Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

later, carrying some with me home, allowing others to fall away, never ever to be claimed. And at some point in the night, the tape simply, suddenly, runs out.

More and more, I squat in the room with no windows and no light that makes me want to sink and disappear inside its walls. Some days I disassociate completely – I can see the world through the glass dome that I’m suffocating inside, but I can’t touch it, feel it, taste it, suck it into my lungs. When I’ve drifted so far away from myself, I feel that my mind is lost forever, that I’ll never make it back to my body. That the loose tie holding it tight has snapped and can never be mended. Those are the worst moments of all, the moments when I know my only option is through the window, my body splattering on the pavement.

A friend mentions Xanax to me: how it soothes, blunts the edges; how everyone takes it. I go to the doctor and before I’ve even half-finished my story of half-truths (‘I feel kinda anxious, I suppose. No big deal, but something to help would be great!’), he is writing a script that says yes, I too can have Xanax. I slip the tiny pink pill, and then a second, onto my tongue. I wait. Twenty minutes later, I feel a soft wave wash over me. Thirty minutes after that, I’m not worrying about anyone, anything. I lie on the bed and watch the outline of the trees outside dance across the ceiling and down the walls. I feel … OK. A revolutionary state.

I’m kept moving from point to point by my friends who come to visit, each one sustaining me until the next. Dave is coming to town for the US release of his book. I’ve offered to let him stay with me, but the reality of what that looks like looms large. I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping the reality of my New York life from everyone at home so far. But however good an act I put on, he’d see the reality. Of me, of where I live. The huge gap between what I am and what I claim to be. He is due to step right slap bang into the middle of it, looking at me in surprise as the water rises past his knees.

He’s sleeping on my sofa – brown, dusty – facing the old grey television, dark kitchen to his left, my bed and the only sources of light to his right. I can tell when he arrives that this isn’t what he expects, what anyone expects. I make a joke about the lack of windows, the burnt orange walls that always make it look like it’s being frozen in time while being burned down from the inside out.

Night one: I join him in the bar where he’s reading an excerpt from his book. I make myself a promise: two drinks, no more. I’ll stay sober; I’ll stay sane, no matter what. I know no one at the bar, bury my head in my phone, back against the wall. Dave steps up to read under two white, bright lights – charming, funny, already so much more at home in my town within twenty-four hours than I am. Outside the window, they’re projecting his face reading, the slight lisp and his British song captivating the whole room of cool, hot, also charming, also funny locals. Some are wearing hats. There’s a photographer kneeling just metres away from his knees, capturing this moment. His face hovers twenty feet to my left out of the window. I stay long enough to be polite, until he’s finished, then abandon my second drink with half a finger left in the glass and leave. In the cab, I cry. Partly from joy and pride for him. Partly because the thick loneliness has doubled in size. He’s been embraced by the city as I stand on the outside, palms against the glass.

The second night: his launch party. Drinks at an apartment in Chelsea owned by another author from his publisher. I know that this will be harder. The opportunities to stand alone, fade into the shadows on the walls, are fewer. I’m buzzed in and stand in the stairwell, paralysed with anxiety, before heading up to the front door. I take two Xanax and then decide to take a third to be on the safe side. The last one tastes bitter as it gets stuck under my tongue.

The fellow author opens the door and I recognise him. He’s a local in the bar downstairs, the bar that I go to a lot, alone. I mentally scan, as quickly as possible, the Rolodex of evenings flashing through my mind. What has he seen? What have I done? A brief flash of something – recognition, horror, confusion, Christ knows – flashes across his face, a brief look up and down, before he straightens it out, the impeccable host, and welcomes me inside, with the half sweep of a hand (it was a Manhattan apartment, after all).

Inside, over and around him, there are floating heads, perfectly round. The room is about a third full of small people, all dressed in black and brown, a statistically impossible amount in glasses. They’re talking in three tiny, tight pockets, cradling small drinks on white paper napkins that are perfectly square. I look from one to the other, feeling naked.

I spot Dave with relief.

‘Terri’s come as a cartoon character,’ he says. The group pauses. One laughs, one swallows drily, one looks away, another coughs.

I laugh – ‘You know me!’ – and smooth down my creased dress that I haven’t had time to iron. I can see how I look, what they must see. My broken hair, pinned high and tight. Scarlet slash of a mouth. Tight reproduction 1950s wiggle dress – blue with white trim. Cherry-red stilettos are cutting the feet that curl up inside them.

I walk to