrey, to take off the mask and say:  I don’t give a fuck what you think about my angry sorrow.  You know how it feels when someone asks you not to share this or that.  And how violent, how total that rage, that indignation can feel.  Even if they ask you nicely.  Even if you get where they’re coming from.  They are your already active voice of writerly doubt, now in fucken stereo.  In my case, the scene where my mother waves a draft of a poem I wrote in front of me.  She found it while going through my trash.  It was about the scene I always talk about:  the one where my mother and father tried to strangle one another in front of my sister and me.  The sounds of us screaming, of the answering machine breaking.

Stop it.  Cha-ching.  Like a cash register.

She tells me:  I hope you’re not planning on sharing this with anyone.  We don’t need to go back to that.  I lie; I tell her that I don’t know why I wrote it.  I hand it in as a junior in high school.  I get a B+.  A draft of it makes a good Christian girl cry.  This makes me feel good about the piece.  And now, a former lover asks you not to share a piece in which he was mentioned.  To summarize how that went:  Goddammit.

The second book.  Crush by Richard Siken.  This is what you said about it:  This is my favorite book.  I carried it with me through Asia, through a dark winter in Boston, through two of the darkest years of my life.  It’s sexy, gritty and gorgeous.  I want you to have it.  And now I do.

You mentioned the book to me in 2007, when I was still writing verse.  And here it is.  Love at first sight.  I’ve read it once already, on the subways and in the hotels ofNew York City.  I consumed it with greed, with abandon.

The cover:  a man, who we assume has stunning features, such as a strong jaw line and defined back muscles.  I want to lick his stubble.  The blood off his thumb.  Well, we assume it’s blood.  But it’s a black and white photograph, so we can’t know for sure.  At first read, the words are in synchrony with the cover.  A lot of love, a love of blood.  Gritty, gorgeous.  You’re right again, you.

You know I’ve loved like that.  You know how I love, and you know just how fuggin’ sad that can get.  It isn’t bottomless, this pit that I’ve let you see.  It’s a quarry in coastalMaine, where the young go to swim.  There are signs there warning that it’s very deep.  That people drown here.

Those who drown are those trying to touch the bottom.  I wonder what goes through their heads as they realize, not without a little panic, a little sadness, a little frustration, that this hole is deeper than they thought.  That this constitutes a serious miscalculation; and might carry serious consequences.  I wonder what they think or feel as the terror slides into acceptance slides into the blurry turning gray, turning white, turning off.

I think:  they get the closest to the core of the earth.  They die on the ascent.  They die rising, floating, weightless.  Dancing ghosts who were minutes ago young men, with lives they were supposed to live.  The quarry swallows them up.  Those young men:  stand-ins for my relations.

I would let my lovers in, and they would think it was a swimming hole in Vermont:  a ten foot jump and your feet touch the bottom.  Okay, no big deal, excited that I took the plunge.  I know you better now.  But no:  it’s that Oh shit moment, seeing the rays of light, the blurry, wavy legs of the other swimmers waiting eagerly for these young men to brag about how far down they went.  Those are the last images that they see as these young men, my relations, gulp in water when what they need is air.  They die on the way back up.  They die moments before the bodies breach.  They go without a whimper.  An apology, maybe.  A dammit, Jeff, maybe.

Back to the cover:  I want, in a way, to be that man who we assume has stunning features.  I think, as I take the 1 train up to 86^th, that I sometimes want a bloody thumb, that it’s been over a year since I drew blood on purpose, but less than a month since I wanted to, since I wanted to go down the quarry myself, since I wanted to bring the insides out.  Intestines on the carpet floor.  Maybe I’ll die sitting seiza.  Without the blood and guts you’d think I was meditating or serene.  And maybe, in a way, I would be.

As fortune would have it, I would have blood on my hand by the time I disembarked.  It was on my index finger which had been happily scratching my ear.  I stopped when it felt wet.  I inspected my finger and sniffed it.  I looked at the cover and smiled.  I thought:  well, the boy’s still got it in him.  Good.  I also think:  I think you’d appreciate this.

This is how you say you get it.  This is how you say Don’t do it.  This is how you say I’m here.

You say:  Listen.  Listen well.

And then you show me something you know I’ll like, you know I’ll need again and again.  A bible for the abandoned, for those who said no to gods.

You say Listen.  Every time.  Every time.  I’m leaning in close.  I’m cupping my ears.

{To J.S., again}

I know you know those nights; we’ve both written about them, you to me and me to you.  Blood from stone – that was the title of a piece you wrote to me.  The opening line of one of my poems to you was about cigarettes and celestial motion, and also, I think, about nausea.

The cops would come by, and ask us if we were there of our own volition.  It did not occur to me until later why they asked that question.  I think it was the summer before I went to France, that place where things went wrong for me, that we first told one another that we loved each other.  Friends, of course, but love, nonetheless.

We were there of our own volition, reading on a playground, or looking at the stars.  How did we choose the playground?  How did it become our place to share?  You read my work and I read yours.  Your voice calling a friend of mine Quijote.  Mine talking about Rhode Island or Japan.

I went to Paris in August, after that summer of playground readings and light pollution from Hartford that turned a cloudy sky pink.  In the spring, I would calculate the time of day and call you.  Mostly, from a phone booth across the street from my apartment.  Mostly, to tell you that I was in a bad spot.  That I had cut myself.  That my lover here had said some terrible things.  That I almost tossed myself out my apartment window.

A letter you sent to me that year came in an envelope upon which you drew smoking gnomes.  For a while, we wrote to one another.  The first thing I ever mailed to you was a postcard from Barcelona, this in 2002, this before you would learn the depths of my grief that I would, for a time, only share with you.

Another what if:  what if I had never proposed coffee after we got off work at 9?  What if we hadn’t talked about Murakami and Borges until 1 am that morning?  Would we have found ourselves staring skyward later that summer, talking about my impending year in the Francophone world?  Would things be different if you yourself were not a writer, too?

I sent you an older version of my manuscript from Boston.  You were in Japan, and told me you were hungry for something in English.  I believe you when you say that you read it all at once.  And I can’t tell you how much that makes me love you.  You said:  You’ve created something very dark here.

The fall that I ended things with that lover, the one from France, the one who was the source of that manic misery, the woman who loved me with such ferocity that it was both sacred and terrible, you were the counsel that I needed.  I spoke to you from the screened-in porch of my senior housing where my friends and I would drink, and you told me:  You are going to feel guilty about this for a while.

That was in 2004.  And now, here, two weeks ago, I sent you a piece, written about a recent weekend in which I sat stunned on my couch, staring at my kitchen knives, scared to shit that I was going to pull a “lights out,” and just unseam myself like a goddamned fish.  I wanted to make a mess of things.

You were one of the only people I could tell.  So I did.  And you came out of the ether of your writerly world, that world where I dream of going.  You said things that only you would say.  Such as:

I care about you, both as an artist in the world, but especially as my nomad-hearted friend.

You sent me two books, which I have just received after a weekend in Chicago, a city which you were going to visit while I was a graduate student.  But there was a fucken blizzard that weekend, so we were left to imagining the weekend we would have spent together, the wine we would have drunk, the pieces we would have read.

So with one exception, it’s been us carving out a refuge in suburbia on trips home, over coffee and printed sheets, that we read or share or write upon.  Sometimes, Starbucks in my town.  Sometimes, midnight at the playground, the cops telling us that they won’t be back, so have a good night.  Sometimes, pictures together (me wearing your pink gloves once), sometimes book recommendations, sometimes, I am well.

Always:  it is me coming to find you at your parents’ red house.  You on the passenger side.  You, that tiny rock that I sometimes know as my only ground.

(To J.S.)

But then, my mother says, It needs a frame.  Why didn’t you get him a frame?

I tell her that I didn’t feel like it.  He can take care of that himself, I tell her.  I shelled out enough on the photo itself.

Jeff, it’s just a frame, it doesn’t cost that much.

I tell her that I know that, that I really just didn’t want to buy one.  I tell her that I was too lazy.

Yeah, but Jeff, it would really help with the presentation if you put it in a frame. 

I repeat myself.

I’ll buy the frame, she says.

Jesus Christ, fine, get a frame.

I have been home less than an hour.

*

My father swears at the ground beef.  He calls it a son-of-a-bitch, addressing it directly:  you son of a bitch, as opposed to a more generalized statement of frustration.  Somehow, the ground beef was not cooperating.  There is more huffing, and opening and closing of drawers, the refrigerator door, crinkling plastic noises, and my mother trying her best to figure out a phone that is, it appears, too smart for her.  She talks to no one in particular, asking if it’s optonline dot net or dot com.  I eventually tell her it’s dot net.  Every time she comes across an e-mail from a sender that she does not recognize, she shares with my father and me, perhaps so that we can also question who these anonymous senders are.

Then:  I never know how to hang this thing up.  That’s always my problem.  I don’t know how to hang it up.  Hey, stop.  Do you have that, where you can’t hang it up?  What were you saying about Brian?  Where’s he doing real estate?  New York?

An orchid, one of my father’s favorites, sits in a wire cage on the top rack of the dishwasher.  He curses the ground beef again, or maybe it’s the boiling water this time, into which he has just dropped in lasagna noodles.  My back is to him, and I face my mother, who is looking at her computer or her phone.  She calls out more names that no one recognizes.

*

We are driving to my Aunt’s house for Christmas Eve dinner.  There is idle chatter about my cousins, what they are doing tonight; one set of them will be joining us for dinner; two of them, and their families, are not, as they will be at my Aunt’s house tomorrow.

My mother says of my Aunt:  she has the best kids.

I clear my throat.  My father, my sister and her fiancé laugh.  My father says, Wrong thing to say!

I ask for clarification.

Take it however you want to is her reply.  Then, she adds something to the effect of if you knew you treated me well, you wouldn’t be worried.

My father makes some noise.  I say something that either is another request for a direct statement or a question as to how to be the best kids.

The time to start is now, she says.  I ask her if she could be vaguer.

We drive toWethersfieldto see the Hartford Holiday Light Fantasia.  The Fantasia is a huge display of Holiday lights, enjoyed from the comfort of your car as you drive throughGoodwinPark.  Visual delights include two dimension representations, inHolidaylight formatting, of Harry Potter, of Sponge Bob Square Pants, of an alien abduction, of waving Santa Clauses, of swans, ducks and fish over the pond.

I think to myself:  America.

It is the first time that the light show has been up since 2007, and my mother is particularly excited.  None of us expressed any real interest in going except for her.  I didn’t know that it was a fundraiser.  What I do know is that I find the display tacky, although, to be fair, I likely thought that the Fantasia was the shit when I was a kid.

As we approach GoodwinPark, we are on side streets, where there are various holiday light displays in the small yard of the small houses that we pass.  I begin narrating in a nasal voice, Well, here you see the first installment here, and spin out various tales at each house down this street; here, a real Christmas Classic:  two Santas riding matching Harleys.  My sister’s fiancé begins to participate:  a typical cop car here, on the corner, poised for a drug bust.  There is laughter.

Maybe they think that with the joking around, the inventive narration, that her comment has been dismissed, that I have let it go.  We drive through the park, and, more than anything, my parents talk about the tree damage from the freak October snowstorm.

But it comes up again over dinner, I think from my father’s end of the table.  Lor, what was it you said in the car?  Something about Bev having the best kids?  Most of the party laughs.

I grip the table and clench my jaw.

*

My parents, Aunt and Uncle, and cousin are talking about fuel prices.  My mother or my father tells my cousin the story that they had already told his wife, my Aunt and Uncle already, and which they had told me earlier that day.  I didn’t care the first time, and at this point, I just look at my sister’s fiancé and mouth the words, That’s four, and hold up four fingers on my right hand.  He smirks; my sister is looking down at her phone.

You and I could probably recite the story verbatim, I whisper to him across the table.

Certain elements and phrases showed up in every rendition of the story:  their contract with Kasden Fuel ended on December eighth or ninth (each time they told the story, it was always December eighth or ninth, one of those two days); my mother has returned every phone call and never gotten a call back; they had shown up anyway during December and my mother sent them back (in the final telling, she adds that she had to call the company to authorize the delivery service not to pump, as they were not allowed to leave a site without permission); and today, the biggest outrage, it seems, was that they sent a piece of certified mail ($5.49 – can you believe that?  $5.49 for a stupid two line letter!) saying simply that my mother or father needed to call Kasden to discuss their contract.

My sister’s fiancé and I then field questions from the table about our professions; I am asked something having to do with my salary.  I respond by telling the questioner that I opted for happiness instead.  I don’t tell the questioner sometimes, even that is difficult enough.  I don’t tell the questioner:  it’s none of your goddamned business.  I don’t tell the questioner:  my mother and father created for me the false illusion that wealth created a happy home, when all it really does is allow you to purchase a house.  I just tell the questioner that I’m out of work at five every day, and that, the work-life balance, to me, is most important.

Three times, my parents say that it’s time to go, and on the fourth, we finally rise to hug, shake hands, and put on our coats.

The other cat-free room is my bedroom.  Or so I have been told.  It turns out that this is no longer the case, despite my parents’ continued insistence that they don’t allow cats to enter my room.  I will discover this as I am stretching in my room after going for a run.  There will be dried cat piss on a number of book spines on the bottom shelf of the bookcase (and somehow, on the second shelf, too).  It will have taken on an orangey-brown color.

But I haven’t discovered this yet; I am still in the dining room.  I hang my jacket on a chair, and toss a sweatshirt over it.  I am about to exit into the kitchen, when my father closes the door.

Don’t come out for a sec, he says from the other side of the class.  I’m going to try to get Bob in.

Bob is a stray, or perhaps one could call him a half-stray cat that my father managed to get to come into the house after a very concerted effort.  He lives exclusively in the house’s sunroom, on one of the couches, which is covered in towels now.  The sunroom boasts a myriad of orchids that my father has hoarded and is cultivating for reasons that none of us have managed to grasp, and now, Bob, with his matted fur and knots, the feline equivalent of dreadlocks.  He has not allowed my parents to remove the knots; they have been scratched several times in their attempts to do so.

So he lives apart from the other six cats, with his matted fur, in the sunroom, where I assume it smells like piss.

I am twenty eight years old.  My father has closed me in the dining room while he tries to coax a half-stray cat into the house.

My father chirps Bob repeatedly.

I look at them both from behind the closed door.  Bob, contemplative, my father, bent over, making kissing noises and calling the cat by name.

My mother comes down the stairs, and is about to enter the kitchen when my father, without looking up, waves behind him, telling her not to come into the kitchen.

I’m trying to get Bob in, he tells her.  She goes to her office in the living room, or maybe she goes back upstairs.

*

Last Christmas, in one of his attempts to get Bob to come in, my sister, sitting close to the open door, shifted her weight, which, in my father’s mind, caused Bob to scurry off.  This year, I was to blame.  I made some noise or stood up from my chair and the cat ran away.  So my father said, Well, he was going to come in until Jeff moved.  I told him to shut the fuck up.  That the goddamned cat would be just fine.

Last Christmas, however, it was my sister.  He yelled at her, telling her that she scared Bob away, that all she’s done since being home has involved her playing those damn games on her iPad.  My sister ran upstairs, crying.  Her fiancé was close behind, and, after a few minutes, he asked for my mother to come upstairs, I suppose, to offer counsel, or, at the very least, bond around the evergreen subject of my father’s anger.

On her way upstairs, she said something to my father.  Something to the effect of You can’t do that to her, or You can’t talk to her like that.

He responded:  I want a divorce.

She said:  So get a divorce.

He repeated:  I’m so sick and tired of this.  I want a divorce.

She said:  So get a divorce.

I was lying on the ground in the other room, sitting by the fireplace which burned propane fuel on ceramic logs, reading The English Patient.

My father stood in the doorframe, and told me exactly what he told my mother.

I said, Okay, not looking up.

He would later tell me later that night that he was sick and tired of being unappreciated.  I would tell him I was sorry and leave him alone in the kitchen.

A half stray cat that wouldn’t come in.  Enough spark to light the tinder.

*

This year, I stay in the dining room.  This year, my mother does not enter the kitchen.

The next day, as we eat lunch together on Christmas Eve, my father is once again trying to get Bob in.  We are sitting around a television in the kitchen, watching the New York Jets and New York Giants play.  This is apparently a big deal; these two teams only play against one another during the regular season once every four years.

My father opens the sliding door that leads from the kitchen to the outside deck.  He sings Bob’s name repeatedly.  My sister rolls her eyes and huffs in irritation.  Her fiancé and I catch each other’s glance and grin.

That name is going to invade my nightmares, I say out loud.

Anytime my father says something encouraging, I think that Bob has entered the house.  But I am wrong.  The cat still sits on the deck, with no discernible intention to move towards the open door.

It is thirty four degrees out, and one of us mentions that it’s getting cold.

My mother, from where she sits, is in Bob’s line of sight.  She removes herself, noting out loud, I’ll leave.  She does, and my father continues to chirp.

Marianne’s Blog, The Retrieval of Intuition:  http://singingoverthebones.tumblr.com/

Tim Hodgson’s Blog:  http://timhodgson.wordpress.com/

Josh’s Blog, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Death:  http://drjekyllmrdeath.wordpress.com/

Thanks:  JDS

“Should we schedule another time?”

is rhetorical.  He assumes it is.  For

two years, once a week, he sits on

the couch for an hour, and, for an

hour, he is honest, for an hour,

he explores.  He is an auto-paleon-

-tologist, dusting off the sediment

of years, inspecting it, spinning a

narrative out of it.  Here:  a fight

took place.  Here:  he wanted to die

For two years, once a week, he

does this for an hour.

And somehow, things feel better.

To MCD

She is a fourth year medical student.  Not the doctor I am supposed to be seeing.  Who had received a call from my therapist earlier in the week in anticipation of this meeting.  So I have to rehash it all again.  Which I don’t mind terribly; I’m just a little talked-out, a little worn from having to discuss my feelings with someone all over again.  It had been my hope that the phone call would have saved me the trouble.

But it doesn’t.  So I tell this med student the recent developments; her enthusiasm is equal parts reassuring and creepy.  She has upbeat speech patterns and perky “OK!”s as I narrate how I haven’t been cutting, but that I’ve been wanting to.  That a few weeks ago, at a wedding, I wanted to slit my throat right there at the dinner table, and just go blanche and slump forward into my food while the music played, everyone bantered, and the colleagues of the bride to my left and right discussed the humor of two of them having the same first and last name, second marriages, and hair extensions.

It was supposed to be a six month check in, just a routine visit.  Two months ago, it would have been my hope that this visit would initiate a conversation about me getting off of anti-depressants.  My recent mental state, though, made that highly unlikely.  We discuss treatment options as the doctor knocks and comes in.

She gives a summary of everything I had just told her.  She refers to me in the third person as he takes notes.

He’s thought about slitting his throat and hanging himself; he has a razor that he uses to slash bread that he’s used to cut himself before, but he hasn’t just taken it out and stared at it while having suicidal thoughts.  He was recently at a wedding where he thought about slitting his throat.  He says that he has suicidal thoughts a few times a week, sometimes daily.  He says that this is the third fall in a row where he’s had thoughts of self-harm or has actually self-harmed.  He feels overcommitted with a lot of his personal engagements.  He says his main reason for wanting to get off of SSRIs is because of the effect it has on his libido.   

He scribbles diligently.  The pen makes quite a bit of noise as it scratches the paper.

We were just beginning to discuss treatment options when you came in, so perfect timing!

Well, the good news is that there are lots of options, he says.

This is exactly or almost exactly what he said when I first met with him a year ago.  His outfit was also similar, if not the same:  khakis, white collared shirt with some kind of pattern to it, black jacket vest.  Fluffy beard.

Dear Jesus God, I think.  It’s been almost a fucken year since I started on these things.  I think back to the meeting with my therapist in which we first broached the subject.  Me on the couch, with my girlfriend at the time, telling my therapist that I had texted her after some argument saying that, to paraphrase, this shit made me want to die.  And that she couldn’t handle that.

I think about my girlfriend getting up to go (was she a little teary, a bit sniffly?  I can’t remember), telling me she’d see me later that afternoon, thanking my therapist for letting her sit in on the first twenty minutes of the session.  I think about how I felt like shit.

I think we need to discuss the possibility of getting you on anti-depressants, my therapist said, seconds after the door closed behind my girlfriend.

I must have looked a little shell-shocked.  She hadn’t used the word before.  Technically, she still hadn’t; rather, she had suggested a solution to it.

So this is depression, I said, or asked, or something like that.  I told her something to the effect that this was the first time we had actually put a label on what I might have.

Your is an anxious depression, she responded.  The ownership of it all:  my depression.  My anxiety.  My self-mutilation.  My current mental state.

She zoomed out for a second, mentioned that the label doesn’t carry the stigma I think it carries, that one-third of Americans are diagnosed with depression.  If that were true, that would mean that there are more depressed Americans than there are total French citizens in the world.

I couldn’t be certain if knowing that I was among a third of all Americans made me feel any better at the moment.  This banality of depression juxtaposed with the possessive:  societal, personal, the fucken brain and all of its dysfunctional glory.  A shared mania 100 million strong.

I told her that I had to think about it, that I would do some homework, do some reflecting.  As she closed the door behind me and I was excreted from her office back into daylight, into reality, where the neat categories and parts of me that we dissected were all at war.

I didn’t let on that I was leaning towards saying yes on the spot, that I would welcome any fucken remedy to stop the cutting, stop the thoughts of chucking myself off the bridge, stop the daily conversations in which I raged at my girlfriend for not understanding, for not getting how fucked up it was in my head.  After all, how could she, why would she?  She was far too well-adjusted, far too optimistic about life in general.

I took two weeks to deliberate.  I asked a friend who I knew had taken anti-depressants.

Things just roll off you more easily, he said to me over the phone.  It sounded appealing.

The steps:  as boring as they were simple.  Tell my therapist that I’m on board.  Call my primary care physician.  Tell him all about it.  Get drugs.

This is too fucken easy, I thought, walking away with the prescription in my hand.

It was that first meeting, just under a year ago now, when he first said, Well, the good news is that there are lots of options.

C PODY.  Code I recognized from my days working in a pharmacy.  Take one capsule by mouth once daily.  So I took my first capsule, two shades of blue on the morning of my 27^th birthday, on my way out the door to drive to a funeral four hours south.

And now, I am back at his practice, in an examination room, with a fourth year medical student referring to me in the third person.

Lots of options.  As though I were choosing breakfast cereals at the supermarket.

Really, though, there don’t seem to be that many.  As far as I can tell, my options are:

1. Increase my dosage.
2. Keep my dosage the same.
3. Try a different SSRI.
4. Change the class of medication so that it isn’t affecting my serotonin levels.
5. Combine an SSRI with a different class of medication.

Those options become even fewer as the three of us discuss what is actually the safest, the most logical solution.  My own vote is to get off of SSRIs so that I can have the functional sex drive of a late-20-something who’s trying to date and not have to explain with each new partner why, in fact, I haven’t orgasmed despite a half hour or more of vigorous humping, blow jobs, and self stimulation.

Babe, my legs aren’t meant to stay open that long, one said.

Your hip bone is digging into me, sweetheart, said another.

My mouth is numb now, said another.

The wisest decision, it seems, is to increase my dosage back to twenty milligrams of fluoxetine, back to what I was taking when I first had a lot of options.  I am to touch base with my doctor in a month, to discuss switching off of this class of anti-depressants, in the hopes of getting on something that won’t affect my libido.

My libido.  My depression.  My anxiety.  My desire to self harm.  My desire to maintain a goddamned erection.  A third of all Americans have what I have.  50 million men.  A little more than 50 million women.  I wonder what their struggle is like.  I wonder if they find themselves with fewer urges to self harm, but dampened desires.

I practically apologize to the medical student for putting such a heavy emphasis on the sex drive.

I know that shouldn’t be such a huge driver of my decision, I say.

It’s part of your mental health, she responds.

Mind and body are one.  One of the most basic tenants of my martial training.  So of course it should be a fucken driver.

But we agree, or I agree with them, that we should wait until I restabilize to change the class of medication.  I reflect that earlier this week, I was ready to call it quits, ready, as I told her, to get in the tub and cut myself open.  Like a goddamned fish, I don’t tell her.

They say some clinical things to one another.  We up the dosage.

Let’s see how you’re doing in a month.  If things get worse, definitely call me, because we don’t want that, he says.

They show me out, pointing me down the hall.  I schedule an appointment for a month.  The piece of copy-proof prescription paper in my hand.

Fluoxetine 20 mg.  CPODY.

Take one capsule by mouth daily.

Like that’s supposed to solve it all, I think.

But then I think:  I fucken hate to admit that this actually makes things better.

Things just roll off you more easily.

I sure as shit hope so.

Yes, there were stories of teens committing suicide after not tapering off of their anti-depressants, but somehow, I thought myself different from them in age and temperament.  I figured it would be unpleasant.  My successful escapades at quitting did involve pain:  I had nicotine cravings for over a year; I still do whenever I smell a cigarette, see some particularly attractive individual dragging on one.  I had caffeine withdrawals when I switched to drinking coffee only on the weekends so bad that my boss put me in charge of firing staff for almost a month because I possessed a cranky cold-heartedness that he did not.

But with the anti-depressants, the cold-turkey approach presented unforeseen challenges.  I hadn’t thought about the how the withdrawals would feel, would affect me.  I hadn’t thought about the fact that it was almost exactly one year ago when this all started again, when I took a picture of my sliced stomach in the mirror as a reminder, as a don’t let this happen again, fucker photograph (but of course it happened again).  When I thought about the lamppost on the bridge over the creek as the foundation of my mortal escape.  When my therapist looked at the underside of my forearms and frowned.

When during a fight in the car with my girlfriend at the time, while we waited for another friend who was making out in the club, I thought to myself that I was going to drive us into oncoming traffic on the way home.

I hadn’t thought about the fact that the turmoil endemic to dating, and more specifically, the possibility of rejection, might trigger something within me.

Your cutting is set off by your relationships my therapist observed on day one, two years ago, me on the couch, her on the white chair.  My reaction to this was silence, awe at how easy it was for her to see that.  She’s fucken magical, I thought.

I would think about all of this later, once I resumed my dosage.  I stared down the barrel of the green bottle on Wednesday morning, somewhat hung over.  Split tablets, whole tablets looked back at me.  I looked back at them.  I took a half tablet out.  Changed my mind.  Took a whole tablet out.  Admitted defeat.  Swallowed.  Back on drugs.

So I’m back on the couch.  The same one I found myself on almost exactly two years ago.  For the same goddamned reason.  A cutter in love.  Now, as then, on the center cushion.  Now, as then, my therapist looking back at me with her ambiguous gaze, one that says, I’m not entirely sure what to do with you.

She does, though, of course.  She asks me how I’m doing.  Over the past couple of months, we’d been meeting weekly as my travel schedule allowed to discuss any number of topics:  body dysmorphic issues, why I’d been pushing myself so hard over the past two years, being closeted in my youth.  Normally, we’d begin by talking about the week that had passed, recapping various small events in my life.  Normally, I would tell her when asked how I was doing, at least at the outset, that things were good, that I was tired, but good.

You’ve been saying you’re tired for the past six months, she said once.

This time, though, I just say it.  Dive right into things.  I’m not doing too well¸ I tell her.  And then I tell her why.

You did?

Yeah, I did.

Why?

I just wanted off, I tell her.  As though it were as simple as getting off the goddamn bus.

She explains what I had at that point learned:  that I had to taper, slowly.  Then she explains things that I did not know:  that people often try to quit in the fall, coming off of long daylight hours in the summer.  And that that’s a recipe for failure.  She brings up the lack of vitamin D in most Vermonters because of all the darkness during the winter, mentions how it affects our immunity and our moods.

Really, most of us here should be taking it as a supplement, she adds.

I hedge whenever telling her bad news.  I explain that I didn’t cut, that I wanted to, that I wanted to do more.  But that I didn’t.

I tell her about Tuesday, how it felt as I drove.  I wanted so badly, so urgently to slice myself open, the only thing preventing me was the constant motion north, my eyes monitoring the speedometer and the double yellow, my hands squeezing the steering wheel, driving towards the company of my friend and colleague.  Even with the absence of sharp or puncturing objects (well, there was a pen, a corkscrew, in the car), I told her that my skin tingled.  As though it were reaching out to me, as a friend, as though to tell me it would be okay I defaced it.  As though to say:  if it will make you feel better, I’ll let you do this to me again.  A pretty face looking to be beaten.

Sometimes, simply changing the sensation on your skin is enough to re-engage the frontal cortex, my therapist had explained in our first meeting.  Going outside into the cold, or taking a hot shower were both examples.  That was two years ago.

I tell her that during the drive, I rubbed my right forearm, pinched it, felt the friction.  That that provided some satisfaction.

I was doing this, too, I say, flicking my wrist, mimicking the cuts I would have made.  She nods, making the face that she makes when she wants to tell me that she isn’t pleased, that she is concerned.

It’s also the one year anniversary of me being suicidal again, I think out loud, to her, to me.  Which, again, I hadn’t thought about until I went back on the medication.

We dissect anxiety, sadness for the remainder of the session.  We talk about the imagined child in me cowering in the corner, screaming, mouth wide open, improbably so, bright lights shining down on him.  Terrified, existentially, of being left, of being alone, of being the undesired body in a sobbing, flabby heap.  When asked how I feel towards this part of me, I tell her I don’t know, that I can’t separate myself from him at the moment.

Let’s put him in the chair over here, she tells me.  Let him know you’re still here, that we’re not leaving him.

I do; we discuss a recent love interest gone awry for the remainder of our time.  How that, more than the pending office move, the stolen bike, the overloaded calendar, was likely the cause.

During the phone call, I felt stunned, concussed, I say, wobbling my upper body on the couch to illustrate.  I tell her that it felt like it did when I beat myself over the head with a frying pan years ago.  She says that the reaction could have been exacerbated by the withdrawals that I was likely experiencing.

Then:  We had an agreement, she tells me as a concluding remark to the session, referencing the fact that I was supposed to call her when in a distressed state, when about to self-harm.  She looks not quite upset, not quite disappointed.  The borderline of emotions:  the most unsettling of them all.

As I’m writing the check for the appointment, I ask her, for clarity’s sake, at what point I am supposed to call.

I didn’t cut myself, so I didn’t call.  I was thinking about it, though.  I had my phone unlocked, ready to call you.  But I didn’t know if I needed to, so I didn’t.

She didn’t come down one way or the other as to whether I had erred.

I just want to remind you that it’s an honest request.  That you really should call me if you’re in crisis. 

I don’t want to be anti-depressed anymore.  It’s not the same as being happy.  I want to tell her this.  I don’t, though.  Instead, I smile and thank her as she closes the door, and I am shat back out into the world, trudging back to my office, retreating to and from a number of invented situations.

At the office, I create a new playlist entitled “Mood Swing Mix 2011.”  On the cover of the CD, I wrote those words, and then, bullet points around the rest of the disc’s face.  A summary of the past month, the rising, the crashing, the epiphanies that lie in the settling dust.

• A day at a time
• A brown autumn
• Love and falling down
• Failed attempt @ quitting SSRIs
• Return of past urges
• Heavy drinking
• Dysmorphia rendered clear
• Accomplishments
• Breathe, fucker, breathe

I don’t think she had intended for the phone call to result in her breaking up with me, but we got there all the same.  I had suspected that the end was in sight, so I preempted things.

“Are you breaking up with me?” I asked her on the phone.  “Because the sense I’m getting is that you’re breaking up with me.”

She answered that she didn’t know, that two years inLondonwas a long time, that we’d already been long distance for two years, that my last visit to her in upstateNew Yorkfelt a bit contentious.  That we started dating when she was seventeen, that’s so young, Jeff.  We got so serious so quickly, but it seems like it’s going to take forever for us not to be long distance.  You seem settled back inVermont, and I don’t see myself back there soon.  It’s so hard, baby, and I mean, I thought maybe we’d stay together until I left in August, but now, I don’t know, are we breaking up?  I mean, I guess that’s what this is, then?  You’re one of the best people I know, Jeff.  No, I don’t, I’m not just saying that.  I talked to Mum and my sister yesterday.  This is so hard; she’s so upset about it, she still sees you as the older brother she never had.  That’s sweet of you, she’d love to hear from you.  Okay, well, I guess that’s it, then?  We’ll talk again, though, right?  Okay, I’m sorry, I love you, good-bye.

I had been lying down on my back, my feet draped over the foot of the bed.  I hung the cordless phone, looked at the red talk light go out, observed the number pad for a lengthy moment.  I got up, heard the creaking of the box-spring, noted that I felt a little dizzy.

I should be crying or something, I thought.  I tried to conjure up tears.  None appeared to want to come, which I found somewhat disappointing.  You’re in a relationship; the phone rings.  You talk for a few minutes.  You hang up.  You’re single.  She was right, though.  Not that that made me any happier about it.

I walked around my apartment, dragging my feet on the carpet and taking stock of the scratching, scuffing sound that I made.  I called my friend Mary, who lived down the street.  I asked what she was doing tonight.  She mentioned her plans.  I asked her if she wouldn’t prefer coming over to do laundry and kill a twelve pack or two with me.  I explained that I was newly single.

She was over later that evening; she did laundry; we drank beer.  She said how breaking up over the phone is so not cool.  As I got drunker, I began to disseminate the news to other friends online.  Michael and Rich said that they would be up fromBostonin thirty six hours.  Another friend would also come.  Another friend would say via chat that the upside was that I got to watch all the porn I wanted, and sent me a few links.  Mary and I were proper drunk, and I think I acknowledged out loud that tomorrow was going to hurt more than today.

The weekend would be spent drinking more, playing games, walking around town, and drinking again.  They all drove home on Sunday.  I washed the dirty glasses.  I took pictures of myself without a shirt on.

My mother has imagined for some time how she wants to die.  In her later years, which, really, are upon her now, she wants a cottage near the ocean with a Mercedes Benz sitting in the driveway.  Not necessarily to drive it, though.

“Just to look at it from my bedroom window,” she’d say.

She’s never owned a Mercedes, to my knowledge.  It had been one of those status symbols for which she vied but never attained.  Over the last five or six years, since the cancer came and went, and the cysts came and went, and the complications from the surgery to remove the cysts came and went, she’s dropped the fantasy about the Mercedes in the driveway.  She still does look at real estate inMaine.  Choosing her battles, I guess.

I visit her and my father for her 65^th birthday.  And his 68^th, a month late.

“If it weren’t for this wedding, you wouldn’t have made the trip,” she says.  She’s alluding to my friend’s wedding an hour from where they live.  She’s right, but I don’t tell her as much.

On this visit, there’s no cancer, there’s no cyst, but she’s finally admitting that she might have Alzheimer’s.

“I just can’t keep track of anything anymore,” she says.  She’s been saying it for years.  She’s right, and I tell her as much.

Her mother died from Alzheimer’s.  Forgot who the President was, forgot that her friends had long since passed away.  Forgot it was Thanksgiving.  Forgot who I was.  Forgot how to talk.  Forgot to breathe.  Forgot to stop dying.  So now my mother is thinking that that might be how she goes.

The prospect doesn’t excite her.  By her own admittance, she hasn’t done the whole aging thing with any amount of grace.

“This getting old stuff is for the birds,” she tends to say.

When she got cancer, she opted out of chemotherapy.  She was aware of the risks, of what would happen if the cancer came back, how she’d essentially be fucked if it did.  She knew.  And she opted out anyway.  Despite our objections, the objections of the oncologist.

“I’m just not doing it,” she said.  “That stuff’s just too yucky.”

So we watched as she didn’t do it.  Fingers crossed, since none of us pray anymore.

We knew she wasn’t one for compromise – she never had been.

“Only child,” we’d say.

It manifested itself in many ways, mostly to our embarrassment: sending food back, returning faulty or imperfect products, demanding to speak to a manager and entrenching herself until the situation was resolved (i.e. until she got her way).

But with her health, we were all a little surprised when she remained as obstinate as she did.  When she returned to the hospital after complications from the surgery where the cysts were removed, I spoke to a very drugged, very cranky, somewhat paranoid version of her.  They were keeping her there against her will, the food was awful, she just wanted to go home.  She had to go to work.  I felt bad giggling.

“I need to get out of here, Jeff,” she slurred.  “There’s no way I’m staying here another twenty four hours.  I just can’t take it.”  This, after they had told her she needed to stay the weekend.  She, like her mother, did not do well in hospitals.  Her mother would sneak out of her room, fold towels and sheets, and then deliver them to unsuspecting patients on other floors or halls.  She had no idea where she was.

Again, though, on this visit, no hospital horror stories, no scary lumps, no x-rays with bad news.  So instead, we ruminate on the possibility of a degrading brain.  We don’t invoke her mother, not that we need to.

It was a long death.  One that started with rheumatoid arthritis; in an earlier chronicle of her passing, I wrote that the arthritis slowed her down enough for the Alzheimer’s to catch her, to sink its teeth into her gray matter.  Which it did, slowly, fucking painfully so.

When she took a cognitive baseline test at some point in the early 2000s, one of the questions was Who is the current President?  She said Gerald Ford.  Which was not correct.

It was before I went to college that we began to see it.  Then in college, when I was living abroad and called home, she did not know that it was Thanksgiving, nor that dinner had been served already.

“We have to go eat now!” she said, as she hung up the phone.

When I last saw her, she was in a home, having forgotten how to dress herself, how to walk, how to form sentences.  She could sit; she could move her eyes.  For the half hour that we were there, my mother implored her to do the exercises the nurse had been doing with her: it was little more than raising her arms above her head.

“Do you remember your grandson Jeff?” she asked her mother.  My grandmother looked at my mother and smiled.  I waved, said hi, that it was good to see her.

“K, mom, we’re going to leave now,” my mother said eventually.  “Do we get to hear you say good-bye?”

“Good-bye,” my grandmother said – the only words from her that day, the last I’d hear from her.

So now, we think, it might be my mother’s turn.  For purely selfish reasons, I hope to shit it doesn’t get her.  Looking at what a toll it took on her, the exhaustion, the frustration, the laughing at the fucken tragedy of it all – I can’t imagine my sister and I putting up with the shit that she did, being as good an advocate as she was, being as stubborn as she was to make sure her mother got good care, doing homework on the prescribed medications.  I mean, she bought The Arthritis Bible; we mocked her for it, if only because we never saw her read it.  But she bought the fucken thing, and that’s more than I’d do.  I’d type a query into Google, see what it yielded, and if it took more than five minutes, I’d tell her I didn’t know how to help.  Maybe my sister will be better about it.  Maybe I’m underestimating my ability to care for her.  Who knows – maybe we’ll rise to the task.  Or maybe she’ll make us.  She does understand the motivating power of guilt, and hasn’t hesitated to use it.

But we’re not there yet.  We just don’t know what’s going to happen to her brain, what it will look like after the autopsy (we learned during my grandmother’s experience that a brain that dies from dementia looks different from a brain that dies from Alzheimer’s).  We can’t even really say that my mother’s dying more than anyone else.  We’re just sitting at the kitchen counter, her leafing through the paper or a flyer, me trying to edit a chapter for a book that I’m working on.  I don’t even know how it comes up, but it does.  Since no one else is dying, it might as well be her.  My father’s parents are dead.  Hers are both gone now, too; her stepfather hung on to the tether of his oxygen tank until he died on the toilet the next town over.

So it’s someone’s turn.  My father’s genes are too good, and we all acknowledge this.  We assume that Susan and I have a while, although our medical histories aren’t yet known (adoption).  So maybe it’s right to assume that she’s next.  Our extended family, well, sure, there are probably others in line before her, but in the immediate sphere, the cards are stacked against her.

“I’m not going to do it,” she says, referring vaguely to a slow, protracted death.  “One day, I’m just going to walk out into the sea and keep going.”

I don’t look at her.  I just nod.  She knows she’s told me before.  I don’t tell her I like the idea, that it sounds peaceful, that I’ve heard that drowning, after the panic dissipates, is actually a soothing way to die.  I don’t tell her that a former colleague of mine who did search and rescue talked about how we often return to the water to greet our death.  How in the winter inNew England, the water is warmer than the air.  I just nod.  Because what else can I do?

Because honestly, what the fuck is a son supposed to say to his mother who’s just told him how she wants to die?

I wonder if it’s a bluff, like her threats that she’s going to divorce my father.  She’s been telling that story almost as long as she’s been telling me about the Mercedes that she’s now given up on, the boat trip that’s now just a casual walk in over her head.

I think to myself:  I haven’t seen her in a body of water since I was in high school.  I can’t even be certain that she’s taken a bath.

I wonder if this simple plan of hers will face as many obstacles as every other simple plan in her life.  Every product she buys has a problem, every customer service experience she has requires long periods of being put on hold, escalation, fights with a manager, letters of complaint, a resolution that leaves a bitter taste (Four hours on the phone, Jeff, four hours).  She does have terrible luck, and I can see her attempted suicide going horribly wrong:  the Coast Guard doing some practice drill the day that she chooses to meander into death off the coast ofMaine.  A dolphin or whale nudging her back to shore, where she’ll spit up seawater, look around, and then trudge back to her car which now won’t start because she left the lights on.  Some improbable event would get in the way.  And the thing is, I think she’s stubborn enough to try again just to prove her point.  That she gets what she wants, that as with everything else in life, she is going to die on her own goddamned terms.

I continue typing, looking at the chapter that I’m editing, letting her commentary hang in the air.  I finally look at her, and say:  “Okay, then.”

“Don’t worry.  I’ll make sure it looks like an accident,” she says.

“You better,” I tell her.  “Otherwise, I won’t be able to collect on the insurance.”