I Never Learned How to Be Alive
Whenever I sleep near an open window, I wake up to street noises that sound like the sky ripping itself out. This is it. I’m going to die. It’s a bomb, a nuclear holocaust, the sun finally consuming our planet, an asteroid about to hit earth. I can’t move: so this is how it’s happening, I’m okay with that. And only after I’m okay with it do I realize that the earth isn’t dying — it’s just a garbage truck passing by, amplified by my sleeping senses to the unnatural end of me.
Six weeks before I was supposed to start graduate school at UCLA I was taken to the emergency room for suicidal ideation. I was asked to list every self-destructive and suicidal urge I had in the past twelve months; I told them. They told me I was going to be put in a psych ward for a few days. I put on my most together voice. Please, please, please. They let me go.
My therapist tells me that maybe there is a hole at the heart of me, where your core is supposed to be. That maybe I never taught myself how to be alive.
I stand staring at my thirteen-year-old self in the mirror above a pub, searching until I’ve cried my eyes from brown to green. Irises shrinking and expanding, I’ve just been screamed at for being too dramatic, for talking too much about the things I like, for being who I am, for breathing human air. I stoop my shoulders and hollow out my chest until my collarbones stick out in the mirror. I stop thinking and start imagining my life isn’t real, that I’m in a movie and this is somehow the pivotal moment where I stop feeling. I wonder if in the movie I should throw myself out of the frosted window onto the ground below. I wonder what sound my flesh hitting the ground would make; what my funeral would be like. I think, in the movie, I should show them.
My mother and I are speeding along the GW Parkway. I have whooping cough and haven’t been able to get out of bed for almost a month. My mother puts on Sitting by Cat Stevens. “He wrote this when he thought he was going to die of pneumonia,” my mom says. “I’m on my way, I know I am,” Cat Stevens says. A few weeks later my mom gets a call from my school informing her that I’ve talked about killing myself.
At the My Bloody Valentine concert, my boyfriend and I prepare ourselves for a wall of noise. It hits us, hard, crackling, embattled. My bones shake and my joints warp. I’m not sure if I can feel myself breathing. I smile. I am empty, empty, empty.
Later, I tell my boyfriend I’d like to live in that noise. In the same month, I disable a safety razor and slash my arm several times because I think that they will finally get it.
I’m being impulsive. I’m putting everything good in my life into a pile, pouring gasoline on it, and setting it on fire. I stand back and watch everything I’ve worked on burn. And I fucking love it.
I’m a video game character that has leveled up and has on rocket boosters. I’m skirting along the clouds, invincible, so far beyond the grasp of the rest of you that it makes me laugh to think about normality. I hear you; I hear you talking about your day, about your life — dispassionately. I don’t understand how you can live that way, and if I could, I’m not sure I’d want to.
My therapist asks me why I still feel like hurting myself. I tell her no matter how much better I get, I still can’t stop feeling so much. She tells me that I’ll always feel more than most people do, that emotions aren’t bad, that no one said change was easy.
I listen to my iPhone on the loudest setting possible and mouth the words:
I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care.
In Angeles National Forest, I make myself small. I roll into a ball and hope that I become smaller than a grain of sand. Looking up, I am comforted that the mountains and trees are so much bigger than I am. I breathe in the knowledge that my existence is so infinitesimally small in the scale of time for the mountains that I almost don’t matter, and that makes me happier than anything in a long time.
In the darkness, there is me. I am scared of the dead and I’m scared of what they might be telling me. I wonder if it’s possible to rip open my skin and get down and find out where that hole is supposed to be, and stuff it with something good. And maybe then I’ll be something whole and better.
I want to scream I’m Sorry to every person I’ve ever met and then crawl into that deadening noise halfway between waking and sleeping and feel the sky fall on me like a blanket. But people tell me Don’t Say You’re Sorry, Just Don’t Do It Again, and so I won’t.
I’ll just tell them I’m learning, I’m learning, I’m learning.
Paige Elizabeth Gresty is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Thought Catalog, Housefire, Affectionate, Everyday Genius, and Internet Poetry. She is a co-editor of Have U Seen My Whale. She can be found at http://belishabeacons.tumblr.com.
