I am now sniveling. Pathetic. I wipe my eyes with my shirtsleeves.
“I feel like such a coward admitting that,” I go on.
“You’re not,” Wolf says, taking off his glasses and wiping his own eyes. Wiping his own eyes! How does he get through this job if my dumb story makes him cry? “You know, once I read a study on bridge jumpers who survived. All suicidal. And every single survivor said, the moment their feet left the bridge and the second they began plummeting through the air, they all thought the same thing. They all wanted to take it back. They all wanted to live.”
I plant my face into my hands, letting the dam break. Lately I reserve my crying spells for the shower or late at night, places no one can see me. Like I’m trying to prove to the world I can be stable, and not too much. But I can’t stop myself right now.
“What a stupid thing to put ourselves through, all for what?” I sob.
“Journey,” Wolf says gently, pushing a box of tissues across the coffee table. Therapists must buy that stuff in bulk. “It’s okay to want to live.”
Present
My first week of college blazes by. The strangest part is how fast this new life, new routine, settles into normalcy. At family dinners, I share what I’m learning in my classes. For once in my life, I have science facts to share with Ruby rather than the other way around.
“If you were able to unravel your DNA, it would stretch to Pluto and back six times,” I tell her.
“I don’t know about that,” Ruby says. “Did you fact-check that claim?”
“No, but you’re welcome to.”
She takes out her phone to look it up.
“No phones at the table,” Dad tells her.
“It’s for scientific purposes,” Ruby says.
“Fine, look it up, then I want the phone off,” Dad says.
After a moment of squinting at her phone, Ruby puts it away.
“And?” I ask her.
She says nothing, eating her dinner.
“Was I right?” I ask.
“Yes,” she mutters.
“Ha ha!” Stevie says, pointing at Ruby.
I taught my sister a science fact. Now, that’s a first.
I stay up late to study and actually get my homework done on time. Sunday night I turn down hanging out with Marisol to study for my first astronomy quiz. what have you become?!?! she texts. jk i’m proud of you.
Tonight is a level up—my first solo shift as an actual hotline volunteer, four to ten. No Davina by my side. I’m so nervous I’m one boo away from peeing my jeggings.
The room is a converted living room with mismatched paintings on the walls, one a watercolor violet, one a painted surfer, another a drawing of unhusked corn. The other volunteers sit at the long tables near the window, drapes parted. Outside, the maple is tacked with birdhouses and strung with lights.
“Hey,” I say with a smile to the other people in the room when I take my seat, even though what I’m actually thinking is DON’T LOOK AT ME. These three are strangers. I’m the new girl in town and am convinced that I’m going to fail. Look at everyone else in the room. First of all, they’ve got a century on me between the three of them. There’s a woman with a poodle puff of gray hair billowing out of a bandana, face wrinkled, eyes steely and judgmental, who crunches on something called “nutritional yeast puffs” in what can only be described as a menacing fashion. There’s a twentysomething girl with a boy haircut, a babyish face, and sculpted eyebrows, who lounges back in a rolly chair next to a skateboard and says, “’Sup?” There’s a woman with long black hair and a hippie skirt rolling a stress ball around in her hand who murmurs, “Welcome.”
They are grown-ups, I’m a kid.
They are experienced, I’m a noob.
Stop, I whisper to my goddamn brain. Enough already.
I take a seat at the almost-empty desk, almost empty except for the antique phone, the headset, and the oh-so-familiar brick-heavy binder. I’ve come to know and love its comforting weight after fifty long hours doing my training here. In the binder, we have resources, like phone numbers to call for local police if someone wants to report a crime. Like nearby drug rehab centers and eating disorder clinics to refer someone to if they want help. We have scripts for suicidal callers, ways we can be supportive, dos and don’ts. We have rules outlined, like never offer explicit advice, only listen. Like if someone says they’re going to kill themselves, you ask them questions, why and how, ask them to put it off, make a pact to stay alive just for tonight. You don’t tell them not to, because we’re not supposed to be there to give them orders or tell them how to feel. We’re there to provide empathy, and to show them they’re not alone. We have no authority. We are sounding boards. Faceless friends.
Although I’m nervous and awkward in this fusty room that smells like a window hasn’t been opened in a thousand years, I’m convinced that there is a reason my life has come to this, and I feel about ten years older than the girl who swallowed a bottle of pills by the lakeside. I know now, after thinking my near death to death, that I didn’t want to die. And I am wondering, after halfing my medication now for almost two months, and now letting myself skip a day here and there entirely, if I don’t have a mental disorder. Maybe I’m just the same girl I always was, a girl with big feelings, one who filled out a survey with an aloof psychiatrist and ended up with a diagnosis I don’t deserve.
The point is, I know who I am now in a way I didn’t a month ago, and definitely didn’t two months ago. I go days without thinking of Jonah. When the black hole presents itself, I roll my eyes at it, tell it to buzz off. Wanting to die is dumb, weak, immature. I want to return to the girl I was just two months ago and hold her hand and tell her to stay home that morning, write a poem, fake sick, take a bath, flush those pills down the toilet, eat some chocolate, cry into a pillow, but don’t you dare try to die. Don’t do something that will stamp you with a black ink you can never erase.
The point is, I am not her anymore. I am on a mission here; when I answer the phone, one of these days, I’m going to save somebody. Maybe, in some weird way, myself.
And holy shit: the phone is ringing.
First is a high-voiced man with a Southernish accent whose name I miss because he speaks so fast, plunging headfirst into a monologue about how he thinks someone’s been stealing his mail and—he thinks it’s the mailman. I wait for some kind of emergency to arise in his story . . . for, I don’t know, the mailman to be harassing him somehow? But then his story changes. He hasn’t been able to find his dang slipper in weeks now and the dang company stopped making them, so he can’t reorder. He doesn’t sound mentally ill. Why is he calling a hotline? At the end he’s nearly weeping about how his sister didn’t send him a card on baby Jesus’s birthday. It’s been almost twenty minutes of this. In training, Davina says if someone isn’t in crisis, to gently try to end the call after twenty minutes. I tell him to hang in there and steer the conversation toward goodbye and hang up. Two of the other volunteers are on calls. I can tell, the way they lean in and press their headsets to their ears in listening mode. But the steely-eyed older woman—who introduced herself earlier as Lydia—stares at me, her crossword puzzle book open.