Britney

How am I alive?

I lie here, sweat clinging to my body like a snug dress under this comforter toward the end of June. The apartment has been dark for most of the day. I cannot see clearly because I lost one of my contacts. I am a majorly depressed bore. Next slide.

In my mind, I am in the bathtub again, my most obvious cry for help; my magnum opus, if you will. Reality brings me the sound of my neighbor’s piano and the crashing of thunder and lightning in the background. It’s too late to call my therapist and it’s too late in the year to call 911 or the hospital; I am supposed to leave the country next week. I also do not think I could handle going back into inpatient, as helpful as it was the first time around. Next.

It is after my early birthday party and I am at a friend’s house, trying to sleep on her bathroom floor. The coldness of the tiles is simultaneously welcoming and uncomfortable. I am too irritable to be in the living room with the other guests who are still awake; it is 6 AM and my mind is only on sleep. In the darkness, I try to imagine that I am at home in my room and that my אמא is in the next room, fast asleep as well. It doesn’t work. I end up running out into the rain for a cab, holding two vases of red roses from a friend. I feel like an outcast at something that happened for and because of me. I feel like a stranger at my own funeral. Earlier in the week I had frequently contemplated Cecilia’s death at her own party in The Virgin Suicides; at the end of the party I had a breakdown in a bedroom and ended up with one half of me dangling outside of a 15th floor window and the other half sobbing into the shoulder of one of my best friends. Now, for the finale:

I don’t know how the future looks. I don’t know how my own future looks. I’m tired of constant agony. I’m tired of having everything I say or write seem like a cry for help. I feel like I am rotting. ♦