It all started in a therapist's office with little blue boxes. Sample packs. They were flat and rectangular, like the boxes cold medicine came in at the Walgreens or the CVS, identical in size and shape. I used this similarity to comfort myself. I thought that if they were ever seen falling out of my bag during class, someone might think they were Sudafed, or Allergy, Cold and Sinus tabs. This thought calmed my over-palpitating heart, which--for the first time since winter quarter commenced--was making an appearance. Ker-thud, pop, thud-thud-thud, it said, which loosely translates from heart-speak to English as, "Fuck you."

No, the blue boxes were not Sudafed. They were not meant to decongest the chestal regions or rid the sinuses of phlegm. They didn't suppress coughing. The blue boxes said "Paxil" on the sides and tops of them, and I was meant to take one each day because I was crazy. I hated myself for that. I didn't want to be crazy. I wanted to be one of the Normals, the majority of normal people who led peaceful lives, with the minimal interruptions of a few sinus infections and an occasional heartbreak instantly curable with ice cream or a night out at the strip club with some buddies. I longed to be one of them. I ached for it as much as I once ached to tongue kiss and stroke the preposterously-blonde tresses of the Chautauqua county Tulip Queen in highschool. I watched them from lonely perches on campus. I saw them eating four by four in the cafeterias, laughing on their way to hockey games with orange paint on their cheeks and beer in their blood, glistening in the athletic center on the treadmills and weight benches, smiling and waving to other Normals, making dates with them, playing Normals' games--games like tennis, kickball, ultimate Frisbee. How I longed to wing Frisbees at them.

But I couldn't, because I was massively depressed.

So much so, that I was seeing and hearing things that were not real, and it was by the skin of my acid-wrought teeth and the flapping of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon that I was on course to pass my classes. I had stopped going to them in January, and for two months in succession, I lay in bed, drank whiskey and rose only to get more whiskey, pee or check out the knife drawer. I talked to the dead, cut my arms and legs with both sharp and dull implements, and pulled my body hair out one strand at a time. At some point during these months, I emptied ketchup packets obtained from the back of the knife drawer onto the wall next to my bed, though I do not recall doing it.

At the end of February, the dead lady who lived in my ceiling, Eunice, confronted me about my life's path. She told me to get in the shower and get on with it, to be exact. Eunice had been my friend through thick and thin during those months, so I keenly listened to her advice, and I set to scrubbing my bedroom wall, my hairless body--and also, in a grander sense--my spirit. I made amends with my angry professors, worked overtime to plow through a veritable mountain of extra credit work, and set up regular sessions with the campus therapist, Theresa. Sadly, this Eunice-sparked life scrubbing seemed to scrub Eunice right out of my mind, as I never heard from her again.

Theresa gave me enough sample packs of Paxil to see me through the summer at home with the folks in Jamestown. The Paxil came with the instruction: "Now, you should take one of these daily, but this isn't a cure-all. You need to see a counselor regularly. Each week, if you can manage." And just before she let me go for good, she reiterated: "Make sure you see a counselor immediately. Paxil takes about a month to kick in, but when it does, it makes you manic. If you're feeling suicidal, that's a dangerous situation."

And I had been feeling suicidal. Eunice had talked me away from the knife drawer an indeterminate amount of times throughout the winter--thankfully--and now this new kick I was on, this life-scrubbing, had led me to a drug that might send me right back to where I started, but with a lot more energy and resolve? I left Theresa feeling completely hopeless.

When the quarter petered out, I celebrated with no one. I had no friends. There were no Normals to go out drinking with, and they didn't drink whiskey anyway. I ripped up the worst grade sheet of my academic life and set in on fire in the back yard in a flaming pile of ketchup-crusted bedsheets, which burned hot in the spots still soaked with whiskey. I suppose it was an act symbolic of life change, but truth be told, nothing seemed worth the effort. There wasn't any "out." No pill I could take. I couldn't be washed clean.

I threw moldy balls of unwashed clothes into suitcases, haphazardly stacked them in the back seat of my car and drove home to Jamestown for the summer with a 64 ounce coffee between my thighs and a Cowboy Junkies tape in my '87 Jetta tapedeck, the one that emitted a burning smell while playing my favorite depressed songs. I had put off taking any Paxil until I arrived home. The little pills of it frightened me. I'd feel the packs in my fingers, willing myself to pop just one serving through the tinfoil bottom, but I couldn't manage to do it without thinking, Theresa, suicide, mania, suicide. I was sure I wouldn't live through the summer.

It's hard not to be surprised by the quirkiness of life, the way it eludes divining and takes us in all sorts of directions we hadn't imagined possible. Here, I thought since I had been sick, that it was my greatest desire to kill myself, and that Paxil would give me the gumption to do it. Instead, the Paxil brought forth an even greater wish for my future. One I hadn't thought so powerful while reorganizing the knife drawer.

Posted by The Bunny at 7:34 PM

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Posted by: marley at February 7, 2008 11:16 PM

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