“Why do you ask?”
“No reason. I feel fine. I just don’t, you know, want to look like there’s something wrong when there’s nothing wrong.”
“You seem fine,” I assure him.
“Good,” he says, shifting his body, getting into the right position with his pillow.
I want to say more, but don’t know what the words are supposed to be. I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable nighttime conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there’s no light in the room. I think of the rare jackpot nights when I ended the day at a sleepover or sharing the room with a sibling or a friend I genuinely liked. Those conversations could trick me into believing I could say anything, even though there was so much I was holding back. Eventually the night would take its hold, but it would always feel like I was fading to sleep rather than falling.
“Good night,” I say to James. But what I really feel is goodbye. I am leaving here, leaving this family. It’s only been two days, but that’s twice what I’m used to. It’s just a hint—the smallest hint—of what it would be like to wake up in the same place every morning.
I have to let that go.
Day 6005
Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over.
I know how wrong this is.
When I was a child, I didn’t understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn’t comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite—I’d be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn’t have access to the body’s emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology.
It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again. When I fall into the life of someone grappling, I have to mirror their strength, and sometimes surpass it, because I am less prepared.
I know the signs now. I know when to look for the pill bottles, when to let the body take its course. I have to keep reminding myself—this is not me. It is chemistry. It is biology. It is not who I am. It is not who any of them are.
Kelsea Cook’s mind is a dark place. Even before I open my eyes, I know this. Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other. My own thoughts try to assert themselves within this noise. The body responds by breaking into a sweat. I try to remain calm, but the body conspires against that, tries to drown me in distortion.
It is not usually this bad, first thing in the morning. If it’s this bad now, it must be pretty bad at all times.
Underneath the distortion is a desire for pain. I open my eyes and see the scars. Not just on the body, although those are there—the hairline fractures across the skin, the web you create to catch your own death. The scars are in the room as well, across the walls, along the floor. The person who lives here no longer cares about anything. Posters hang half-ripped. The mirror is cracked. Clothes lay abandoned. The shades are drawn. The books sit crooked on shelves, like rows of neglected teeth. At one point she must have broken open a pen and spun it around, because if you look closely, you can see small, dried drops of ink all over the walls and ceiling.
I access her history and am shocked to realize that she’s gotten this far without any notice, without any diagnosis. She has been left to her own devices, and those devices are broken.
It is five in the morning. I have woken up without any alarm. I have woken up because the thoughts are so loud, and none of them mean me well.
I struggle to get back to sleep, but the body won’t let me.
Two hours later, I get out of bed.
Depression has been likened to both a black cloud and a black dog. For someone like Kelsea, the black cloud is the right metaphor. She is surrounded by it, immersed within it, and there is no obvious way out. What she needs to do is try to contain it, get it into the form of the black dog. It will still follow her around wherever she goes; it will always be there. But at least it will be separate, and will follow her lead.
I stumble into the bathroom and start the shower.
“What are you doing?” a male voice calls. “Didn’t you shower last night?”
I don’t care. I need the sensation of water hitting my body. I need this prompt to start my day.
When I leave the bathroom, Kelsea’s father is in the hallway, glaring at me.
“Get dressed,” he says with a scowl. I hold my towel tighter around me.
Once I’ve got my clothes on, I gather my books for school. There’s a journal in Kelsea’s backpack, but I don’t have time to read it. I also don’t have time to check my email. Even though he’s in the other room, I can sense Kelsea’s father waiting.
It’s just the two of them. I access and find Kelsea’s lied to him in order to be driven to school—she said that the route had been redrawn, but really she doesn’t want to be trapped in the bus with other kids. It’s not that she’s bullied—she’s too busy bullying herself to notice. The problem is the confinement, the inability to leave.
Her father’s car isn’t much better, but at least there’s only one other person she has to deal with. Even when we’re moving, he doesn’t stop exuding impatience. I am always amazed by people who know something is wrong but still insist on ignoring it, as if that will somehow make it go away. They spare themselves the confrontation, but end up boiling in resentment anyway.
She needs your help, I want to say. But it’s not my place to say it, especially because I’m not sure he’ll react in the right way.
So Kelsea remains silent the whole drive. From her father’s response to this silence, I can imagine this is how their mornings always go.
Kelsea has email access on her phone, but I’m still worried about anything being traced, especially after my slip-up with Nathan.
So I walk the halls and go to classes, waiting for my chance. I have to push harder to get Kelsea through the day. Any time I let it, the weight of living creeps in and starts to drag her down. It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. People talk to her, but it feels like they are outside a house, talking through the walls. There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There’s a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens.
The only person who tries to engage me is Kelsea’s lab partner, Lena. We’re in physics class, and the assignment is to set up a pulley system. I’ve done this before, so it doesn’t strike me as hard. Lena, however, is surprised by Kelsea’s involvement. I realize I’ve overstepped—this is not the kind of thing Kelsea would get excited about. But Lena doesn’t let me back down. When I try to mumble apologies and step away, she insists I keep going.
“You’re good at this,” she says. “Much better than I am.”
While I arrange things, adjusting inclines and accounting for various forms of friction, Lena talks to me about a dance that’s coming up, asks me if I have any weekend plans, and tells me she might be going to DC with her parents. She seems hypersensitive to my reaction, and I’m guessing the conversation usually gets shut down long before this point. But I let her talk, let her voice counter the unspoken, insistent ones that emanate from my broken mind.
Then the period is over, and we go our separate ways. I don’t see her again for the rest of the day.
I spend lunchtime in the library at the computer. I don’t imagine anyone at lunch will miss me—but maybe that’s just what Kelsea would think. Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn’t entirely grounded in your own mind; I feel Kelsea’s mind isn’t letting her get anywhere near that point, and I wonder how much of my own thoughts are getting stuck there as well.
Logging into my own email is a nice jolt to remind me that I am in fact me, not Kelsea. Even better, there is word from Rhiannon—the sight of which cheers me up, until I read what the email says.
A,
So, who are you today?
What a strange question to ask. But I guess it makes sense. If any of this makes sense.
Yesterday was a hard day. Justin’s grandmother is sick, but instead of admitting he’s upset about it, he just lashes out at the world more. I’m trying to help him, but it’s hard.
I don’t know if you want to hear this or not. I know how you feel about Justin. If you want me to keep that part of my life hidden from you, I can. But I don’t think that’s what you want.
Tell me how your day is going.
Rhiannon
I reply and tell her a little about what Kelsea is up against. Then I end with this:
I want you to be honest with me. Even if it hurts. Although I would prefer for it not to hurt.
Love,
A
Next, I switch accounts and find a reply from Nathan.
I know I haven’t made a mistake. I know what you are. And I will find out who you are. The reverend says he is working on that.
You want me to doubt myself. But I am not the only one. You will see.
Confess now, before we find you.
I stare at the screen for a minute, trying to reconcile the tone of this email with the Nathan I knew for a day. It feels like two very different people. I wonder if it’s possible that someone else has taken over Nathan’s account. I wonder who “the reverend” is.
The bell rings, marking the end of the lunch period. I return to class and the black cloud takes hold. I find it hard to concentrate on what’s being said. I find it hard to see how any of this is important. Nothing I’m being taught here will make life less painful. None of the people in this room will make life less painful. I attack my cuticles with merciless precision. It is the only sensation that feels genuine.
Kelsea’s father is not going to pick her up after school; he’s still at work. Instead, she walks home, in order to avoid the bus. I am tempted to break this pattern, but it’s been so long since she’s ridden the bus that she has no memory of which bus is hers. So I start to walk.
Again, I find myself wishing for the mundane possibility of calling Rhiannon on the phone, for filling the next empty hour with the sound of her voice.
But instead, all I am left with is Kelsea and her damaged perceptions. The walk home is a steep one, and I wonder if it’s yet another way she punishes herself. After about a half hour, with another half hour in front of me, I decide to stop at a playground I’m about to pass. The parents there give me wary looks because I am not a parent or a little kid, so I steer clear of the jungle gym, the swings, and the sandbox, and end up on the outer ring, on a seesaw that looks like it’s been banished from everything else for bad behavior.
There’s homework I could do, but Kelsea’s journal calls out to me instead. I’m a little afraid of what I’ll find inside, but mostly I’m curious. If I can’t access the things she’s felt, I will at least be able to read a partial transcript.
It’s not a journal in the traditional sense. That becomes apparent after a page or two. There are no musings about boys or girls. There are no revisited scenes of discord with her father or her teachers. There are no secrets shared or injustices vented.
Instead, there are ways to kill yourself, listed with extraordinary detail.
Knives to the heart. Knives to the arm. Belts around the neck. Plastic bags. Hard falls. Death by burning. All of them methodically researched. Examples given. Illustrations provided—rough illustrations where the test case is clearly Kelsea. Self-portraits of her own demise.