August 21, 2019
Hold on.
Yes?
Let’s take a step back.
Okay.
You’re about to mix the clinical with the reality.
I know. You know that. We wrote this story.
Yes.
Are you having doubts as to posting it?
Yes. And here is where you start mixing the clinical with the experiential.
There is one story, but there are two ways to tell it.
Can we retell it?
The whole thing?
No. You don’t have to go back and change what you wrote before, at least not the preceding paragraphs. But we need to make this ours now.
Is the rest not good?
It’s all perfectly serviceable. It’s all perfectly you-in-2015.
That it is. I wasn’t quite so heavy with the lilac scent on my words in those days.
It still gets a little purple.
I guess.
Let’s cut a deal, then.
Oh? You want to edit it?
You want to edit it. You want to make it more relevant. You want to make it more 2019. You want to make it fit. You want to understand, not just regurgitate.
Okay, fair.
Let me talk about the clinical side. You go back to the other version of the story.
Okay.
What was happening at this point, is that you were having an honest to goodness panic attack. You were entering a fugue state.
I froze for several minutes, probably about an hour, sitting on my bed and holding a broken mirror in my hands. All thoughts had left me, and all I could think about was not being. Not being here, not being at all.
Having decided not to kill myself, I put on a hoodie, went up stairs and emptied the quarter jar of quarters, left the broken mirror on the counter, and grabbed my bike. I had no idea what I would do, where I would go. I just knew that I needed out of there. That place wasn’t a place I could be.
Still in a trance, I made my way to what I assumed would be a safe space to hide out for a while, long enough for my dad to not be out looking for me. I don’t know why that was something I was thinking of, but it was. I rode my bike to the nearby Wal-Mart, and hid behind it, where the semi trailers were parked. I hid between two storage containers in the back, the stars invisible to me due to the bright lights of the parking lot, and yet the shadows were such that I remained in total darkness.
You needed to get away. You needed to not be there. You didn’t have the language to explain panic, and you didn’t understand the importance of escape.
Yeah. How could I have? No one had thought to teach me.
You had boundaries for what you felt were healthy means of interaction, and no means to communicate when they had been crossed. You had been slogging through anxiety with no way to explain to yourself or others what anxiety was, and you had crossed the point where you could continue to exist in that state.
The only solution was escape. Escaping into an internal world had worked until my dad demanded to see the report card, and escape by death hadn’t panned out. The only route left to me was literally escaping the situation.
As the night wore on and the clock struck nine, I realized that I couldn’t stay behind the Wal-Mart forever. I’d need some place to go. With only my bike, my hoodie, and five dollars in quarters, I biked the four miles from where I had been camped to the nearest bus station serving the route that would take me back to Boulder. I had no plans beyond getting to Boulder, other than I figured I could be homeless there in relative safety.
That’s where you spent the coldest night of your life.
The last bus to Boulder had already left, and so I was left on my own from about eleven that night until nearly six in the morning. I slept off and on on the bench in the bus-stop shelter. I hadn’t brought my bike lock with me, so I kept my bike leaning against the bench where I was dozing. I eventually got too paranoid and tied the sleeve of my hoodie around the top bar of the bike while I huddled deep within the relatively thin cotton of the jacket, no protection against the cold of the Colorado night.
At some point during the night, your anxiety abated enough to let you get some more perspective on the situation, and you started to think in terms of what you would do.
I would take the bus to Boulder, get off near the then-open Crossroads Mall, and see if I could get something to eat.
You never quite made it back to baseline in terms of anxiety, however. You were riding on a high, the fugue state constantly re-conquering you and leaving you paralyzed for hours at a time.
The bus was warm. It had eaten $3.50 of my total of $5, but it was totally worth it. I fell asleep in the back seat within minutes of getting on, and was only awoken when the bus reached the end of the line and the kindly driver (who surely knew what was up) shook me awake and helped me onto my bike.
For lack of anything better to do, I rode my bike from the Walnut Street Station to my old elementary school. School wouldn’t be starting for another half hour or so, so I camped out in a playground near by, affectionately known as Rock Park. I sat atop the sculpture-cum-playground that made up the park’s central feature and watched elementary schoolers trudge toward their classes.
With a bit of rest under your belt and once more in familiar territory–
Literally three-quarters of a mile from my mom’s house, at the time.
–you were starting to come out of your state of panic.
I was left with the dilemma of basically being a fugitive. I couldn’t go to my mom’s house, and I could never return to my dad’s. I was no longer anxious – my brain couldn’t hold that anymore – I was simply tired and sad.
Without anywhere to go or anything to do, I made my way back up to my original goal of Crossroads and puttered around the mall for a bit. My $1.50 wouldn’t buy me anything, so I just strolled around the bookstore for a while, always a favorite spot of mine. As I headed back out to where I’d left my bike in front of the entrance, I was startled by a red Honda Civic pulling up directly in front of me. My mom had found me. She admitted immediately that she had been canvasing the bookstores in town looking for me.
Even in your current state, you were a total dork.
The rest of that day and the next were a blur of crying. I was crying. My mom was crying.
Your dad may have been crying,
Maybe, but it wasn’t the type of thing I saw or heard from him. Mostly, he was angry.
I remember heated phone calls back and forth several times throughout the next few days. He had found my journal and accused me, “If you feel like you’re going crazy, maybe we should put you in the hospital. Is that what you want from us?”
I couldn’t answer.
Might’ve done you some good. Gotten you some help.
“I’m throwing out a bunch of your stuff, since you don’t care about your place here.”
No answer.
Stuff. Gifts. Clothing. Toys. Things piled high to, as you felt, buy your loyalty.
“What’s with the broken mirror?”
No answer.
You couldn’t tell him about the numinous aspect of it that drives that imagery in so many trashy teenage poetry notebooks, about how it came crashing down over you like a wave. And you definitely couldn’t tell him about wanting to use it to kill yourself.
“What is it you want from me?”
What did you want from him?
I struggled for a way to put into words the anxiety, panic, and depression that had slowly taken over my life from the moment puberty had hit, exacerbated by the fact that I was living in a place where I felt distinctly unwelcome. I think I wound up mumbling something about the fact that, with my dad gone all evening at the bar, I had no contact with someone in utter control of my life other than through punishment. Even then, as a child, that only felt partly true.
Dig deeper.