“Oh, fine, fine,” I said. “Just letting off a little steam.” I closed my eyes and felt my sense of hopelessness rising higher and higher. Once again, I wished I had my phone. But even if I had it, should I call Ki-ki and burden her with my crap again, for the second time today? I was a sandbag, dragging down everyone around me. No wonder my mother didn’t want me and sent me away. I was worthless all over again. Why was I even alive?
The woman left the bathroom and I stayed where I was for a minute. I put the seat cover down and sat on it, rocking back and forth and squeezing my eyes shut to try to not feel so bad, but nothing was working. My pounding heart felt like it wanted to jump out of my mouth.
It must have been a long minute. Eventually, Julie came in.
“You all right in there, muffin?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. If I’d tried to, I’d have started bawling really hard. Her soothing voice was the last thing I needed. All it did was remind me of the mom I wished I had. Home home, Cynthia had once or twice found me crying. All she ever said was “You want me to give you something to cry for? Is a good cut-tail you want!”
Instead, Julie said, “Honey?” She sounded concerned. “Open the door. Let me in.”
Numbly, I unlocked the stall for her. She took a look at me and hugged me tight and said it’d be okay. That didn’t help much, only made me want to cry more, and so I did. I also started hitting my balled fists against my thighs. Something inside me had come undone.
I’m on some pretty strong antidepressants and antianxiety meds, and have been ever since they took me to the hospital after I overdosed on painkillers to try to kill myself.
I remember a group of doctors, quiet as a cloud, drifting from bed to bed in the children’s ward. A kind-faced older man seemed to do the talking for the team as he explained my wonky brain chemistry, and said that I might have to take meds for the rest of my life. Nice.
Anyway, the medication isn’t the only thing they prescribed. I was also supposed to go to group therapy with a counselor, but my mom couldn’t afford to pay a shrink and, since arriving in Canada, I had rejected any suggestion of it when Dr. Khan brought it up. Every now and then my aunts tentatively raised the question but I always changed the subject. I was taking my meds—antidepressant in the morning, antianxiety pill at night. Dr. Khan had made me promise to write in a journal. That was all I could do for now and since I had been in Edmonton it had worked to keep me more or less okay. I had felt panic sometimes, like at the bus stop earlier, but I didn’t generally want to tear my own face off; I felt sadness, but not the giant abyss that I had wanted to fall into the day I took the bottle of pills, to fall and never return.
But those good old days of managing my depression and anxiety with just medication seemed to be over. I was having the ice cream sundae of meltdowns in the bathroom of Tacos and Tequila.
After holding me for a few minutes, Julie sat me down, told me not to worry, and left to fetch Aunt Jillian.
Could anything be worse than what I was going to call this—the Tacos and Tequila Incident? As crazy as it seemed, the Cute Boy seemed interested in me. He was looking at me, wasn’t he? Yeah, and he knows you were looking at him, too. His dad announced it to the whole wide world. I sat on the toilet seat replaying the entire awful episode over and over in slow motion. I groaned from deep down in my cramping belly.
When Aunt Jillian appeared, she didn’t even blink to see me wet-faced and shaking in a toilet cubicle. She went into crisis mode. “Right. Let’s get her out of here and back home. We’ll deal with this better there.”
The idea of going out into the restaurant looking like that made me freak out even more. I clutched Jillian’s hand. “Please, please, Aunty, please don’t make me have to say goodbye,” I begged. This time, I wasn’t playing or being goofy. I was really scared of having anybody else see me with my snatty nose and my still-dripping face swollen from crying.
“Of course you don’t have to say goodbye, sweetie. We’ll tell them you’re not feeling well and you send your apologies, that’s all,” said Julie. Though I was kind of glad I didn’t have to talk to anyone, especially the Cute Boy, somewhere under the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth I was a bit sorry. He really was gorgeous. That was the last coherent thought I had for days.
journal session 3
The last time I felt like that, I had a nervous breakdown. This is what I remember.
I opened my eyes to a white fluorescent strip light. The bed below me was hard and narrow. I tried to turn, feeling the thin sheet sliding on the vinyl mattress cover, and reached out to push myself up. That’s when I noticed I was wearing a strange gown and had an IV drip in my arm. I looked around. Five other kids lay in railed beds like mine around the room, mostly sleeping or playing on their phones. One was awake and looking at me. There was a giant yellow banana painted on the wall behind his bed. I guessed it was the children’s ward of a hospital. It was day; I could see light through the windows in one wall, but I couldn’t tell what time it was. My stomach burned like acid.
I had a sore throat, too. Banana Kid heard me clearing it and took it as an invitation to chat. He asked in a friendly, curious tone, “You’s the one who take tablets to kill yourself? I hear the nurses talking about you.”
I slumped back down and turned my face away. Luckily, I was in a corner. It was what I deserved, anyway, to lie alone in a corner. I was alive. I didn’t know how to feel about that. Should I be disappointed? Or relieved?
“Nursie!” Banana Kid yelled. “Look, the girl who take the tablets wake up!”
Outrageous! You rude little—! I swung around to complain but the words froze in my mouth when I noticed there was a counter by the doorway to the ward where two women in white sat doing paperwork. One of them, a chubby brown-skinned lady, sighed loudly and creaked to her feet. Her lack of amusement showed in her stiff neck. “Shhh! Hush, Clive. You feel because you living here you could bawl out any old way? Have some behavior!” After scolding him in a stage whisper, she said to me in a normal voice, “Missy, how are we this morning?” So it was morning, then. As she waddled toward my bed I shrank back into the hard mattress. She took my arm and checked the IV needle stuck in the bend of it. Clear liquid dripped from the plastic bag hanging on the metal stand, going down a skinny plastic tube into my arm via the needle into my vein. It looked just like on TV, I remember thinking.
“Doctor is on his way,” she said. She put a blood pressure cuff around my arm and pushed some buttons. I lost interest and looked back toward the wall as she took my temperature and pulse. The machine beeped, squeezed my arm, beeped again, and relaxed. I didn’t watch as she unwrapped the cuff. I kept my face to the wall until she said, “Why would a nice young girl like you, with so much to live for, try to take your own life? That would be such a loss. You are so beautiful.” Her tone was kind and sympathetic. I turned just enough to see her face. She had relaxed and wasn’t looking so stiff anymore. There was a spark in her eye. “You know who can help you with those feelings?”