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

my hand into a fist; bubbles peek and pop through the gap where my knuckles join. It begins to creep up on me. Somehow, perhaps surprisingly, the thought of dying slowly, painfully, while sobering up terrifies me more than anything else at that moment – including surviving – and I heave, bend, baulk and spit again. My ankles shake and I struggle to stay standing without the wall to hold me.

Two days earlier, my eyes had opened for the first time to fists full of bottles. But that time, they had kept their contents. By my best guess, my suicidal bent was foiled by a mixture of child-protection caps and unconsciousness. Once I’d realised what I’d almost done, I simply swallowed an extra morning Xanax and put the Prozac and mood stabilisers back on my bedside table where I’d taken them from the night before.

Waking clutching pill bottles like flares wasn’t the first sign that something was, is, wrong. This low, when it came several weeks ago, had been quick and sticky. But that day, like every day, I’d climbed into my dusty pink shower and stood with my body under the water until the skin over it turned scarlet. At pains, as usual, to stand with my hair kept out, to avoid the panic that overwhelmed me when water went over my head, in my eyes, filled my mouth. Then I patted myself with a towel briefly, pulled clothes from the floor over my damp arms and legs, poured drops into my eyeballs, painted my face bright, pinned my hair up higher and higher, tighter and tighter, and walked out of the door with as straight a back as I could manage. I walked, I smiled, I ate, I worked, I breathed in, I breathed out, I drank, I blacked out. Again, again, again, again, again.

The weeks before this one were just days and nights of sharp, paralysing fragments of pain. Memories incomplete and scattered in different corners of my brain, some beyond recovery. Most nights were missing, as were some days. The minutes and hours before a blackout and the minutes and hours when emerging from one spent googling methods of suicide:

‘Painless suicide’

‘Hanging yourself + how to’

‘Sleeping pills + number to die’

‘How to make a noose’

‘Slit wrists + how deep + death’

‘Instant death + hanging + height’

The previous Sunday, I’d blinked awake to find myself at the intersection of a street in the West Village, the green man walking flashing in my eyeline. My feet took me to the sidewalk outside a church, its roof rising up into the deepest blue sky. A priest on the steps, white robes glowing and swaying, beckoning me in. I’d read somewhere that priests could spot those truly in trouble, in real mortal danger, their souls set to be lost without a great, selfless intervention. Even in a crowd of thousands, their pain and peril marks them out, the swarm of black that shifts over their shape as they move. I walked towards him slowly, up the steps. He looked right through me as I passed, not noticing the screams bouncing around inside my mind.

Was I really here?

Could he see me?

Could he see the danger?

The ledge I was on?

Please see me.

Help me.

Please.

Father.

Inside, people swayed and sang, hands held aloft, trying to touch God and bring Him into them. I gripped the seat in front, my hands strangling wood. I sobbed, choked, offered up something like a prayer, or at least a plea, to whoever could hear me. I would do anything. I would become His servant. I would forsake everything if He would help me, if someone, anyone, would help me.

I stared desperately, helplessly, at the priest, as he showered us with a sermon in the shadow of a crucifix. He didn’t look at me once. The hell burned through me and made me disappear, here, in His house. I would never be saved.

Now, on this Saturday morning, my options are even more limited than they were that day. Driven by cold fear, I decide that I have no choice but to go to the emergency room. I throw on the nearest clothes I find on the floor, straighten up my hair, swill water around in my mouth and head out of the apartment. I walk to the corner two streets away and hail a yellow taxi with hands covered in dried spit. We speed along and I press my hands against the cab window, straining towards the bright, beautiful sunshine-filled sky.

‘Why did you do that?’ the admissions nurse in the ER demands as I stand by her desk, crying, heaving. I shake my head, splattering her paperwork with tears as I do. She stares, unmoved. She’s the first of several people to ask me the same obvious, yet impossible question when I say I believe I have taken two bottles of pills. She glances down at the wet patches on the paper in front of her and looks away again.

‘I need your insurance card,’ she says flatly. I slide it over the desk and she takes a photograph with a camera I can’t look directly at.

I’m taken through to the emergency room, not realising that I am voluntarily walking into a room I wouldn’t be able to walk out of again. ‘Why did you do that?’ asks the second nurse. It becomes more of a complaint, an exasperation, than a question. I shake my head, cry again. I’m given a hospital gown to change into and socks.

The air is tight and fat and hot as a man screams complaints I can’t understand from behind a half-drawn curtain. A single shoe lies on the floor next to another man, shirtless, in bloodied jeans, handcuffed to the bed, spitting. A prison officer sits and keeps watch on a prisoner being treated in the hospital from a plastic chair nearby. Metal clanks against metal as the prisoner hollers and thrashes and kicks. I put my hands over my ears to quieten the screaming, the