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

I think that he loves me. I know that he loves me. Each day bleeds to night, gives way to day, and it happens over and over again and I don’t know when I’ll see him again.

I dream of the day he means nothing to me, means less, when every single waking moment isn’t owned, claimed by him. He squats inside my chest and I hate him and love him and want to cough him up out of my mouth and spit him into the air but he won’t budge. I imagine what he’s doing every minute of every day. I dream of him at night; he stalks my dreams; some nights he tells me it’s OK, others he tells me it’ll never be OK and I wake up gripping the sheets in my tight fists and I hate him more than ever. I want to kill him.

Saturdays, I pace Sixth Avenue. I try to keep in a straight line by putting food in my mouth and my feet on concrete but my mind flies away, out of my reach, across the sea and land, like a watchful bird, as he lies with the one he’s with. He says he loves her; she says it back. It’s no longer irrelevant.

I’ll resign, I’ll come home, we can be together, I plead from across the sea.

No, he says. You can’t do that.

I can’t do that. No.

I carry him on my back, across my thighs, around my neck. The weight is suffocating me. I can’t breathe.

Being back in the city, the plague of before is never far away. I’ve been broken afresh, and in the seconds I can’t control my thoughts, I feel apart from myself in a whole new way. My mind sitting so far away from my body. The world moving around me as I stand perfectly still, without comprehension. The wound is fresh, the dampness of new blood feels known, dangerous. Once again, within weeks, I’m burying myself in booze. The familiar clink and slosh comfort me while it chokes me.

Then, one night, I almost get arrested. I’ve been somewhere in the city, drinking alone. I flag a yellow taxi, climb in, share my apartment’s cross streets before my head is lolling against the back seat as we speed home. I’m woken by the cab driver knocking on the plastic partition, announcing we’re there and I need to pay. I scrabble around in the bottom of my bag: nothing. I try again. My purse is empty and there’s no card – just loose change in there. I start to panic.

‘I don’t have my card,’ I say.

‘You have to pay,’ he replies.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know where it is.’

He shakes his head. ‘If you don’t pay I’ll call the police.’

I panic, the panic of a drunk immigrant who knows they can be deported just for being arrested.

‘Please don’t,’ I say and start to cry.

He locks the doors and calls the police. Several minutes later, there’s a flash of police lights and a firm knock on the window.

‘Miss, why won’t you pay the driver? We’ll have to arrest you if you don’t.’

I continue to cry, my hand searching through my bag as they start to radio it in. Suddenly, it’s there at the end of my fingers: the card that I was too hammered to find the other fifteen times I’d looked. The police keep their eyes on me while I pay, laughing.

‘Miss, are you drunk?’ they ask.

‘No, sorry, I’m just tired,’ I say, continuing to laugh while heavily tipping the driver so he’ll lay off. The police finally let me out and I try to not so obviously weave through the West Village as they look at my retreating back.

While at night I battle with myself in the shadows, I’m reconciled on the outside during the day: the magazine has never been better, everyone agrees. What a great success. I’m finally enough.

The gap between these two halves of me grows. I reach upwards, outwards, push harder, straining, as the crack beneath me widens. I exist in the gap and it’s wonderful. I sit in absence, in complete isolation and I’m made steady, almost completely frozen by the singularity of it. This, I can understand. Here, I think, I can be. Here, I am nothing real. I don’t feel, and when I do, I stamp the last orangey embers out under my boot.

I go instead, most nights, to the place where you pay to feel for three minutes. I can’t remember when and how it first seemed like a sensible avenue for treating my madness. It does, after all, go hand in hand with my drinking, like a pair of intimate sisters, fingers slipped into a warm, soft palm after the correct number of drinks (four, by the way).

My apartment in the East Village is just three blocks from a karaoke bar, which is itself another five or six from another karaoke bar and so on and so on. There are so many karaoke bars in New York that you could navigate the city by the bright, flashing, sticky neon squares of abandon that light your path alone.

My favourite bar, the one that I became a weekly, twice-weekly, thrice-weekly visitor to is on St Mark’s, up brownstone steps and inside high-ceilinged rooms. On the odd occasion I manage to convince someone to come with me, but more often than not, I go alone.

The staff know me by now, pitying looks in their eyes. The sad, drunk girl back again. I always sing the same songs: ‘You Oughta Know’ by Alanis Morissette; ‘It’s All Coming Back To Me Now’ by Celine Dion. Melodramatic songs of loss, regret, rage, betrayal. I always play the same trick: slipping the unamused bartender a twenty-dollar bill with each song request, barely registering that I was dropping, in total, about a hundred bucks per night. Or that it really seemed to make no difference to when my song was played. Still, I folded the