In a comment from Darcy in the previous post, I was asked if I had written of my recent adventures, as I said I would.

Yes, Darcy, I’ve written some. But it’s exceptionally painful, and sometimes I can only work on it a couple of hours a week. I need to keep walking away.

But here’s a very brief excerpt to whet your appetite:

Being as blind as I was – no glasses in Suicide Watch; you’ll poke your eye out! – I hadn’t seen my bed very clearly from where I was standing during the costume change. When I shuffled over to it, I realized it wasn’t a bed at all, but a metal tray built into a concrete bench. On the metal tray was a ¼” quilted “mattress” that wasn’t quite as long as my body, and folded at the bottom was an actual moving blanket.

Sitting down, I realized that although the thickness of my dress would prevent me twisting it up to hang myself with, its very weight meant that movement caused choking. It rode up in the front when I sat down, constricting my throat. Sweet irony.

I got up. Paced. Sat down again. I was exhausted, but didn’t foresee any sleep on my horizon. In addition to plain old fear, there was a roar of noise in my head. My thoughts were everywhere all at once. Andy, my impending homelessness, my friendship with Meredith – all the thoughts were coming at once. If only I had pen and paper, I could untangle some of these thoughts. I could make my head a little less crowded, and maybe get some sleep.

Pacing, I began to cry. My mind and body had had enough. I needed succor and sleep, and neither would be forthcoming. I needed Andy, and that was totally out of the question, probably forever. Over and over I whispered “I’m sorry,” as if enough of them would spin back the clock and make Andy un-hate me. “I’m sorry.”

Next to the stainless steel toilet was a nook in the wall that held folded sheets of toilet paper. I blew my nose, and the thin paper gave way, smearing my already filthy hands with snot. I took another tissue and wiped my fingers off.

But what was I sorry for? Well, that my husband had thought me so ill and reprehensible. Sorry that I had left him in 2007. Sorry that he’d rejected me when I returned in 2008. Sorry that I’d slept around. Sorry that I was crazy – crazy enough to have landed myself in the hospital a month earlier, on my birthday, with an overdose. Sorry that I always felt unloved, even when he loved me. Sorry that I pushed too hard and burned him out. Sorry that I wasn’t good enough for him – ever. I’d known that since the beginning. Sorry that we’d fought so much, and that I wanted to excise my pain by destroying our past, because he insisted we didn’t have a future.

Sorry that I was so useless to him. Since he’d banished me the year before, I’d been trying so hard to build my freelance writing business, but Andy didn’t feel that was real work. He said I needed to be making more money, that he couldn’t keep footing the bills. I reminded him that he wasn’t paying all the bills by himself – he was taking every penny I earned and putting it in his bank account. He called me a mooch, living off his welfare. He called me ugly, lazy, useless - I was sorry for being all these things.

It would be months before I would realize that I was apologizing for things I couldn’t control, like Andy’s feelings and opinions. It would take many sessions with therapists and social workers to realize what part of our destruction I was responsible for, and what part I was not.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.