Taking care

The pile of the carpeting felt itchy upon my face and the ringing in my ears was incessant.  There was a full moon and it cast its sad pallor over the immobile objects of the room.  My mother's chest rose and fell comfortingly and I pretended that her breathing was a lullaby casting me off to sleep.  But the bile pitched from deep within me and I retched upon the floor.  I shook my mother awake and told her that I had overdosed on Tylenol.  I was fifteen.

The ER nurse forced me to swallow charcoal to absorb the toxins in my stomach.  I cried and feigned ignorance; I had simply taken too many capsules to conquer a painful headache.  I pleaded stupidity and hoped that I would escape the mental ward.  I winced when they jabbed the IV into my arm, but in truth, honest pain was more durable, understandable... I was scrappling with the unknown, the intangible.  Blood and physical pain were welcome intermediaries.

They released me, with a few notable head shakes and stern warnings.  I went home.  We made cookies.  It was Sunday.

In another environment, perhaps I would've shot up heroin.  Maybe I would've snorted the next available drug.  In Lexington, VA, I went back to high school and sat through Earth Science.  Lucky.  My options were limited.  There were no guns in my house.  I hated knives and was terrified of ropes.  The strongest drug in our medicine cabinet was Tylenol.  How fortuitous.  How strange.  How simple.  My options were limited.

My friends bemoaned unrequited crushes, lamented poor grades.  I secretly swelled, poisoned with my knowledge, my affliction, my fatal desire.  Homecoming, exams, Valentine's Day... the days rushed past me... and I flitted between reality and my morbid obsession, my greatest wish, the desire to end all pain, all suffering.  My parents marriage dissolved around me, my grades crumbled, my mind withered... I vacillated between hyper-productivity and vast withdrawl.  I couldn't explain to anyone what had absorbed me because I was at a loss to understand.  Was I depressed?  Was I elated?  My pendulum swung to such extremes.  I loved.  I hated.  I could dance a thousand steps; I couldn't move a muscle.

Time did not care.  My friends moved forward... awards were won, grades were earned, love was requited, rejected, renewed... and I remained.  I staggered through life.

It stretched interminably... my adolescence.  I slept.  I awoke.  I labored, I failed, I drifted, I stalled.  Somehow, I lived.

Today.  Today, I savor.  I relish.  I marvel.  And I mourn.  What if I had known?  What if someone had seen and understood?  What if someone had thrown a line?  I am 38.  Married.  Loved.  I have stared down death and put aside angst and collected my broken parts and moved on.  But what if it had never come to that?  How bitter am I?  How much of me is still unknown?  Is that different from anyone else?

There are some wounds that escape time... they never close.  That doesn't mean you can't move forward... you move gingerly, you favor a leg, you skip a step.  I walk with a limp... on especially cold days, the day my father died, the day I lost my first baby, the day I ended up in the UVA Psych ward...my gait is a little jaunty, a little encumbered... we never walk away unscathed.  Our wounds, our scars are our merits.  I have never covered my scars; it took too much to earn them.