finding rest: part one

Sometimes it’s easy to forget the mountains all around. I’m in the car with Josie after dropping Amelia at school. What I can see of her when I find the right spot in the rear rear view mirror is blond curls and cereal bar extras stuck around her month. Closed eyes, head slumped into the side of her car seat. What I can see outside is gray solid to the horizon, the sky and the pavement, until they merge. After weeks of opaque skies the mountains just stop being there.

Amelia is at preschool for a couple hours. I am running errands with Josie. Where though? I can’t remember where I am going, or why. The rain doesn’t look real. Nothing does. My body can’t hold the weight of itself. Feels like it can’t maintain the weight of anything. Won’t produce anything but water and salt. A deluge. I stop at the light, shifting down to neutral and admiring the way my hand trembles as it lifts from the stick. There is a white mini-van in front of me, the light, then space. All the empty space ahead and I am terrified. Pull the other hand from the steering wheel to compare, the pair shake in unison. All week it’s been this way with the tears and tremors. A drug I haven’t taken and can’t come down from. I forget things.

I know something now. I need help. Such a simple sentence, and the hardest thing to say. I need rest and I need help and if I don’t find both soon, I will find them in a hospital bed. It’s not what I say. Instead, it’s hard but fine. I’m doing fine, busy but O.K. is how I tell it. I lie. And, I need help. Three words, so simple. So impossible. Anything but that. It comes in waves, this sanity tide, and recedes to negatives in the night. Those middle of the night knowings. It’s coming. It’s coming.

I don’t know how I old I was when I understood I’d go crazy one day. Small. For sure they would haul me to the Funny Farm and lock me there forever. Didn’t know what that meant, crazy. Didn’t know how it rises up from the body, overtaking the mind. A slow root rot invisible in the earth until the tree begins to topple. And is it too late then? Can any amount of nutrients right it?

I’m five or six-years-old cowered in the tiled shower in the bathroom that connects my parents’ bedroom to mine. My sister laughs above the sirens outside, “They’re coming to get you. They’re coming to take you away … Haha. Hoho. Hehe … They’re coming to take you away.”

She’s 13 or 14 and I know she’s teasing, trying to scare me the way she does in the dark. Leans her head over the top bunk above me, cackling: “I’ll get you my pretty. And your little dog too.” Cackling until I scream.

I pull the glass door closed, make myself tiny in the corner. Hold my face to the cool tiles until the sirens pass. She is right. She thinks she’s teasing. She’s right. I know what crazy is. It surges from my center - an energy I can’t hold, building until I scream at nothing. Only crazy people scream for no reason.


Sometimes it’s like watching. Not me. Watching someone else fall apart, but feeling it, too. It’s fascinating. Visceral. Who knew that falling apart comes as much from the body as it does the brain? Nervous breakdown. Breakdown of the nervous system. Duh!. Nerves. It’s a physical thing, these trembles.

Breakdown. Overwhelmed until I can’t do anything. Can’t write a check. Can’t check my messages. Can’t make a phone call. All this stuff that always needs doing and I can’t. So I don’t. And it doesn’t get done, keeps growing and piling. I lay in bed feeling my nerve endings unwrap one by one. I want to stop it and I don’t. I’m terrified and comforted all at once. When this melt comes I will have rest. I will have help.

to be continued