25 Fragments
TSR NONFICTION PRIZE WINNER
At nineteen, I’ve spent my entire life trying to convince people I’m nothing like my mother. I’ve dropped out of college after only two years, I’m mentally unstable, and I’ve recently moved back into her house. I have two jobs. The first: manager of a run-down private pool. I sit with the guards at a picnic table while one exceptionally dorky kid flops around the shallow end. We take turns discussing what we think would be the best way to die. One of the guards says in your sleep. Another says prescription overdose. I tell them there’s no good way to die. No matter what those listicles say, it will be painful. I tell them everything is painful. We sit in silence and watch the kid tangle a noodle around his limbs in an attempt to keep himself above the water.
I watch a made-for-TV movie with my mother while snowed-in at our house in rural West Virginia. On the screen, an actor pretends to slit her wrist with a steak knife. I squirm when the blade makes contact with the skin. I tell my mother that if I were going to kill myself, I’d do it the right way: a bullet to the head—quick and dirty. She tells me that to be sure you die, you have to put the barrel of the gun in your mouth and point it up toward your brain, toward God. I’m eight.
While working on my MFA thesis after swallowing 20 mgs of Prozac for the day, I see a young, prominent writer tweet that they don’t “do psychopharm” because it harms their writing process. I try to pretend their viewpoint doesn’t matter, that it’s uncommon among people with real artistic influence, that it won’t cause someone to think twice before starting or continuing to take prescribed medication that could save their life. But I can’t pretend. I’ve never known how to not take things so personally.
When I’m four, I find a stray cat outside the townhouse where my mother and I are living. I try to give it milk, like they do in cartoons. It gashes me on the shin with its claws. I have to get stitches. In a blind rage, my grandmother calls animal patrol and they take the cat away. I wave as the van leaves my street. I assume they put the cat down—no one wants something around that doesn’t know how to love right. I have a permanent scar. Sometimes the body won’t let you forget.
I leave my dorm and take a bus through the night so I can hold my grandfather, who has been more like a father to me, as he lies dying in a hospital room. My mother cries next to me. My grandfather grips and releases my hand as though he’s convulsing. I tell him I love him and he dies. The doctors tell us it was painless. But I was there. I felt a soul escape from a body. It didn’t look or feel painless to me.
I’m bullied because of my voice for the first time. A kid across the lunch table calls me gay. My elementary school classmates debate whether I am or am not. This is also the first time I imagine my skin touching anyone else’s skin. I hate the thought of it. This leads to the first time I don’t eat for an extended period. Specifically, I avoid food for three days in an attempt to fake sickness so my mother will let me skip school. My mother makes me go anyway. The truth: I’d stay home for the rest of my life if she’d let me.
My second summer job: sales associate at a college bookstore. The manager is a former military woman. She says she doesn’t like my attitude. But what she really means is she doesn’t like my unmedicated and undiagnosed borderline personality, manic-depressive, and anorexia-nervosa disorders. She doesn’t want me around the customers, so she assigns me the task of writing down every ISBN number in the store. While recording numbers, I listen to the formulaic pop music blasting through the store’s speakers and think about my ex-boyfriend—any of them—and how much I miss him. If I think about it, I miss everyone I’ve ever met. It takes me days, weeks, months—what feels like forever—to write all the numbers down. In fact, I’m positive there’s an alternate universe where I’m still only halfway done, watching the FedEx guy roll in more carts stacked with boxes for the impending fall semester while Taylor Swift plays throughout the store. There are so many alternate universes and all of them are terrifying.
When I’m twenty-four, my first-year composition students and I have a discussion about suicide and the stigma of mental health. Days before, a student died by suicide in an on-campus parking garage just before morning classes. The school has yet to release an official statement. The general student body was notified online via a campus news article titled: “Death near parking garage causes blockage.” We pause and dissect the insensitive wording of the article. I ask my students how they’re doing. Some of them cry. One of them says it’s hard to be a person in this unforgiving time. I agree and wonder what tweets the student might have read in the parking garage before they died. And, if they had read the right one, is there any chance they would still be alive? “As of 11:48AM” the university’s paper had tweeted, “police say the scene is all clear.”
My therapist tells me her personal religion is Montana. She asks if I understand where she’s coming from and I tell her I do, but I don’t. She asks me about my dreams, so I tell her about my dreams. I tell her that sometimes I have an exceptionally vivid one. It involves my ex-boyfriend ripping out my organs on the operating table where I lie paralyzed, but completely alert. It feels fresh every time. She makes a face, the face that people make when I tell them what I actually think about. I follow up with, “Yeah, it’s like that.” She tells me sometimes we dream to give ourselves closure. At the end of the session she asks if our meetings are helping. At this point, at twenty-one, I’ve barely eaten for two and a half years and I worry I have forever ruined my body. I assure her our sessions are helping and I really believe it.
My mother takes me to London after my grandfather dies. She says we need to get away. So, we go away. I walk the streets. I see the sights. I sit in the restaurants. I fall in love with a boy from Essex on Tinder because he lets me. I spend almost the whole visit on my phone where the boy and I plan trips and fantasize about weddings and children and houses and joint burial plots—where we fantasize about everything. When my mother and I get back from London the boy asks me to send pictures while I’m working at the pool. I send pictures. In the locker room I take flashes from every angle my body will bend. What he doesn’t know is I would do anything for him, or anybody if they’d just ask.
A muscular boy I hardly know helps me carry things up-and-down stairs the night before I move out of my first college apartment. After we finish, it’s late and he gets into my bed unprovoked. I ask him to leave, but he says “it’s fine.” I’m not fine but I don’t feel like I have it in me to tell him no, to further disappoint him, or anyone, for that matter. So, he stays and we have sex. Or he has sex and I’m there. I wonder if he can feel my soul leave the body. I wonder if it’s already gone. And if it is, I wonder if I can ever get it back. He drives me to the airport early the next morning and forces me to kiss him before I exit the car. I never go back to that place, to that apartment. I never answer his calls. I tell our mutual friends to tell him I’m dead. I try not to think about this night, but some things the mind won’t let you forget.
I’m twelve. I watch my mother holding her new purse-dog in bed. It’s the afternoon. She hasn’t gotten up or dressed in weeks. The dog has a vet appointment scheduled for the next day because my mother is completely and irrationally convinced it’s going to die. She rolls over and looks right at me and says, “If this dog dies, I don’t know what will happen.” I realize that people like us, she and I, we can’t plan for anything.
I transfer colleges and I try—I really try. My therapist tells me exercise would be good for me. So, I take the stairs instead of the elevator up and down all the skyscrapers at my new school in downtown Chicago. My mom visits me for Thanksgiving and sees my spine while I’m in-between shirts. She tells me I’m too thin. I tell her you can never be too thin. What I don’t tell her: I’m running a minimum of 10-plus miles a day. It takes up all my time. I don’t tell her I’m trying so hard I’d run right off the Earth if I could. I don’t tell anyone.
In middle school, I swim at a meet in Pittsburgh and lose every race. On the car ride home, my mother tells me that swimming is a waste of time and I’ll never be good enough. After this, I don’t let her attend any of my competitions for years. With the extra time, she starts therapy, and when that doesn’t work on its own, medication. As a result, she eventually becomes better—she becomes my actual mom.
I’m dating my roommate who claims he is “the next great American poet.” He’s not. One night we get first-year-of-college drunk and when we hook up he starts crying about how depressed he is. He tells me he thinks about suffocating himself with a plastic bag more than anything else. In an attempt to comfort him, I tell him I’m depressed too, like many writers—many people—are. But he says I’m not depressed like him, that the only people who could ever understand him are Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I tell him he needs help, real medical help, if he actually feels that way. He tells me he’s not sick like my mom. He doesn’t want to be prescribed medication. He says he doesn’t want it to make him become someone he’s not. I tell him if he’s as depressed as he says he is, he might need to become someone different. He says nothing. The next day I come home from Film and Religion 101 to a barely-legible handwritten poem on my pillow titled, “Spaceman, Holy Father.” It’s about him being the first astronaut to openly masturbate in outer space. It’s not good.
While we’re practicing cursive, my teacher yells at another student for spelling the word “friend” wrong. “Fri-end,” she says over and over. She continues to berate the student and claims that it “isn’t that difficult.” The student cries. I cry because they cry. Sometimes, when I see other people in pain, I can’t help feeling it too. This makes me think about collective consciousness or twins in the womb. And writing, whether it be this essay or the alphabet in cursive, makes me think about how little I know about how this world works.
At eighteen, I have so many friends but none at all. I begin drinking vodka from the bottle. I line my dorm room with empty ones. I pose them like trophies. When friends visit, they take pictures and put them on their social media stories with the caption, “same.” Humans are more similar than they’d like to think.
In high school, I qualify for the district swim meet and my mom is in the stands toting a sign and smile. Before my race she texts me saying she’s so nervous she had to pop a Klonopin. I swim. I do well, not well enough to qualify for the state meet, but well. My coach records a video of the race and when I watch it weeks later I can hear my mother screaming for the entire four minutes and fifty-seven seconds of my race as though I’d won.
My ex-boyfriend agrees to meet up with me to consider getting back together. This is after I call him a trillion times. I tell him I love him and that I’m better. I show him my prescription bottle for Ativan as proof. He asks if he can have it and I give it to him. He tells me he doesn’t love me anymore but wants to have sex. He tells me you don’t have to be in love to have sex. We have sex and then I hit him and he hits me. He leaves. I never see him again, but I think about him all the time. I think about all of this all of the time.
I watch my mother cry in her car as she leaves after dropping me off at college. I never call her during my first semester. Over winter break, I snoop on her ancient desktop computer while she’s at the gym and see her messages to my aunt saying she’s been depressed in my absence. The words I remember most clearly: “everybody leaves.”
The Montana therapist talks me into trying Prozac. I’m planning on applying for MFA programs in the fall and tell her I don’t want it to hurt my writing career. I tell her I want to be real writer. She tells me I can’t write or be real if (and when) I’m dead. She’s not wrong. I start Prozac and sleep for nine months due to fatigue from the initial side effects. Sometimes all you need is a good sleep.
At twenty-four, I watch a lot of TV. Some might say too much TV, especially for someone who is trying to be a “real writer.” But if there’s a screen, I’ll watch it. I enjoy nothing more than spending an entire day in bed, exploring the separate world of each channel. Today, I enter a familiar space when I flip to a scene featuring a suicidal person. This person sits in a dark room, holds a gun to their head, and counts down from an arbitrary number. As I watch, I resist the urge to scream at the TV, to let this person know the fault in their technique. The gun does not go off. The character lets it drop. The music slows. I look around my living room and come to terms with knowing there’s more of my mother in myself than anyone else. The scene ends with the character curling up in bed, sobbing, pretending everything that just happened never happened.
In its old age, my mother’s dog goes deaf, blind, and becomes incontinent, causing it to shit on the carpet. Sometimes I tell my mother, if I can tell it’s one of her bad days, that it was me who shat on the carpet just so she won’t yell at the dog. Because I’m four, I think she believes me. (For context: this is a different dog than the one my mother hugged in her bed. Life is full of dead pets.)
Senior year of high school: my friend and I go to Arby’s for off-campus lunch every day because we say we “hate people” and no one else goes to Arby’s. Also, we think their curly fries are superb and underrated. We eat them and listen to murder podcasts as if they’re scripture in her Honda Accord that’s been missing its front bumper for longer than we’ve been alive. Today we listen to one about an axe murderer who swung his weapon back so hard that the dull end put dents in the popcorn ceiling. My friend tells me she doesn’t understand why everyone hates popcorn ceilings so much. We skip our next class, Anatomy, and listen to another episode. I assume our end-of-the-semester half-dissected cat continues to disintegrate in the drawer just fine without us. The next podcast is the top ten buried alive stories. It’s gruesome. Confined spaces. No air. No help. Fingers worn down to the nub. My friend and I, so alive at sixteen, conclude this would be the absolute worst way to die.
I start grad school and go off Prozac because I think I know everything. I drive around South Florida at night, every night. I meet up with an ex-boyfriend and we help guide baby sea turtles to the ocean. At sunrise, we go back to his apartment and it’s full of old dogs—some missing eyes and legs. We drink cheap beer and pet them. He tells me he adopts old animals to help them feel comfortable before they die. When I leave, he looks at me and tells me he’s glad I’m not dead. I go home and start my prescription again. I think if I’ve learned anything it’s that we should all try to do more of this kind of stuff, more of leading baby sea turtles to the ocean, more striving for comfort and less pain, less of everything else.