I am terrified that B— will die, and that his mother will not think to call me when he does, not knowing that we are partnered because he doesn’t talk about me at the dinner table. He is an intensely private person. She wouldn’t even tell my grandmother, he tells me, over Zoom, one night, when I express this fear. My mother is the reincarnation of Socrates. She would just casually tell her, Oh, B— killed himself. Like five days later when someone said they hadn’t seen me in a while.
I obsessively imagine our wedding, his funeral. I try to pretend this is so I am prepared for when it happens. I like to plan things like this. It brings me peace, to know what dress I would wear, how it would feel to buy the airline tickets, what I would say to his mother when she asks me what the nature of our relationship is. How I would keep my face stoic, not crying even when they read the eulogy. Is this normal? At our wedding, I decide, I will wear a red dress.
A man I used to sleep with brings another girl to the bar we both frequent. She is tall and thin and blond, but unpretty in a boring way, and I am horrified that I am judging another person like this. He is touching her back. I am doing cocaine in the bathroom. Earlier today, B— has had a seizure. I am constantly reminded that we could all die, at any second. I see the shattering glass from the plate he has dropped, the pasta and eggs on the floor. I am cracking like a mirror, and there is nothing anyone can do for me but pet my hair quietly and make soothing sounds. I am leaving the bar. I am calling B— on the phone and he is making soothing sounds.
I worry that the drug supply has fentanyl in it. I worry that B— will drink himself to death on George Dickel or tequila, asphyxiate in his sleep. I worry that these cigarettes will get the best of me. One night, a drunken mistake, I slip getting into bed while holding a plate of home fries and smash my face into my end table, splitting my chin open and busting my lip. It could have been much worse, I say to myself, my mother, the next morning, examining the one-centimeter gash on my face. My apartment has ants.
When I am not imagining his death, I am picturing our life together. I am picking out china. What kind of cat we’ll have, what kind of carpets. I snore, he has nocturnal episodes. I shit five times a day, like clockwork. At least no one can say we’re unoriginal, B— says, referencing my Bipolar, his epilepsy. We’re a barrel of laughs, I shoot back, chuckling to myself. We’d have a fucked up baby, I point out. Maybe it’s better to not. I want an apartment in a nice part of Brooklyn, a terrace I can smoke off of like in a movie. I want a life all our own, a secret language only we speak. I want it all. Why doesn’t it want me, too?
He calls me, after the seizure, but doesn’t mention he’s fallen to the floor in front of his mother, that everything has gone pins and needles, then black. I spend my Monday obsessively suicidal, planning to jump out of the sixth-floor window of my parents’ studio when my mother leaves the room. I do tell him this, and he sends, in careful text lingo: Do. Not. Do. That. I nod, text back, I know, I know, as if I am a bobblehead. On the phone, he sounds normal, if a little exhausted. I can’t talk right now, I tell him. I am getting ice cream in the park with a friend. Later I feel so guilty I could split in half.
If it’s not made in a specific region of France, then it’s not existentialism, a meme I read says. It’s just sparkling anxiety. I worry that the cable in the elevator will snap, and we’ll plummet to our deaths. I worry that the subway tunnels will cave in, and we’ll suffocate. For someone so obsessed with death, I spend a lot of time thinking of ways to avoid it. My physical therapist says I sit with my shoulders hunched up, which is contributing to my back and shoulder problems. I have knots all up and down my spine, which cannot be easily untangled. I cannot be easily untangled. I am a ball of twine, and I roll and roll until I am unable to see the sky.
I want to skip to the end of the story. I want to know what happens: will we be together forever? Will we live happily ever after? B— says no, our natural incompatibilities will eventually overtake us. I hate his pessimism, and when we talk on Zoom that night, I can’t imagine being this close to another person. I don’t want to be. If this is love, I want to return it, I want to put it back in the box. I feel like my heart is walking around outside of my body. I want the answer key, the cheat codes. I want to press a combination of buttons on the remote and have it miraculously handed to me: here, this is what you should do. These are the instructions to life.
Most days, we’re convincing each other to stay alive. Coming up with inane reasons. Because I love you, I say stupidly. Because I need you. Because we’re on a roller coaster called life and I just shit my pants and I need you to come bring me a fresh pair of underwear. The list goes on and on. Life is basically trivial. You come up with more and more trivial reasons to stay alive and before you know it, you’re old and you’ve spent your best days arguing with your best friend in the world over whether or not to kill yourselves. At least, that’s how I imagine it.
So I’m researching flights to Nashville for tomorrow and he’s telling me I don’t need to come right away and I’m panicking and calling my mom. It’s good, because I’m afraid that the planes will fall out of the sky. I’m picturing his corpse, his head smashed open on the stairs up to his bedroom. I am catastrophizing, imagining worst case scenarios in technicolor as I walk towards the bar where I will drink away all the thoughts or else. Or else what?
Not everyone is suicidal all the time, my therapist says. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being definitely, how suicidal are you right now? She looks at me with her big brown eyes, her face a mirror of concern. I look at my own face in the Zoom screen, parsing it for answers to questions I’ve already thought of. My lipstick is red, garish. My earrings, gold, huge, hysterical. Like a three, I say. But on Monday, I was a seven. She nods, too understanding. Let’s get you down to a two. Not everyone is suicidal all the time, echoes in my head. I’ve had these intrusive thoughts, in one form or another, since I was a teenager. They are as much a part of me as breathing, as brushing my teeth, as smoking a cigarette. I don’t know how to let them go.
Everything will not be okay. I am sick, and I am crazy. But I am not alone. I’m glad I have you to do this with me, I tell B— after my most recent Bipolar episode and his seizure. I am broken, exhausted, frustrated that I will never get better. The anxiety, the intrusive thoughts, and the darkness is overwhelming. As am I, he says, expressing to me that he feels like the victim of voodoo or a Biblical curse. Together, we are angry at God for making us this way, for breaking us when we have done nothing wrong. But we are together. We aren’t stumbling around in the dark by ourselves. In the shadows, there is a little bit of light.
