So Much I Could Cry

I'm normal again. The paint on the walls around me seems to be chipping, the pictures almost all taken down, but I'm normal again. What does that mean? It’s just when you revert back to your previous form of mental illness, the one everyone knew and loved. I’m worried about you usually means: can your neuroticism go back to the way it was, the way I felt comfortable with?

The fear left my body along with all the care. The embarrassment, however, is here for me always. I don’t know how to reach out to anybody, I don’t know how to talk first. Why should I? As this hideous, embarrassing monster I've become.

It's been three days of this. No trust of self, all failure. I think it has to do with taking my favorite drug. My only drug - my first drug ever, actually.

I didn’t drink until senior year of high school. The first time I got drunk was at Ashland University. Dad drove me a few hours away to visit Zach, who had just started college. I listened to Childish Gambino through my headphones and felt a bit guilty, knowing I was about to do something my father wouldn’t approve of. He trusted me, so did my mom. Why wouldn’t they? I was Good Girl. This is like Cool Girl from Gone Girl, but lame. Good Girl does her homework, Good Girl looks away when a boy looks at her. Good Girl loves theatre, loves her grandparents, loves to volunteer. Good Girl can be shy, can be nervous, unpopular, or just freak.

Zach took me to see his school’s production of Little Shop of Horrors, then he took me to a sad complex off campus where the floor was carpeted and the dining table had big plastic bottles of soda. Sorry, mixers. When you drink alcohol, the first thing you learn is that other liquids can compliment cheap liquor by being mixers. Sprite takes on new life whenever it’s poured after Everclear into a plastic cup. I started with shots of Fireball and it was awesome. I’m not a cliche; I have no aversion to Fireball as an adult. I drank a lot of different evils that night. Each time I’d drink something new, I’d write it down in my notes app to commemorate the experience. Fireball, vodka with Sunny-D, sip of Jaeger, vodka with ginger-ale. It was a grocery shopping list of college concoctions by the end of the night.

This college party was relatively intimate, which is not how it would be when attending The Ohio State University the following year. I followed Zach’s lead, my older and wiser friend. We might have switched houses at one point. I might have stopped to puke in a public restroom or maybe gotten sick when we were in the safety of the dorm. I tried twerking on a wall, then I stumbled onto icy pavement, then I woke up in Zach’s twin bed.

The ride home was shrouded in mystery. My dad suspected nothing, because I was a good girl. It was my cross to bear; misery and hangover that I got away with. It somehow felt like murder.

The next time was different. I got invited to my first and only high school party, with only a few months of senior year left to spare. It was New Year’s Eve at a pretty rich girl’s mansion. A bouncer took everyone’s keys. We spent a night of horror in a sprawling basement that turned into a maze for my feeble drunk mind. Girls painted their bodies in tally marks to denote how many shots they had; couples touched under covers and over pants in the home theater. I stepped into a circle of teens on the patio where I got passed a blunt. I took a hit and I wasn’t in the circle anymore - I was watching the ball drop. I was counting down. I looked at a boy but we didn’t kiss. I kissed the only girls I knew there. I started to feel sick. I stumbled over bodies but I didn’t make it to the bathroom. The vomit escaped and it landed right in front of me. One of the only nice boys in my grade found some paper towels; I became a casualty.

The next morning, I woke up before everyone else. Cars were slotted into the long spiral driveway like horizontal Jenga. I came embarrassingly early the night before, which meant I’d be stuck until mid-day watching drowsy boys and girls shuffle out the door to retrieve their cars before I could get mine. When I finally got home, I came clean to my parents. I told them everything, though I’m not sure why. My mom threatened to call the pretty rich girl’s mom, to berate her for allowing underage basement dwelling and drinking. I begged her not to punish me even more. A lot of kids got sick or broke things or made some sort of mistake that night, but I was one of the only people who admitted to a party foul. When it came time for after Prom festivities, my poor performance and subsequent honesty garnered me a very deliberate snub.

College experimentation with drugs and alcohol wasn’t anymore grand. I realized very quickly that weed gave me panic attacks, though I didn’t understand what panic attacks were at the time. I thought the weed was killing me and I thought that if I never smoked or ate or sipped a THC substance ever again, I’d be in the clear. This was disproved around the time I moved to New York and started vacationing at ERs anytime I felt a bit off. My body was betraying me even before I consumed anything illegal - why?

I spent most of my twenties living in fear of my body, of substances, of death. This didn’t stop anything bad from happening to me, but I thought that this watchdog mentality would make whatever thing that will inevitably kill me, kill me more kindly. I am not dead yet and, to my knowledge, the disease that will take my soul has not yet made its presence known.

I am 28 and I want to do drugs now. I want to be like every drug-addled boyfriend I’ve ever had. I don’t want to take a small stem of a mushroom, feel nothing, then proclaim: I did it! I want to take a huge pouch of ZYN and stick it on my gums. I want to get a little sick in the bathroom after a huge bong rip. In this spirit, I buy molly for some kind of late birthday celebration.

I’m tired before we take it, but you tell me I shouldn’t drink any caffeine. When I swallow the pill, I feel the panic I maybe should have felt during the hours leading up to this special scary moment. The fear passes quickly, though, and I stay relatively sleepy. Am I going to feel anything? You take more than me, you feel more than me.

I ask you to give me a second dose. That’s not in my detailed plan of how this was supposed to go, but it’s starting to feel like storm chasing or UFO watching. I’m so skeptical; is this thing on? I’m tapping on the MDMA microphone inside my brain.

I deliberately do not watch how much you measure out for me, because I know you will give me what I need. What I need is relative; it’s whatever you want to give me. If you give me too little, I will be gracious. If you kill me, I won’t mind. I asked you to do it because I want you to do it, whatever there is to do. That is how I’ve always succumbed to you, anyway.

I feel warmness at the base of my spine. I feel nauseous in my stomach, not my head. I trace your body with my finger, thinking to myself: finally. I would touch you in any mental state, I would touch you just like this, but I’m allowed to touch you more right now. Maybe that’s why drugs are good; you can do what you want to do, but you can say: it was just because of the drugs, babe.

I think I am an honest person, so I tell myself that maybe that’s why the molly doesn’t reveal Life’s plan to me. I do not hear God, but I tell you the truth: there has not been one day since I met you that I have not thought of you. Good, bad, long, short. There is always a thought. Embarrassingly, there are sometimes too many thoughts. There are probably so many thoughts that you wouldn’t know what to do with all of them if they were somehow physically dropped at your door. These many thoughts would not fit inside your apartment. They’d have to linger on the street, making an orderly queue. What are you guys in line for? Someone would ask. All of the thoughts would gesture toward your door.

I’ve always been all thoughts all the time; I do not expect anyone to think as many thoughts about me as I do about them. When the evening is finally over and my jaw unclenches, the thoughts race even more. I oscillate between feeling great, feeling awful.

On the fourth day after taking my first drug, I start to become consistent. My brain waves are plateauing or something like that. This is all I’ve ever wanted: a numbness. Everything always feels too much and I am tired now. I am tired of the constant battle I wage each day. In an effort to become something greater, more beautiful, more interesting, I only became something awful.

For a brief moment, though, I feel the neutrality wash over me. I am outside the body and the mind I usually cannot escape. I see World. It is so bright - how do you people do it? Whatever. Who I am is who I am, and I should stop trying to change it.

I made you look though, didn’t I?