Hamlet in the Hospital

One of the books I happened to have with me during my first stay in a hospital psychiatric unit was a volume of Shakespearean tragedies, but it would seem that, despite my suicidal depression, I was in more of a dryly comedic frame of mind.  Plagued by insomnia and lack of appetite as side effects of my new medication, my intelligence insulted by the banality of the literal-minded professionals around me who offered a chemical solution to everything, I found myself envying Hamlet, whose purported "madness" was regarded with a certain awed solemnity, and whose suicidal crisis constitutes one of the best-known and most poignant passages in all of literature.  I doubted even the melancholy Dane would be taken seriously in the modern mental-health system.  With the play in hand, I sat down to vent my frustrations in parody.  Nearly every line in this is lifted directly from Shakespeare, with a few obvious tweaks . . . and what isn't Shakespeare was borrowed almost verbatim from conversations I seemed to have on a daily basis in the hospital.

SCENE ONE: Dining room, Elsinore.

(Ophelia, Prince Hamlet, Queen Gertrude, King Claudius, and Polonius are seated around a circular table, eating breakfast.)

HAMLET (to Gertrude): Who would bear the whips and scorns of time, th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of th'unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?

GERTRUDE: I would!  The pleasures of life are so much greater than the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

HAMLET (to Ophelia): Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?

OPHELIA: I would, my lord!  Of course I would!

POLONIUS (to Claudius): Your noble son is mentally ill.  Mentally ill call I it, for, to define true mental illness, what is't but to be nothing else but mentally ill?  That he is mentally ill, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true.  You would do well to start him on an antidepressant.

SCENE TWO: Courtyard, Elsinore.  Two hours later.

(Hamlet stands alone in the courtyard.  Claudius and Polonius watch him secretly from around a corner.)

HAMLET: To be, or not to be - that is the question.

(Hamlet unsheaths his dagger.  Before he can plunge it into his chest, Gertrude walks into the courtyard and Hamlet quickly restores the dagger to its sheath.)

POLONIUS: He's a danger to himself.  I recommend that you confine him where your wisdom best shall think.

CLAUDIUS: It shall be so.  Mental illness in great ones must not unwatched go. (He exits.)

HAMLET (with a sudden start): A king of shreds and patches - save me and hover o'er me with your wings, you heavenly guards!  (To the air in front of him)  What would your gracious figure?

GERTRUDE: Alas, he's mentally ill.  To whom do you speak this?

HAMLET: Do you see nothing there?  Nor did you nothing hear?

GERTRUDE: Nothing at all.

HAMLET: Why, look you there!  Look how it steals away!  My father, in his habit as he lived!

GERTRUDE: This is the very coinage of your brain.  This bodiless creation psychosis is very cunning in.

CLAUDIUS (re-entering): How does Hamlet?

GERTRUDE: Mentally ill as the sea and wind when both contend which is the mightier.

CLAUDIUS: His liberty is full of threats to all, to you yourself, to us, to every one, and especially to himself.  If anything should happen, it will be laid to us, whose providence should have kept short, restrained, and out of haunt this mentally ill young man.

GERTRUDE: But so much was our love we would not understand what was most fit, but, like the owner of a foul disease, to keep it from divulging, let it feed even on the pith of life.

CLAUDIUS: Hamlet, for thine especial safety, which we do tender, we must send thee hence with fiery quickness.  Therefore prepare thyself.  The ambulance is ready, the paramedics tend, and everything is bent for the hospital.

SCENE THREE: A small conference room in the psychiatric ward of the hospital.  Later that day.

(Hamlet and a doctor sit facing each other.  Hamlet's sheath is empty; the dagger was taken away and put in a storage room.)

DOCTOR: Hamlet, do you know why you're here?

HAMLET: I will tell you why.  I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire - why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.  What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!  And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

DOCTOR: Will you sign yourself into the hospital voluntarily?  (Offers Conditional Voluntary Hospitalization form.)

HAMLET: Gentlemen, with all my love I do commend me to you.  (He signs it.)

DOCTOR: You'll probably have to stay here for a couple of weeks while you're getting stabilized on the medication.  We're going to put you on Zoloft for depression and Risperdal for psychosis.

HAMLET: Psychosis?  My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time and makes as healthful music.  Just ask the nurse who took my vital signs earlier.  It is not mental illness that I have uttered.  Bring me to the test, and I the matter will reword, which mental illness would gambol from.

DOCTOR: Okay, here's the test.  Tell me what you see in this inkblot.

HAMLET: Do you see this mark that's almost in shape of a camel?

DOCTOR: Hmmm . . . show me.  Ah!  By th' mass and 'tis, like a camel indeed.  Here's another one.  Tell me what you see.

HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.

DOCTOR: Where?  Indeed, it is backed like a weasel.

HAMLET: Or like a whale.

DOCTOR: Very like a whale.  Now how about this one?

HAMLET: That's a hawk.  No . . . wait . . . I think it's a handsaw.  Or is it a hawk?

DOCTOR (nodding his head several times in a self-satisfied way): Hamlet, you are mentally ill.  Do you wish to know how you have been diagnosed?

HAMLET: I am tame, sir; pronounce.

DOCTOR: Major Depressive Disorder, severe, with psychotic features.

HAMLET: Is't possible?

DOCTOR: Our time is up.  My honorable lord, I will most humbly take my leave of you.

HAMLET: You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal - except my life, except my life, except my life.

DOCTOR: But can you contract for your safety?

HAMLET: I do not set my life at a pin's fee, but conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.  So, unfortunately, yes.

SCENE FOUR: The conference room.  Two weeks later.  (With apologies to Macbeth.)

(Hamlet and a counselor sit facing each other.)

COUNSELOR: Do you know me, my lord?

HAMLET: Excellent well.  You are a fishmonger.

COUNSELOR: Not I, my lord.  I'm a counselor.  We met last week.  How does my good Lord Hamlet?

HAMLET: O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.

COUNSELOR: So I take it things could be better.

HAMLET: O God, God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!  Fie on't, ah, fie, 'tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed.  Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

COUNSELOR: What is the matter, my lord?

HAMLET: Between who?

COUNSELOR: I mean, why are you so unhappy?

HAMLET: I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thought to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.  What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?  To die, to sleep - no more - and by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. . . .

COUNSELOR: But, Hamlet, you have so much to live for.  You're a student at one of the finest universities in Europe, and you're next in line to the throne of Denmark.  I don't understand why a young man who has so much going for him would want to die.

HAMLET: There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.  To me 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

COUNSELOR: I understand your father passed away not quite two months ago, and you're still quite upset about this.  How is it that the clouds still hang on you?  Thou know'st 'tis common.  All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.

HAMLET: Ay, madam, it is common.

COUNSELOR: If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?

HAMLET: Seems, madam?  Nay, it is.  I know not "seems."

COUNSELOR: Let's not bicker over words.  'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, to give these mourning duties to your father.  But to persever in obstinate condolement is a course of impious stubbornness.

HAMLET: He was so excellent a king, so loving to my mother that he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly.  Heaven and earth, must I remember?

COUNSELOR: We can change the subject, if you like.  How have you been responding to the medications?  Have you noticed any difference?

HAMLET: Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!  Zoloft does murder sleep" - the innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, the death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast.

COUNSELOR: He's still hearing voices!

HAMLET: Still it cried "Sleep no more" to all the house; "Zoloft hath murdered sleep, and therefore Hamlet shall sleep no more, Hamlet shall sleep no more."

COUNSELOR: Who was it that thus cried?  You do unbend your noble strength to think so brainsickly of things.  Go get some water and I'll have the doctor give you some Risperdal.

HAMLET: My appetite is much decreased, too.  But what is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?  A beast, no more.

COUNSELOR: I have to go now.  Is there anything else you want to say?

HAMLET: The time is out of joint.  O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right!

COUNSELOR: Ah!  A delusion of exaggerated self-importance!

Mortification

I'll never forget the date - it was Sunday, September 14, 1997: the day I accidentally handcuffed myself to one of my uncle's kitchen chairs.  Of all the people who were there that day, I'm probably the only one who remembers that it happened at all; I'm not sure the others would even know what I was talking about if I brought it up.  I'm certain I'm the only one who remembers the date.  That part wouldn't surprise any of them; my memory for dates is somewhat legendary in my family.  I don't think any of them know, though, that if everything had gone according to plan, they would be the ones who could never forget.

I was a couple of months shy of my fifteenth birthday, and not the least bit interested in living that long.  It was in January of that year that I'd first felt that extremity of despair rise up in me, the urgent and unequivocal certainty that I wanted to die.  Suicide was an idea I'd tossed around in the privacy of my thoughts since childhood, but that was the first moment I'd honestly craved it and believed I was capable.  It was a moment that passed; I continued on in the same profound misery, but the energy that might have spurred me to action was gone.  The depression eased up a bit around the time spring arrived, but as the new school year started, it came down heavy again.  By then, I'd put a lot of thought into the best solution I knew.  I had a plan.

In choosing a method, there were two criteria that mattered.  First of all, it had to look like an accident.  I wasn't a spiteful teenager out to punish my family and my indifferent schoolmates for letting me down.  My death, by my reckoning, was a settling of accounts, not of old scores.  I knew it would be a painful thing in any case for those who had loved me - but substantially more so if they knew I was the orchestrator of my own demise.  My mother's grief would be terrible enough, losing her firstborn, her only daughter.  I could not compound that agony with unnecessary guilt.

Second of all - and I'm ashamed to say that if push had ever come to shove, this consideration would surely have taken priority over the other - my suicide must be painless.  It was terror that had kept me alive so long: terror of the process of dying, and of what I might find on the other side.  (I wasn't particularly interested in the afterlife at that point - in fact, I earnestly hoped there wouldn't be one - but it was hard not to think about it when I realized it was something I might be confronted with presently.)  I thought I could overcome these fears, but I knew I didn't have the willpower to set in motion events that would result in my confronting the unknown in solitary convulsions of physical agony.  I'd never be able to drag a razor across my wrist, or tighten a noose around my neck.

I decided to go with sleeping pills.  I seemed to recall my mother offering me one out of a big jar at some point.  I didn't know where she kept the jar, but it had to be in the bathroom or kitchen, like all the other medicines.  I'd find it, and I'd swallow pills until the jar was empty.  I knew I could force myself to do that, and then I'd get rid of the jar.  We'd been living in our current house no longer than two months, and I was the only one in my family who suffered from insomnia with any frequency; it would probably be a long time before anyone went looking for the pills, and then they would most likely assume the jar had been misplaced in the move.  Afterwards, when the fear of death really hit me, it would be too late, and on some level I knew I would find that comforting.  It wouldn't be too bad, anyways, because the warm languor of sleep would come over me before I could work myself up into too much of a panic.  I would know, as I closed my eyes and let it take me, that I was descending this time into a silent abyss from which I would never return, but by then, I would be too tired, too seduced by that sweet promise of oblivion, to care.

Before I took the pills, I would change into my swimsuit.  It was late summer, still hot; the backyard pool was still so inviting. . . . When they found me, they would assume I'd foolishly decided to go for a dip alone.  Accidental drowning, the death certificate would say.  They would mourn, and then they'd get on with their lives, and all my pain would still be over.

Looking back, I find myself wincing at the sheer naïveté of this plan.  For one thing, although I later searched the cupboards and medicine cabinets  more than once, I never found any sleep aids at all, let alone a big jar of them.  Assuming I had found the pills, however, and assuming there had been enough of them to overdose on (several dozen, at least, and to underestimate what it takes is to risk waking up in the hospital the next day with permanent liver damage), there's a good chance I would have found myself vomiting as my body rejected the noxious invasion.  If I had managed to keep them down, I still would almost certainly have failed in my purpose of protecting my loved ones from the fact of my suicide.  An autopsy is standard procedure in the case of an unwitnessed accidental death - and even if I actually had drowned, slipping into a coma and falling facedown into the water before the poison could finish me off, the truth would surely come out in the tox screen.

It didn't seem like a perfect plan, even at the time.  But it was the only way out I had.

Talking to my parents wasn't an option.  I knew they wouldn't understand.  My father didn't care what I did or how I felt, as long as I stayed out of trouble and got my chores done.  He hardly ever had anything nice to say about me anyway - if I told him how I'd been feeling, he'd probably laugh, or he'd think I was making it up to get sympathy, as he'd accused me of doing before when I burst into tears during one of his lectures about my stupidity and incompetence.  I thought my mother might take me seriously, at least, but I knew she'd tell me to pray about it, and I wasn't ready to tell her - because I hadn't yet admitted to myself - that I no longer believed in her God.  And suppose I did talk to them, and convince them I needed help?  I'd be getting it on their terms.  I imagined my mother and some starched-syrup professional working together to "cure" me of what little I found in my own nature to love: my introversion, my eccentricity, my darkness.  I imagined my father telling the doctors how lazy I was, how disrespectful and rebellious; he'd known me all my life and still didn't have a clue who I was.  By the time they all were through with me, I'd be dead for sure, even if I was still alive.

Perhaps just as importantly, that wasn't the way my story was supposed to go.  I wasn't supposed to be one of those troubled teenagers.  I was a brilliant student.  I was a talented writer - just a couple of months earlier I'd written a letter to the editors of the Los Angeles Times, and they'd chosen it for publication without knowing it was the work of a fourteen-year-old.  My mother assured me that I had what it took to succeed in competitive debate; she'd insisted I join the high school debate team, even though what I really wanted was to act, and although all I'd done so far was sit in the meetings and watch other students practice their speeches, she was sure I would love it if I only made a little effort.  That was the sort of person I was supposed to be: driven, hardworking, ambitious.  I was supposed to be making friends, maybe even wanting to date, and at the very least I should be packing my days with activities that would look good on a college application.  After all, college was only three years away, and I'd already begun to suspect that that wasn't as much time as once it might have seemed.  I wasn't sure I would really like college.  I loved to learn, but I had a notion that institutions of higher education might not be the ivory-tower havens I dreamed of.  From what I'd heard, most college students were at least as interested in partying as in their studies, and many of them were there because their future earning potential would be higher with a degree, not because they were consumed by a passion for knowledge.  It sounded a lot like high school, actually, but without the structure of a tightly organized schedule of daily classes.  I was supposed to be looking forward to it.  I was supposed to be a success, tackling one challenge after another with verve and aplomb.  How could I bring myself to admit that I felt on the verge of collapse most days, that I didn't know what I wanted anymore, and the future was closing in on me too fast?

It was better, I thought, not to have any future at all.  All I needed was a day alone in the house, when I could carry out my plan undisturbed.  When my mother announced one day in early September that we would be going the next Sunday to visit my uncle, I thought I'd found the perfect opportunity: all I'd have to do was not go.  By some poetic twist of fate, the date would be September 14.  I remembered that date all too well from the previous year.  My father had been yelling at me again, consciously lording his parental authority over me, and he had called me "inferior."  A great tide of something more heady than anger surged up in me then, and I ran out into the yard, utterly uncontrolled, and threw myself down in the grass.  The feeling needed to expend itself in destruction, and I was all that I had; and before I knew what I was doing, I was digging my fingernails savagely into my arm and tearing them through the flesh, as hard as I could bring myself to do.  It was thirty seconds or a minute at most before it passed, abandoning me bewildered in its wake, my arm sore - but also leaving me feeling hollowed and cleansed, chastened.  It seemed somehow fitting that on the anniversary of my first foray into self-injury, I would finish the job.

"I don't really think I want to go," I told my mother casually.  "I have a lot of homework this weekend.  I should probably stay here and work on it."

"You're going," my mother said firmly.  "You can do your homework on Saturday."

"It's going to be so boring," I complained.  "It's not as if any of you are going to want to talk to me anyway."  I saw my uncle and his family a couple of times a year, at most, and I didn't particularly care for any of them.  I was too old to bring a book along to lose myself in while the adults conversed about uninteresting things.  The occasion was certain to be dreadfully dull, and I would secretly have wanted to skip it even if it hadn't posed a scheduling conflict with my suicide.

"You're going," my mother repeated, in a tone that brooked no refusal.

I thought about deliberately dawdling over my homework.  Education was a priority in my family; surely they'd leave me behind if my grades were at stake?  They wouldn't let me leave it undone, and I doubted they would have me take it along to my uncle's.  I could even lie and say I had something big due on Monday, like an essay or report.  No - it was only the second week of school.  I didn't even have that much homework yet, let alone the sort of project I'd need all weekend to finish.  I could pretend I was sick; I'd never been much of a malingerer, so my mother probably wouldn't suspect I was faking now, especially if I started on Thursday night saying I felt a little under the weather and I thought I would go to bed early . . . but no, if I'd stayed behind sick, there was no way they'd believe I'd spontaneously decided to go for a swim.

I won't pretend there wasn't a streak of relief in me that Sunday morning when my mother packed us off to church as usual, and then on to my uncle's place.  Unless I had that heavy energy searing through me, I wasn't sure after all that I had the courage to go through with something so . . . immense.  I didn't know whether it terrified me more that I might do it if I had the chance, or that I might not.  I didn't really want to live, and yet . . . How cruel it was that I'd had to be born at all.  I'd never had a chance not to be faced with this dilemma: to suffer or to die . . . to be or not to be, except that I already was.  In a way, the day's outing seemed like a nasty circling microcosm of my own life: dragged away from plans I didn't really want to make, to go somewhere I didn't really want to be.  Conveyed, carried forward, swept on ahead, life pounding relentlessly on to the next thing before anything previous had been resolved.

We went out that afternoon to explore some cute little gift boutiques in my uncle's town.  The adults pretty much ignored me, which suited me fine.  I browsed a little and found a small framed wall hanging depicting an antique-style world map, the kind with "TYPVS ORBIS TERRARVM" across the top and sea monsters frolicking in the ocean beside an illustration of the Four Winds.  It wasn't expensive at all, and I decided to buy it.  I wondered if it was foolish, spending my money on something I wasn't planning to be alive long enough to enjoy - but then, I wouldn't need money either when I was dead, would I?  Still, it seemed like a betrayal of my intentions to make any kind of investment in the future, even so small an investment as the ownership of a beautiful and fascinating object.

We went back to my uncle's house after that, and it was about as dull as I had expected.  I don't remember anything else in particular until that evening when we happened to go into the kitchen.  I don't even remember why we were there - surely the living room would have been more comfortable?  What I do remember is that there was a pair of handcuffs on the back of one of the chairs.  It was a wooden kitchen chair with a slatted back, and one of the cuffs was closed around the top between the slats; the other cuff hung down loose and open.  When I pointed them out, my uncle explained how they'd come to be there; I think they'd been part of a costume, and someone had put them on the chair for a joke.  I stood behind the chair and fiddled with the cuffs while the conversation went on around me.  It wasn't hard at all to sink into my own private, brooding sphere, a bubble of dark thought.  I slipped my right wrist into the open cuff, just testing the feel of it.  I wasn't supposed to be here at all, I was supposed to be home, I was supposed to be dead -

"We don't have the key to those," my uncle said, and somehow the words penetrated my haze.  I looked up, and saw that he was staring at my arm, where I'd just closed the handcuff around my wrist.  I remembered doing it, remembered the satisfying click, but I couldn't quite process how it had happened.  My actions had been deliberate but without thought.  For a moment reality hovered around me, quivering, as if there were a thin, thin veil between now and thirty seconds ago, and all I had to do to make this go away was step through it.

Then it hit me.  There was no going back.  I was really and truly handcuffed to this chair.  "I thought they were a toy!" I protested, as if I could argue my way out of this.

"Oh, they're real," my uncle said.  "Not police-issue, but they're real."

I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid.  It had never occurred to me that these were real handcuffs, or that there wouldn't be a key.  It would have been bad enough if there had been a key, and I'd had to stand there chained to the chair until someone found it and released me.  But what on earth was I going to do now?  I tugged, but the heel of my hand was simply too wide to fit through the circumference of the cuff.

"We might have to go to the hospital," someone said.  Probably my father or my brother.  "They have tools there that can cut metal."  (Strangely enough, no one ever suggested calling a locksmith.)  I wondered if they'd really be able to cut the metal without cutting my skin.  I imagined climbing clumsily into the backseat of the car while someone pushed the chair in after me, walking into the emergency room while it dragged behind me, and if I'd been much for prayer, I think I would have prayed the floor would open up and swallow me right then and there.  Chair and all.

By now, everyone had gathered around me, focused on my wrist and the cuffs and the chair.  I felt strangely dissociated from my own arm, as if I were a pushy spectator at the scene of an accident, getting in the way of rescue efforts.  "Let's see if we can break the chain," someone said.  I honestly don't remember what happened next; I was too busy cursing my thoughtlessness, and my stupidity, and my existence.  I do remember my relief when whatever they did succeeded, and the chain linking the cuffs broke.  It wasn't a much better situation - I still thought I would die of shame if I had to go to the hospital and explain how I'd come to have a cuff locked around my wrist, but at least I wouldn't be going in with the chair in tow.  I pulled on the cuff again, but I couldn't get it off no matter how I twisted my hand.  The metal dug painfully into my skin and I had to abandon the attempt.

"Soap," someone said.  I think it was my mother this time.  "Maybe we can get it to slide off, and if not . . ."  I wondered if removing the cuff would still be considered a matter of urgency now that I wasn't attached to my uncle's chair.  Maybe I'd have to go to bed tonight with it still on, and then to school tomorrow.  I wondered if I would be able to convince my classmates it was a statement of some kind.  Anyway, we all went over to the sink then, and someone found a bottle of liquid soap and started slathering it over my arm, and someone else tugged at the cuff.  The tightness of the metal biting into my hand was terrible, and I kept jerking and crying out, forcing them to abandon one attempt after another.

I'm not sure how long it was that we struggled there - five minutes perhaps, but that's really only a guess.  It seemed much longer at the time, but was probably really much shorter.  I do remember the moment the cuff slipped tightly over the thickness of my knuckles and I was free.  For a few seconds I was just dazed.  To be in possession of my own unencumbered arm again was so precious as to be strange.  Then a wave of relief that I wouldn't have to go to the hospital at all swept over me, existing alongside, rather than mitigating, the humiliation of the ordeal.

It wasn't quite over yet.  After I washed the soap from my hand and arm, my father picked up the cuff, the closed, locked circle of stainless steel resting on the counter where it had fallen.  I never wanted to see it again.  I never wanted to think about this incident again.  I didn't want to hear anyone mention it ever again, but instead of tossing the horrid thing away, my father rinsed it in the sink and held it out toward me.  "Take it," he urged.  "You can keep it as a souvenir."

"Um, I . . . don't really want -"

"Go on!  Take it!  You can show it off someday when you look back on this and laugh."  For some reason I suspected the only one who would ever look back and laugh about this would be him.  I could imagine him telling his clients the story of his stupid daughter who accidentally handcuffed herself to a chair.  If I happened to be around, he'd probably ask me to go get it and show it to them.  This humiliation was never, ever, ever going to go away.  I didn't have the energy to fight.  I took the cuff from him and slipped it into my pocket, where I could feel its metal heaviness against my leg for the rest of the evening every time I shifted position, as if it were still holding me.

At home, I considered throwing it away, but I could just imagine someone - probably my father - pulling it out of the trash and pressing it back upon me.  Or demanding I produce it so he could have a good laugh with his clients, and then getting angry when I had to admit I didn't have it anymore even though he'd told me to keep it.  Instead, I just shoved it under a pile of laundry in my closet.  Out of sight, out of mind . . . eventually . . . maybe.  I listened to the silence of the house around me, imagined my parents and brother coming home, my mother coming to knock on my door, and only the silence answering. . . . I wondered how long it would have been before anyone thought to look in the pool.

I had been humiliated as only an adolescent - self-conscious, self-absorbed, and unsure - can be, and of course I overestimated just how important the whole thing was.  After that night, no one ever mentioned it again.  "Remember the time Truth handcuffed herself to that chair?" was never a topic of discussion at family gatherings, and my father never asked me to bring out the cuff to show to one of his clients.  There was no reason why I shouldn't have thrown it away, but to do that I'd have to go into the closet and dig it out.  I'd have to see it again.  I'd have to remember that awful day, acknowledge that it had really taken place.  Better just to leave the cuff under the clothes and junk at the bottom of the closet.

Every now and then, over the course of the next three years, I'd be looking in the closet for something, and I'd turn over a shirt I hadn't worn in months and there it would be, still locked shut, staring up at me like a wide silver eye.  I hated it, but something perverse and punitive in me wouldn't let me get rid of it, even when the opportunity presented itself naturally, and I would bury it again, pushing it deeper under the pile of clothes like a shameful secret.

Years later, after I went off to college, my father and brother packed up my bedroom.  I suppose the cuff turned up when they were going through the closet, and got stored away with the rest of my belongings, to which I have had no real access since then, even after I ended up hospitalized with suicidal depression halfway through my first semester and had to come home in what felt like disgrace..  When my family moved into our current residence, my mother found it necessary to "downsize" my stored possessions, but she assured me that all she'd given away was a few boxes of paperback books, which means the cuff might very well be at this moment in a box in our storage shed - and in a few months or years, when I get a chance to go through my old things, I'll see it again for the first time in over a decade, unchanged by the passage of years: still locked shut.

It doesn't have the power to hurt me anymore.  I've suffered worse humiliations since then, over the course of the years I've spent in the mental health system.  My emotionally abusive father no longer has any power over my life.  Through all the aching awfulness I have never been crushed entirely, and I continue to astonish myself with my own resilience.  I wouldn't say I look back and laugh now when I think of that night in my uncle's kitchen, but I have perspective enough merely to shake my head and sigh.

This time, when it turns up, I won't feel compelled to keep it, by my father's command or by my own denial or self-loathing.  I'll finally be able to throw it away.  The funny thing is, I'm not actually sure I will.  It's just an artifact now, a steel-hard memory.  There's something almost pathetic about it, this single useless cuff clenched tightly shut holding on to something that slipped away long, long ago.

Green Eggs and Humanity

With apologies to Theo Geisel.  Though, knowing how he felt about Hitler, I'm not sure he would mind.

I am Stan,
Doctor Stan.
Would you like to kill this man?

I would not like to,
Doctor Stan.
I do not want to kill this man.

Will you shock him
'til he's dead?
Will you shoot him
in the head?

I will not shock him 'til he's dead.
I will not shoot him in the head.
I do not want to kill this man.
I will not kill him, Doctor Stan.

Will you stab him
with a knife?
Gas his children,
rape his wife?

I will not stab him with a knife,
Nor gas his kids, nor rape his wife.
I will not shock him 'til he's dead.
I will not shoot him in the head.
I do not want to kill this man.
I will not kill him, Doctor Stan.

Will you hang him from a tree,
by the neck for all to see?
Will you make him dig a pit,
and bury him alive in it?

I will not hang him from a tree
by the neck for all to see!
I will not make him dig a pit
and bury him alive in it!
I will not stab him with a knife!
Nor gas his kids!  Nor rape his wife!
I will not shock him 'til he's dead!
I will not shoot him in the head!
I do not want to kill this man!
I will not kill him, Doctor Stan!

Now settle down!  Don't have a fit!
Why must you be so obstinate?
Who do you think yourself to be,
to speak in such a way to ME?
You hesitate to kill this man?
You must not understand the plan.
One such as you can't comprehend
the higher things that I intend!
Be silent!  Do not stay your hand!
Give in and do as I demand!
In my position you can trust,
And I say kill him!  Yes!  You must!

I cannot keep from shuddering.
I do not want to do this thing.
I have no choice but to obey.
So I will kill him, as you say.

Say!  That wasn't bad by half.
In fact, it almost made me laugh.
I did just as you said I should,
and somehow it felt awfully good.
Have you another I must kill?
I'll do it gladly, yes I will!
I'd love to shock him 'til he's dead!
Please let me shoot him in the head!
What fun, to stab him with a knife,
and gas his kids, and rape his wife!
Let's gather folks around to see:
I'm going to hang him from a tree!
How droll, to make him dig a pit
and bury him alive in it!
To start, I'll spit into his face.
Then I'll exterminate his race!
I'll hunt them down until I'm done,
and won't it be such jolly fun?
I'm glad you made me kill that man.
Thank you,
thank you, Doctor Stan!

The End of Everything Before

There are a few jobs less appealing to me than that of President of the United States, but not many: working the incinerator at the animal shelter, for example, or peddling my ass on the streets.  I hate politics with a passion that really ought to be incompatible with my utter lack of interest.  Moreover, I have more than enough trouble managing my own quiet little life without worrying about, say, tax legislation, or who should be the ambassador to Peru, or what everyone's so upset about in the Middle East.

Strangely enough, however, when I was riding in an ambulance for the first time, staring out the windows in the back doors at places I'd just been, on my way to the hospital, the thought that kept coming to the forefront of my mind was this: Well, there goes any chance I had to become Leader of the Free World.

It had happened the way these things always do: all of a sudden, out of the blue, and inevitably.  It was just about a month earlier, on my eighteenth birthday, that I'd taken my first dose of antidepressants.  I still remember placing my thumb over the scoring in the middle of the little powder-blue pill, pausing for a moment before breaking it in half, lingering for a moment before swallowing one of the halves, a tiny thing, barely perceptible really, compared to the great mouthfuls of big pills that would soon become my daily regimen.  I had become a user of psychotropic drugs, the same day that I had become a legal adult.  It was a sober moment, a drizzle of gravity in a day marked by the triumph of having survived childhood.

I was a savvy consumer, of course.  I started devouring everything I could find online about the medication I was now taking.  Strangely enough, however, I didn't immediately recognize the side effects for what they were.  It was only after several days of persistent insomnia, combined with an ever-mounting restlessness, that I put two and two together and realized that this was something the powder-blue pill was doing to me.  I hadn't had any side effects at all to start with, but after the first four days, I stopped breaking the little pills in half.  When I realized what was going on, I was stunned: how could something so tiny and inanimate have such immense power over me?  I fought for control in the only way I could: through knowledge.  I spent hours online, reading about my new prescription and the conditions it treated.  And little by little, empowered by knowledge, I began to forget that I was a promising student at a prestigious college and lost myself into a new identity as a person with a frazzled and fragmented brain.

It's not as if I could have done homework, anyway, all those awful sleepless nights.  My mind and body felt by turns fuzzy and frenetic, and sometimes both at once.  I didn't want to disturb my roommate, so I either went down to the computer lab to putter around online or just lay miserably in the dark.  A couple of times, I went to the infirmary to spend the night.  The staff there were kind, professional, and friendly; to this day I am grateful for their patience and matter-of-fact cheerfulness.  The infirmary was closed over the Thanksgiving holiday, however, and so for four intense nights I was left to my own devices.  My roommate was gone, so at least I could putter in relative privacy.  I spent hours taking personality quizzes online; I catnapped uselessly in the afternoons, wrapped in the heavy stickiness of uneasy sleep; and at night, when the restlessness possessed me like a fire in my veins, I put on one of my more energetic CDs and danced.  It was a graceless, artless dance, a pure kinetic frenzy.  Habitually sedentary as I was, I found myself quickly exhausted.  I kept dancing.  I brought my heel down hard on a tiny bit of lead that had come from one of my mechanical pencils and jammed it up under the skin, and kept dancing.  I worked myself up into a giddy and discontented euphoria; into the night I danced like burning, and when I woke the next afternoon it was all I could do to stumble down the hallway to the bathroom.  One night I left campus and walked down the road a ways, to CVS.  I didn't know if they were open all night or not, but if they were I was going to buy a big bottle of sleeping pills.  For the insomnia, of course.  I don't know what would have happened if I'd gotten them, because the store was closed.

After the Thanksgiving weekend, I was so far gone that my psychiatrist ordered me confined to the infirmary, allowed out only to go to class.  I usually went; going to class provided a brief oasis of sanity in the midst of what my life had become; a taste of recent routines I had almost forgotten.  It was my only remaining pretense at being a student.  I'd started missing class regularly in mid-November; I'd been struggling for the most part to keep up with the assigned readings, and the prospect of researching and writing a paper quite simply reduced me to tears.  I spent about a week in the infirmary: sometimes trying to write in my journal, sometimes reading a bit; there was a computer there that I was allowed to use, and I spent hours at night reading up on urban legends or playing Snood; amusements in which I took no real relish, but which served as a flimsy barrier between me and the immensity of my chaos and despair.

It was too late, though; the real barrier, the one I'd carefully constructed all those years of increasingly severe depressive episodes, had already crumbled away.  I couldn't pretend anymore.  I couldn't conceal the truth from myself or anyone else.  In daily conversations with my psychiatrist and psychologist, it all came pouring out, all the dark ugly reality, or at any rate more than anyone had ever heard before.  And after several days with no sign of improvement, there came the morning when all the staff came to surround my bed and my psychiatrist told me I was going to be sent to the hospital.  They seemed to appear from all corners at once, before I even knew they were coming, like a flock of birds.  I was later to learn that this happens all the time in the mental health system; if they're doing anything they know you won't like, they don't give you a chance to respond to reason rather than force, no matter how docile and cooperative and sensible they've always known you to be.  It's not just a formality, either; they have steel in their eyes and look right through you without seeing anything more than the trouble you have the potential to be.  I've seen it happen many a time since then, to me or to others, and it never gets any less frightening, the feeling that you've already lost a fight you never meant to put up in the first place.

There wasn't a thing in the world wrong with me physically, but for some reason they wouldn't let me walk out to the ambulance.  They pushed me out on a stretcher.  For weeks now, I had felt myself slipping slowly out of control of my life, and as I lay on the stretcher watching the walls of the infirmary slip past me without saying goodbye, I felt that these people had come to finish the job.

It was then, in the ambulance, as the shadows of sparse-leafed late-autumn trees flicked over the back windows, that I realized a line had been crossed.  I wasn't just a bright college student who had to swallow a pill every day.  I was going to be a mental patient.  For the rest of my life, I'd never be able to shake that part of my history.  I would never be able to look in the mirror and see someone who hadn't been locked up with the crazies.  I remembered an extremely dull book I had read a year or two earlier, about the 1988 presidential election.  The stability of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis had been called into question when rumors surfaced that he had been treated for depression in the past.  (Dukakis and his personal physician denied the rumors, which there had never been any real evidence to support; later his wife, Kitty, would go on record about her own struggles with alcoholism and depression and become active in mental health education and advocacy.)  It wasn't that, as an aspiring writer and academician, I imagined having many relentless and well-connected enemies in the future who would stop at nothing to bring me down.  It was more that, if I ever did, the ammunition was there, packing a wallop whether anyone ever used it or not.  No matter where I went or what I did in the future,  I would always have the knowledge deep within me that many, if not most, of the people around me would look at me, not with admiration and respect, but with revulsion and pity, if they only knew.

A more immediate and concrete dread was the anticipation of what lay ahead for me at the hospital itself.  In my senior year of high school, I'd taken an evening psychology class offered by a local community college, and the professor told us about his experiences working in a large state mental hospital.  It was some scary stuff that he told us.  I remembered one story in particular about a patient smearing feces on the walls.  Could I really be going to such a place?  Did these professionals whom I had trusted actually think that I belonged there?

The first thing they did in the hospital was take me to a private waiting room.  I'm not sure how long I was there, but it was long enough to read a whole magazine cover-to-cover, including the boring articles I had no interest in reading in the first place.  Then the interviews began, with bored clinicians whose role I didn't quite understand.  One of them inquired about my family mental-health history, and I told them my paternal grandfather had suffered from depression and committed suicide in the early '80s, before I was born.  Eventually he left, and fifteen minutes or half an hour later another came in and greeted me with, "So, I understand you're having some trouble getting over your grandfather's death?"  It was my first taste of just how garbled beyond recognition my life could become in the hands and charts of the mental health system.

I think it was then, during those interviews in that waiting room, that I began to lie.  It was simple honesty that had gotten me into this mess in the first place.  These people didn't want to help me, and I didn't want their help.  I was tired of fighting this uphill battle called life, and what could I possibly have to live for now?  Whatever might once have provided some flimsy hope to cling to was surely ruined now.  This hospital full of frowning professionals wanted to keep me alive, and I wanted to die - and if they weren't with me, as the saying goes, they were against me, and what right did they have to the truth if they were only going to use it against me?  At first I didn't so much lie outright as just soften the truth as much as my conscience would allow.  Once they took me upstairs to the adult psychiatric unit, however, I began to prevaricate in earnest.

They told me it was for legal reasons that they had to transport me in a wheelchair, but in my mind it was a symbolic crippling.  The power of self-determination was out of my hands, even to the extent that I wasn't trusted to walk on my own without - what?  Falling, or running?

I remember the moment they opened the doors to the ward.  I didn't hear any screaming.  I didn't smell anything foul.  There was something almost sinister about how sinister it wasn't.  I remember doors and generic artwork on the walls and a pukey pink everywhere that I later learned was supposed to be soothing.  They wheeled me to the nurses' station, where I was handed over to a woman I would later learn was one of the least warm and personable staff members on the unit.  She showed me to one of the regular rooms, but when I learned I would have a roommate, I went into a panic.  So far I hadn't seen any of the other patients.  I imagined myself alone with someone wild-eyed and delusional, and I wouldn't even step over the threshold.  The nurse simply said "Come on then" and led me back through a door on one side of the nurses' station, to what I would later learn was the ICU section of the unit.  Ironically, had there been any patients there prone to unprovoked violence or the smearing of shit, this was where they would most likely have been . . . but the rooms were private.  The four regular patient rooms were taken, so I would spend my first few days in the seclusion room - a narrow, windowless chamber with no furniture but a metal frame bed with a mattress, where patients who had lost control of themselves were taken to calm down.

It would be nine weeks before I was released.  Over the course of the next week, I would put up a valiant effort to act "normal" and convince them I didn't belong there.  I would have to figure out what on earth to say when a nurse asked, as a routine part of the intake, whether I would rather be restrained face up or face down, if it came to that.  I would be asked to name the presidents in reverse chronological order as far back as I could (I tripped up somewhere around World War I, but my psychiatrist told me I'd made it farther than any patient he'd ever had) and given a list of three items to remember, to see if I could recall them five minutes later (a shiny new penny, a red rubber ball, and a tall oak tree).  In the weeks to come, I would have nurses ask me on a daily basis if I was "feeling anxious," because I was pacing, which is something I've done almost from the time I learned to walk, having discovered early on that it liberates my mind and encourages my creative process.  I would form relationships with some of the staff and other patients that would make an impression on my heart forever.  I would learn how easily figurative language can be taken literally by those who are more used to dealing with psychotics than poets, how easily a timid appeasement smile can be taken as evidence of insincerity on one hand, disconnection from reality on the other, based on what it is that the observer is looking for.  I would read, write, color pictures, get a member of the staff to take me walking in a blizzard, and celebrate the coming of a new millennium.  I would bang my head in frustration and melt ice cubes in my hands just for spite.  I would follow in the newspapers the story of a man who murdered seven coworkers and claimed that his antidepressants made him do it.  I would be tested, diagnosed, doubted, believed, and dismissed, and ultimately I would make the decision, for reasons of my own, to take the medications and give life a try.

For the moment, though . . . my first moment alone on a psychiatric ward . . . all I could do was shut myself up in the seclusion room and curl up on the bed, closing my eyes against the light that came through the reinforced glass window in the door.  It was a place beyond tears.  It was the end of everything before.  Making myself as small as I could, I wrapped myself around the refrain that was pounding in my head, the one that had been with me a thousand different ways since the ride in the ambulance: Nothing is going to be the same ever again.

In Defense of Pessimism

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Under Pressure

"Sometimes I feel like a basket case," a friend of mine confided yesterday morning.  This is a man I have always known, over the several weeks we have been acquainted, to be confident and self-controlled.  Lately, he's had more than a few challenges thrown his way, and he has been feeling the strain.  When I told him I had always admired him for his strength, he was a bit skeptical.  I stood my ground, though.  After all, he has told me over and over again how strong I am, and I don't think of myself as strong at all.  I reckon turnabout is fair play.

I've been getting a lot of that lately, from my family and friends.  Everyone seems to think I'm tremendously strong.  I'd love to know what they see that I don't.  All I know is that I'm the first to concede in any argument, I spent my childhood getting picked on by the kids everyone else picked on, and I recently got out of a relationship with a partner who hit me twice and berated me constantly - but I got out only because she dumped me.  Apparently, when the going gets tough, the tough resort to appeasement gestures.  And when the going gets really tough, they curl up under furniture in the fetal position.

But maybe that's the thing about strength: it doesn't matter how strong you are until push comes to shove and you're already feeling the strain.  Think about an Olympic weightlifter.  He braces himself physically before he picks up the weight, then takes a few deep breaths before lifting it slowly from the ground.  As he brings the weight higher, he makes whatever minor alterations or corrections are necessary in his posture, his grip.  He feels himself fighting the force of gravity, wrestling deep in his muscles with the very laws of nature.  The sweat of exertion beads on his forehead.  His teeth are clenched; his breaths are heavy and loud and sometimes come out as involuntary groans.  The sinews in his arms, working at full capacity, scream achingly for relief.  But the athlete focuses away from the pain of the moment, letting his goal push all other thoughts from his mind.  And when he finally does set down the weight with one last loud gasp, the cheers of the crowd ringing in his ears, he finds himself the holder of a new world record.

Now, I have experienced all those things myself: the sweat, the ache, the clenched teeth.  But the burden I struggled to carry - a large box of books, perhaps - was a mere fraction of the weight our athlete had to lift.  If the athlete had been there to carry my books for me, he would have swept them up easily, made it seem effortless.  There would be nothing in his demeanor that would suggest he was performing what would be, for me, a tremendous feat of strength.  In testing his own limits, though, he feels and shows the strain.  The moment in which he performs his most difficult feat, one that most of us could never hope to achieve, is the moment in which he struggles as much as I do just moving the couch to vacuum under it.

It is not the lack of stress in our lives that determines our mental fortitude, but the amount of stress we are able to endure without breaking.  The more pressure there may be on us, the more we show the strain: anxious, fretting, irritable, skittish, self-indulgent, and cowering, in whatever combination suits our temperament and condition.  These are not symptoms of weakness, but the manifestations of strength in action.

Through a Glass, Bluely

Down the street and around the corner from my home, there's a face on the sidewalk. I first noticed it two or three months ago. Out for a walk, I thought I saw the moon, nearly full, hanging low and orange among the trees. I wanted to see it better, to get out from under the trees for a clear view. The trouble is, I live in a city that takes special pride in its tree-lined streets - a beautiful place to live, but far from ideal for stargazing. As I ventured through the quiet neighborhood to the nearest main avenue, I lost sight of the moon, and finally found myself wondering if it was only a streetlight I had seen among the dark treetops. As I headed for home, a streetlight that had blinked off came suddenly back on, and there, on the sidewalk in front of me, I saw the face in the streetlight's orange glow.

It was the face, maybe a little larger than life, of a man of African heritage. He seemed to be speaking, and there was passion and enthusiasm in his features. I thought perhaps I ought to recognize him. The image seemed to have been rendered in black spray paint, using a stencil. Night after night, it became part of my routine to go around the corner and see the face on the sidewalk.

Then, for the first time, I went to see the face in daylight. To my astonishment, although it still appeared to have been spray-painted onto the sidewalk with a stencil, the face wasn't black at all. It was a bright, vivid blue. How had I not noticed?

The answer to that is simple enough: the paint on the sidewalk reflects blue light, causing it to register as blue to the human eye. However, the light from the streetlamp was in the red-green portion of the visible spectrum. The reason I didn't see any blue when I saw the face in the glow of the streetlight was that there wasn't any blue to reflect.

If, instead of the face, I had caught a clear glimpse of the moon I was originally chasing after, I would still have experienced deception by my own senses. The moon famously appears larger when it's close to the horizon than when it's high in the sky, even though it is actually the same size.

Through the middle of July, there was a special issue of Scientific American Mind on newstands, all about optical illusions and the science of visual perception. Even if you aren't interested in brain science, this one is worth picking up just to look at the pictures. All the old favorites are here (afterimage tricks, parallel lines that seem to tilt toward each other, the impossible triangle) as well as some you've surely never seen before - including numerous winners of an annual "Best Illusion" contest - perhaps the only art competition in the world in which the winners' trophies are as much fun to look at as their entries. (This year's winner couldn't be featured in the magazine, but it's certainly worth a look. I guarantee you'll want to watch the video more than once.)

There are sixteen pages of illusions that take advantage of the neurological mechanisms that recognize and interpret faces and the direction of eye gaze. The secret of Mona Lisa's smile is revealed, and the reader is treated to a truly two-faced Paris Hilton, an Einstein that morphs into Harry Potter, and some creepy variants of Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. Eight pages about a select group of brilliant artists who specialize in making three-dimensional images of famous two-dimensional illusions (including a Lego reproduction of Escher's Ascending and Descending) are, alone, enough to justify the purchase price of the magazine. (If you're an Escher fan, visit the downloads page at the official Escher site to enjoy computer-generated virtual tours of Ascending and Descending and two of the artist's other works.)

One of the most intriguing, and unsettling, articles in the magazine is "Colors Out of Space," a glimpse into color-perception illusions that drives home just what a fickle and easily deceived thing the human brain is. So much of what we see is context-dependent. A pair of pictures, side by side, depicts the same Rubik's Cube, bathed apparently in yellow light on the left and in blue on the right. But it turns out that the parts of the cube that appear blue in the yellow picture and those that appear yellow in the blue picture are both printed in the same shade of gray. The brain essentially filters out the yellow or blue to compensate for the color of the lighting, and so the same color stimulus is interpreted differently based on the colors around it. Likewise, the squares that appear red in both pictures are printed in orange on the left, purple on the right. The brain filters out the yellow and blue and is left with what apppears to be the same shade of red in both pictures. What's truly unnerving about illusions such as these is that, even when you know how they work, you can't not see them. You see blue and yellow and red, not gray and orange and purple. If you isolate the colors by blocking out the rest of the image, you can prove to yourself that the authors' claims are accurate - but view the image as a whole again, and once more, your brain deceives you. Deception is possible even when the cube is depicted under white light. The center square of the brightly-lit top of the cube appears brown; the center square of the side of the cube facing the viewer, which lies in shadow, appears to be orange. Of course, they're actually printed in the same color. (You can see the blue- and yellow-lit versions of the cube about two-thirds of the way down the page here.)

The brain is a marvelous instrument. The neurological processes behind optical illusions are crucial in interpreting the world around us in meaningful ways. The reason that we can't recognize the actual colors used in printing the Rubik's illusion is the same reason that we are able to recognize the faces of our friends, by sunlight or by moonlight or under colored spotlights on the dance floor. More important than merely translating the wavelengths of light that hit the back of the retina into our personal language of color and shadow is the process of interpreting what it is that we see, in such a way that we can navigate our surroundings, seek out what is beneficial, and avoid what might cause us harm. Our brains must interpret the world in realtime, in greater detail than any computer rendering - and they do it excellently. Just as any complex computer program can be pushed to its limits, however, our brains find themselves struggling when they must interpret data that don't fit the established rules - and we are reminded that everything we know and believe about the world is filtered through the same marvelous but imperfect instruments of perception.

The Five Stages of Heartbreak

Note: A playlist of songs that illustrate the topics I have discussed in this piece may be found here.

Just like any other kind of grief, the period of mourning after the loss of a relationship is a journey with many facets and stages. The Kübler-Ross model of "five stages of grief" is so well known as to be almost a matter of cliche in any discussion of loss. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - they may not go in exactly that order, and not everyone will go through every stage every time, but, in all their variety, these are the accoutrements of mourning. They come and go, shift back and forth amongst each other with gentle ease or crushing suddenness.

Of course you sink into denial when it ends. Of course you do. There's no way she really means it, right? You've come to this point before, or close enough anyway, and you always found your way back, didn't you? This is just going to make the two of you stronger in the end. You'll go to counseling together. You'll change. She'll change. But really, this is going to be good for you. It can't go on forever. There really can't be such a thing as "never again." Once you've suffered enough to really drive home how much she means to you and how wrong you were and how it all could have been different, she'll call and ask you to come back. The Powers that Be wouldn't really make you suffer longer than necessary, would they? They're only making you go through this so that this time, you really, really learn your lesson. Really, really, really. And then one day it hits you: she's really, really, really gone. And your future lies ahead of you, hours and hours and hours of it, years and decades of your life in which there is only one certainty: she's not there. Then you cry with a violence you'd almost forgotten you had in you, until your body shakes with every sob and your eyes are so red from weeping, they'll still be sore tomorrow. You finally fall asleep from sheer exhaustion. And when you wake up, you try not to, but you can't help but think: Maybe she'll call me today, maybe, maybe . . .

And sometimes she doesn't call, even though you have business to settle, for crying out loud, and you can't do this on your own, and the tension of not knowing what she's thinking and doing is unbearable. Then she calls, and you wish she hadn't. She's angry. You didn't do a damn thing right. You made promises you didn't keep. You're immature, you're lazy, you're just plain sick. You've been selfish, totally selfish all along, and she wouldn't trust you as far as she can throw you, and she can't bother trying to help you right now, she just has to look out for herself, and try to put her life back together after everything you've done to her. She won't hear a word you have to say, she hardly even pauses for breath. There's no reason you should have to listen to this, except that you do have to. When she's said everything she has to say, after one last biting imprecation, she hangs up. And suddenly you're angry too. You were trying to work this out amicably. She didn't have any legal right to put you out of the apartment, but for her sake, you went. You're letting her keep some of the furniture your family bought for you, without compensation, because she needs it more than you do. You've worn yourself into the ground trying to please her, sacrificed and made concessions right and left which she either doesn't acknowledge or doesn't think you have any right to feel so strongly about, unlike the brutally painful concessions she made for you. Maybe you're being unfair, but you don't care. She's being unfair too. So there. You don't need her. Good riddance. Well, you love her, but . . . so what. Good riddance. Or something.

Sooner or later, you get to the bargaining stage. If you have any sense, you'll bargain with God. Turn her heart toward me, God, and I'll do anything. Just say the word. You can make me die horribly in five years, or five minutes even, just let me spend the rest of my sorry little life with her. I'll move a mountain one grain of sand at a time, or swim from Alaska to Antarctica naked, or donate both my kidneys without anesthesia. Just please, please, God, let her love me again. But that's only if you're smart. If you're not, which of course you won't be, you'll attempt to bargain with her instead. I promise I'll eat lots of green vegetables and never touch a Caramello. I'll give away all my books, I'll stop writing in my journal what I did every minute of the day. I'll get a job, I'll go to school, I'll volunteer somewhere. I'll get therapy. I'll be an extrovert, I'll be a morning person, I'll be domestic. We can have big breakfast parties every day and I'll do all the cooking and wash the dishes too! Of course, that's not what you say, but it's what's in your heart, and the things you really do say are almost as pathetic. We could have made it work. I swear we could. If we'd had a bigger apartment, if we'd had separate bedrooms, if we hadn't rushed into getting the apartment, if we'd gone to couples counseling. If I were somebody else. We could have made it work. Right? Right?

Of course, she turns down your bargains, every time. Sometimes gently, regretfully, but other times with vicious honesty. This time, when you sink down to the couch and let the tears flow, no one knows. You are sad, and it's not a quiet and gentle sort of melancholy, but a gnawing agony in your vitals. In between disasters, you can never quite recall how awful it's possible for a human being to feel. Surely nothing was ever this terrible before? It was never this hard to breathe, was it? You were never so paralyzed and terrified by your pain that you shuddered at the thought of being in a dim room and you felt near panic at the thought of complete darkness; you were never so sick at heart you felt sick thinking of taking in a little water, let alone food. Nothing was ever this bad. Or was it? You may have thought it was at the time, but surely nothing could be worse than this? Because this really won't ever end. You thought last time that your pain wouldn't end, and it did, more or less, fading away to a sweet and wise little ache you barely notice unless the wind blows just so. But this time it won't ever end. Everyone says it will, but it won't. You know because you know because you know. You don't want it to end. You don't want to hurt like this, but you don't want to move on from it either. Not without her. Because moving on would make it too real. Moving on means you have a future without her. All you know is that you'll never love again. Not like this. Not if it means there's even the slightest chance you might have to hurt this way again. How could you have thought the risk was worth the pain? No, from now on your heart will be in your own safekeeping. Unless she decides she wants it back.

Then, one day . . . acceptance. Of course, the first time it isn't really acceptance at all, just a numb kind of denial. In a stupor, between crying jags, you let the hours carry you on . . . and suddenly it happens. Your life becomes interesting to you again. You laugh at a funny movie. The first time it happens, you bite your lip, hang your head, and feel disloyal. But then one day, you realize after you've been reading for a while that you were really enjoying the book, not just immersing yourself in a distraction. You go out with a friend you haven't seen in a while, and spend most of the evening talking about something else. You decide maybe you like yourself better the way you are than the way she wanted you to be. You start browsing the local community college's course catalog. You take an interest in something new - text adventures and Flash games, the Forer effect, chronobiology. You can conceive of living a good life without her in it.

Perhaps.

Someday.