Summer, Day 1

My favorite box to unpack in the first one, whatever the first one is. The feeling of taking your belongings, carefully packed in some other place, in some other time, and arranging them. Bringing your life out of storage.

My least favorite box to unpack is the last one. The one with all the junk you didn't know where to put. You've already spent time unpacking, putting away, organizing. This is the box that makes the move definite, the box that says "you live here now," the box that takes your careful organization to instant mess because there was no place to put the junk anyway. I usually avoid unpacking that box until the very end, when I have to pack again and move somewhere else.


Today, I slept in and enjoyed the stuffy hotness of my room, the sound of rowdy cardinals in the trees, the horn of the passing train. No slammed doors, no muffled music in the hallway, no forgotten alarm clock in the distance, no sleep-deprived crammers slumped over books outside their rooms, no hum and beat of the City. The first day of summer.

As I turned in my key to the front desk last night, leaving dorm life behind maybe forever, the strap of the ex-shower flip flops I was wearing broke. Shower shoes Bookish Friend had given me on the first day of college two days ago, broken shoes on the last day of college this year. A sign?

Crazy talk

Being crazy: It's the thing you know only happens to other people, until it happens to you.

I'm crazy.

It's not the kind of crazy where you wear funny jumpers and own ten cats and mutter to yourself as you knit tiny sweaters for destitute hamsters, it's not the kind of crazy where you run around the streets naked but for a long beard while mothers shield their children's eyes, it's not the kind of crazy where you go bungee-jumping and sky-diving.

It's the kind of crazy where you think life is normal sometimes and the rest of the time you don't have the strength to do anything. The kind of crazy where you know for a certainty you're a failure and sometimes you don't even know who you are. The kind of crazy where you have to keep yourself from breaking down and crying during class or during dinner or because someone said your hair was cute.

It's the kind of crazy you don't see for years and years and years, the kind of crazy that grows like a black hole but somehow stays unnoticed until a feather tips the balance.

My feather fell very, very slowly for a month and a half, and then everything collapsed.

One night, I just found myself tossing and turning in the middle of the night, sobbing, my head full of thoughts I couldn't deal with, sobbing, unable to remember my name or why I existed, sobbing, with a bottle of very strong pain medicine in one hand, sobbing, trying very hard to do what I knew was something incredibly stupid.

I didn't do it. Instead, I got up and made a cup of tea, and that mug full of water was the most important thing in the world for the whole trip down the hall to the water fountain and back.

I saw a therapist, I talked to my friends, I tried to fix things.

In the past, being depressed was all right. Being depressed was only a minor down, something I could get out of by playing the Glad Game and taking a little break.

This wasn't anything like that. This still isn't anything like that.

This is like a hole you can't get out of, a hole you don't even see the walls of because you can't even see past the crushing oblivion that is everything you try to think of. There is nothing in the world worth living for, there is no love, there is no happiness for you, you are worthless, you are stupid, you shouldn't even be here.

For the longest time, I couldn't write. Couldn't muster up the energy. Sometimes I'd think of the words without writing them down, sometimes even words were too hard to think of. It was better to just sleep.

I'd like to say that I know the cause, I'd like to say that it's over now, I'd like to say I'm completely cured, but I can't.

What I can say is I know the feather, I know the worst is most likely over in great part, I know I'm on the way to someday being cured. It's not much, but it's a start.

The greatest problem is that it comes and goes. Today was a beautiful day, but two days ago I was sure I would never have the strength to come back to school after a week of holidays because I wasn't good enough, because I couldn't hack it, because I was terrible at everything I did.

Tomorrow may be a great or a terrible day. There is rarely a middle ground.

Some things give me hope. For example, there are three children's books I've wanted to reread sitting on my desk, there is the finished take-home exam, there is the list of things I have to do and the schedule I've made for myself to do them, there's the class trip to the sea next weekend, there's the fact that you, readers, keep on commenting here and worrying about me when most people really couldn't care less.

Some things make me quake in fear. For example, there's all the math homework I think I understand but really just looms like a mountain I can't climb. There's the Cell Bio that seems ridiculously easy but somehow bores me to actual tears during lecture and trips me up on silly mistakes. There's the emails I have to answer, the appointments I have to schedule, the things I have to plan and organize.

I really want to say that I'll be all right. That it will pass and I'll get better.

But when you think one day that everything is done and over with and the future looks bright, only to be run over by a train, there's not much you're certain of.

Crystal ball

I tend to be eerily accurate with my predictions.

There was The First, of course. You could say it was love at first sight, although it wasn't. It was a certainty, a fact: I didn't know his name, I had never had a boyfriend, I never expected to have one, yet I knew that by the end of the year we would be together. I didn't go out of my way to make it happen, but it did. As I knew it would. And, again as I knew it would, it ended.

The Second happened unexpectedly. He remained an uncertainty for some time, during and even after. I hoped, for what reason I do not know, but eventually that passed and I was certain once more.

The Third wasn't so much a certainty as a destiny: he was bound to happen.

He became The Boy.

And, by my current prediction, may very soon be just The Third.

The change may have been gradual, but, as always, a moment of clarity brings the prediction, and life is uncertain no more.

In one way, it was a certainty from the very beginning. By all the laws of logic, it shouldn't last. By all the laws of logic, it shouldn't have happen at all. The problem is, one stroke of good luck jaded me and made me think anything could happen, no matter how impossible or improbable, how far the distance or how disgruntled the parents.

The thing is, life doesn't happen that way. Life isn't a fairy tale, life doesn't always turn out well.

Until this Thursday night, I'd held the doctrine that everything always turned out okay. Procrastination was fine, I knew I'd get the project completed before the due date and do well on it. Getting sick was fine, I knew I'd eventually get better after one or two weeks. Having some accident or other was fine, I knew there was a grown-up who would come and make me safe and take the hurt away. Government papers and banks and forms and taxes were fine, I knew there would always be a knowledgeable grown-up who would take care of it for me. A long-distance relationship was fine, I knew it would keep going forever in the fairytale way.

But in real life, that's not how it happens.

In real life, sometimes you get bad grades, sometimes you don't get better, sometimes you have to get complicated and expensive surgery, sometimes you get in trouble, sometimes you have no money. Sometimes you fight.

In real life, you have to think about the future. Now is fine, but what about then? What about grad school? What about jobs? What about families? I have too much ahead of me to think about spending the rest of my life with one person and having to plan everything around that. I have too much ahead of me to wait forever until, by some miracle, we end up in the same place again. I have too much ahead of me to not explore the world and the people in it.

The bickering gets to me. Playful, pretend-playful, or neither, it's bickering and I can't stand it. I can't stand to be the perpetual cheerleader, to always try to find solutions to problem, to always say "That's OK, do what's in your best interest, I can wait another six months to see you." I can't stand to always have to defend my opinions on such and such, whether about a Halloween costume or cultural differences. I can't stand the long silences sometimes when he needs time to think.

I know him well enough to know he's thinking roughly the same thing.

I'd like to say I got my crying over and done with several weeks ago, but I know that when it does end, I most likely won't be able to help it.

I'm sorry, Boy. While you're doing your thinking, I'm doing mine, too, and this is the conclusion I've come to.

It was great while it lasted, and I don't regret it, any of it, but it feels like it's time we parted ways.

Sure, it may take some time to reach the actual end, but I don't see any way out.

Time to think and explore my new grown-up world.