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

I went to bed, on my side table, and now it’s gone. The landlady denies all knowledge of its whereabouts or the circumstances in which it went missing. I go to work with a flat, small, naked head. I feel vulnerable and like everyone now sees who I really am. Someone says how young I look. Someone else tells me I’m pretty now. I feel bereft. Exposed. Like now, somehow, they can see my cuts, congealed blood, the pills that rattle around in the empty space just below.

Less than a week later, I arrive home, to the room that’s really a box, and there, proudly, defiantly, in the centre of my bed is my weave. I look down the hallway: there’s no sign of the landlady. I look around for clues. And there under the bed is a pair of purple knickers I don’t recognise, that aren’t mine.

The hot madness inside our apartment in the sky continues to build. I wake up one morning with tiny red bites on my body. I scratch my body, the bones that have made an appearance. ‘I think the apartment has bed bugs,’ I say to the landlady.

She reacts furiously: ‘You must have brought them in!’

I struggle to remember why I’m here. I feel like I’m serving time, but I’m not sure for what. I work as hard, harder, than I’ve ever done, but my job leaves me feeling exhausted, emptier still. The women I meet smile and slip their hands into mine, the corners of their mouths never moving to meet their ears. The conversation stops when I enter a room. Words are said quickly, with sharp edges that cut, when I’m out of rooms. The person I’ve come here to be remains further away than ever before. I used to be able to see the outline of her, just ahead, but she’s long gone now and I walk alone.

I’ve lived with loneliness before. I was a lonely child, a lonely teenager, a lonely adult. I have spent the majority of my life alone, mute, hiding. It’s so soft and quick off the tongue, so easy to claim, romantic, even. But it becomes clear in this city that I’ve never experienced true loneliness before, not the kind that you wear like a cloak of invisibility. Loneliness layered upon loneliness until you wonder if you are, in fact, not just invisible, but dead already. Your existence snuffed out, suffocated.

I walk down Eighth Avenue and I believe, right down to my toes, that I can’t be seen by a single person around me. The end result of the disappearing act I started a few months before. Now I’m in the air. In the sewers. In the spit on the sidewalk. Everywhere but in my own body.

When I was a kid I thought that the world was watching me – that human existence was me, and everyone else was just watching me. That the world started the minute I walked into a room, and stopped the minute I walked out. That I could communicate with the world through the mirror. That when I spoke into it, they listened, they saw. Now I’m not sure if I’d ever existed. That me, Terri, my consciousness, is a figment of someone else’s imagination – maybe my own, if that is even possible. I try to talk to strangers just to check I’m there, here.

‘Hello?’ I ask the woman in a trench coat hurrying down Broadway on a Saturday afternoon.

‘Excuse me?’ to the man jumping into the cab I’ve hailed.

Neither so much as flinch in my direction.

I feel my identity, my sense of being crumbling. Who am I? Where am I? What am I? Am I? Maybe company will bring me back to life. I crave it: the look of recognition, familiarity in another’s eyes. The fingers attached to the man in the bodega graze mine when he hands me my change after I buy cigarettes one night. The hairs on my arms stand to attention as 350 volts flood through my body. It’s the first time I’ve been touched in months. I miss it so much. I miss feeling something, anything so much.

The drinking, the pill-popping continues. One night after a party at a friend’s apartment, I take a handful of sleeping pills, half a handful more than usual. I feel myself drifting off, on the warmest, softest wave, and as it laps at my eyelids I think this may actually be it. It’s not the first time I’ve felt this in recent months, but it is the first time I’ve so joyfully welcomed it. The relief as I sink further and further into the thick blanket, the arms of someone I love. I’m woken a day later, when my friend stops by to check I’m OK, still breathing, when I don’t respond to his messages.

The cycle goes on, the darkness chokes, even in this place in the sky, in the light. Eighteen months after I left London, I decide it’s time to go home. If I don’t, something bad, something worse is going to happen to me. And it won’t feel like that when it comes; it will feel good, like something better. It will feel like sweet, sweet escape. I quit with no job, for the first time in my career. For the first time, I choose life.

CHAPTER 20

I’m home, back in London. Within days, he appears, seemingly out of nowhere. But from the first half-moment, the first apparition, I know he’s been there all along, moving as I move, forever just out of my eyeline. He’s the one who was meant to find me, who I was going to come together in the hands, under the eyes, of.

He has a partner. I know this without asking or without him telling. I find it strangely, shockingly irrelevant. My usual concrete moral core barely flinches at my transgression: the joining of our bodies, his mind folding into mine.

His partner has nothing to do