Britney

I am in bed before my 10 AM bedtime trying to salvage the bright lights of a grey recovery month when I remember the best one. My memory has become so bad, paired with the sludge of being inside all of the time, that I couldn’t say when it was—just that it wasn’t this or last week—but it was one of the times he came to visit the bunker. I had just stopped writing in order to draw and he was sleepy. “I’m tired,” he kept saying. Neither of us spoke much for a while because he kept closing his eyes and leaning against the wall.

“Go to sleep,” I said. I knew what was next.

“No, I don’t trust you.” (No one who is close to me trusts me in their sleep, not that they really should.)

“Will you go to sleep if I go to sleep?” This became my end of the evening’s back and forth. “Will you go to sleep if I go to sleep?”

Eventually, I resigned myself to the creeping tiredness and lay down. He was next to me when I closed my eyes, far away enough that we weren’t invading each other’s breathing routines. It was the best nap I’ve ever taken because I didn’t know it was happening. I went to sleep with the expectation of going to sleep without really thinking I would go to sleep. Even now I laugh. Waking up was an experience—I didn’t want to open my eyes because I realized that I’d fallen asleep, and was semi-shocked by this. I felt his fingers on mine before I saw them. I don’t remember when he let go but he was still holding on when I opened my eyes. This is my happiest moment of the month. As I write this I remember mentioning it before. (I don’t recall where, but it was in passing.) It is not the same. This is detail. This is me saying: That was the safest I felt in years. Since her.

Yesterday, again. Still in the dark, pre-recollection. I am offering my tears up to God in a stream of “why.” You know how it goes (or how it must, for a grieving, lonely, bedridden 17-year-old biting back at the heat and the heels of sobriety). Suddenly, rain. Like a response to an emergency call my body is suddenly moving, moving, moving down the hallway and outside in my floor-length sheer nightgown, my crutches banging against the floor at my sides. I bellyflop onto the closed bunker door and look up. Nothing is more beautiful. I think, To have experienced the most precious moment of my life and my mother isn’t even here. This must mean something. The tears stop. The rain stops. I don’t realize everything right away, but to have a true beginning means even more. I know where I stand on the racetrack. (I promise I didn’t recognize the strains of irony in that sentence until it was too late.)

I wonder how long I will be able to maintain this sort of house arrest, even though I am slowly but surely rising from the ashes of my perceived inadequacy and definite idiocy and lackluster depression. This is the longest diary entry I have written in a while, and a reasonably on time one. That means a lot to me.

Old-to-new creed: This is just the beginning. I have to believe that. ♦