Dawn
is a pulsing light behind the pale suburban homes.
The
woman sits on her bed, her comforter and sheets in knots behind her, flotsam
from the night’s shipwreck of hours. Darkness seeps out of them as sweats seeps
out of her. As if after a broken fever, her shirt clings to her like a double
skin but her body is cool in the lightening gloom.
She
blinks and stares at a sky she has never seen before. Not with these eyes which
see light instead of shadows and color, so much color!
“How
long?” She whispers. How long has she been swimming underwater, with only the
shallowest of breaths to keep her going? Ages. Millennia.
“Depression
robs a person of everything,” her mother said weeks before. “This is not you. I
know that. Do you?”
And
she hadn’t, not until this morning. It’d been so long since she’d felt anything
but coiling darkness inside her that she’d forgotten what just breathing felt
like.
The
room smells of a struggle and abandoned sleep, but she has never smelled
anything like it before. It’s like everything around her has bloomed; the
lavender liquid with which she washes her sheets pushing through the dough-like
scent of sweat; the glass of water she hasn’t touched that smells of dust; even
the paint chipping off the walls. All of it surrounds her, strong enough to
make her press her hands to her nose.
Tears
sting the patches of skin on her face she’s rubbed raw throughout the endless
night. “Ouch,” she moans and then snorts with a swallowed chuckle. She can feel
her skin again and it hurts, but it’s the kind of hurting that can heal. Her
whole body, her mind, feels like a blister, just waiting to be drained of water
and puss.
The
light keeps growing, pushing against her room’s darkness. It reveals the book
she’s hasn’t opened in weeks and the bottle on her bedside table. It’s tipped
over and empty.
Pills
lay scattered on the carpet like powdery white landmines which she cracks into
pieces as she gets off the bed and walks to the window. She doesn’t feel them
dissolve under her feet, each one of those pills she counted over and over
again throughout the night, making sure they were enough.
Nothing
miraculous had happened. There had been no voice from above or sign that she
should stop. She could have taken them times over and no one would have known. It’d
just been a sound. One tiny, pinpoint of noise she’d balanced on the entire
night.
The
shower head dripping onto the tiles in the bathroom, the sound echoing through
the open bathroom door. The stupid shower head she’d meant to have called
someone about for months now, but had never found the push to look for a
number, to pick up her phone, to make the call.
“That’s
going to be the last thing I hear,” she said and felt…something. The beginnings
of the rage that would launch her to scratch the walls with her bare nails, to
rub her face enough that days later the marks would still be intact.
Drop
by drop, rage built until she couldn’t sit anymore. She counted the pills
again, to steady herself, but each one matched a drop and her teeth grit
together. Her heart pounded harder than it had in months or years or centuries
and she pressed her heels against her chest, trying to make it stop. Just stop!
The
drops counted her backwards, like a hypnotist’s voice, and she saw the wasted
hours in this room, on this same bed, the time spent keeping track of how much
time she’d lost. Over and over and over. And she was sick of it. Sick of
herself like this.
That
was when she’d lunged out of bed, tipping the bottle and spilling the pills.
She grabbed the curtains that hadn’t been opened in days and ripped them off
the window, sending the beam that held them up crashing to the floor. With a
scream, she grabbed on to the very walls and dragged her nails down, peeling
the old paint in strips.
It
continued for hours, the ripping and tearing, the knotting of bed-sheets. She
thinks, now, that she hadn’t thought even once to head into the bathroom and
yank that shower head off the wall. Instead, she’d massacred her room until her
hands swelled.
And
here she is, now, staring at the growing light as if she’s never seen it
before. She hasn’t, not really.
After
a plunge in such dark waters as the ones she’s been swimming in, light is never
the same.
Nothing
ever is.
She
watches the light.
And
hears the drops falling behind her.
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