Really Good, Actually(12)
We consulted Lauren’s colleague’s crowdfunding page and had to admit the man knew his angles. I mentally bookmarked a lying down/side twist pretzel thing he was doing. Lauren said crowdfunding was a “slippery slope,” and that probably we as a species had experienced “all the web series we could ever need about white people doing polyamory,” and that if you weren’t careful someone you went to elementary school with would be asking you for twelve dollars a month to make feminist watercolors. Emotional Lauren said she’d probably buy a feminist watercolor, then we all got distracted because someone we didn’t like had posted a series of bizarre engagement photos on Instagram. A small fight erupted when Lauren pointed out that Amirah’s Tom posts were only a few degrees off the photo set we’d scrolled through, featuring the bride-to-be mostly submerged in a lake, her future husband wading in to rescue her, King Arthur in a polo shirt. After we’d all been unequivocally bitchy for an hour or so, I explained “haha, so what” to the group, with an emphasis on how liberated I was feeling.
“I used to be so preoccupied with what I looked like or what people thought of me,” I said. “But the other day, I went to a coffee shop in old pajamas and last night’s makeup, and when I ran into someone from work, I simply told them I was having a hard time. It was very freeing.” I wrapped a cheese cube in salami and popped it into my mouth. When nobody asked a follow-up question, I continued: “It’s good! It’s like, I don’t need to dig my own grave to know that ultimately, nothing is that important and we all die alone. I don’t know why you guys are being so serious about this. I mean it in like, a fun way.”
My friends looked more skeptical than they had about the spit potion, but I was undaunted. I told them the stakes of being alive had been pleasantly lowered, since nothing could be as disastrous as this breakup, and that I’d been sleeping better—in fact, sleeping often—and eating with less worry about things like nutritional value or whether I’d be exercising later.
I felt pleasantly disconnected from everything around me, as though observing life underwater, which allowed me to take my time before responding to stressors and to fret less about the things that were ultimately insignificant. I was sure this was the way forward and happy to have finally gotten here, even if I had to undergo a traumatic event to do so. Everyone listened carefully, nodding like a group of NPR hosts. Lauren dipped an endive in yogurt, wiped the side of her mouth, and said politely, curiously, “Isn’t that, like, exactly how people describe depression?”
After they left, I piled the dishes in the sink alongside the ones from yesterday and the day before. The night had been mostly wonderful, and it was reassuring to have the house feel full again. I imagined the upstairs neighbors poking each other with excitement: No Kate Bush tonight! And is that . . . the laughter of others? Still, I was frustrated by what Lauren had said about my new outlook. It didn’t feel like depression. It felt like burrowing down in a positive way. The next day, I cleared out the self-help section of the used bookstore down the street, working my way through my purchases with a pen, underlining passages and annotating the margins with !!!s, ????s, and YOU DO NOT NEED TO ASK PERMISSIONs. Everything felt heightened: making tea was a ritual, the time I spent ignoring work emails was sacred, buying a garish lipstick I would never use was an important act of self-care.
Summer carried on. I worked from home and allowed myself to rest and tried almost aggressively to let the soft animal of my body love what it loved, which mostly at that point was potatoes. I spent distracted time with the self-help authors, agreeing furiously with whatever was in front of me and forgetting it moments later. I almost booked a spot on a ten-day silent retreat dozens of times. The collages got weird, and I hung them up around my house, thinking, This is good. I am building a temple to my grief. And then thinking, oh, for god’s sake, but leaving them there anyway. I subscribed to a lot of newsletters about feelings.
One day after some particularly intense decoupage, I looked down and noticed my hands. Noticing Things had become a major pastime of mine. I’d noticed, recently: that coffee was warm, that sunlight was bright, and that I felt sad. This morning, I noticed my hands and had a thought that had become increasingly frequent in recent years: my mother was right. This time, she was right about the hands themselves. They were exactly her hands. The brittle, nubby nails and the too-long-to-be-stubby, too-short-to-be-elegant length of the fingers, the soft knuckles and small palms.
My mother pointed this out often in my teen years, gasping and holding up her hand against mine. “Look at that,” she’d say, as if suddenly remembering that this person in her kitchen was someone she’d made with her own body. “There they are.”
I hadn’t paid much attention to it. I was very busy deciding how to get my hands and the rest of me looking as terrible as possible, using Wite-Out as nail polish and scribbling absolute nonsense all over my arms and palms so that a boy who talked about pop punk too much might one day talk too much about pop punk to me. I hadn’t paid enough attention to that or anything else my mom had said when I was young.
And so, that night, I wrote her an email. It was long and emotional and mostly about our hands. I told her I loved seeing mine and remembering they were hers too—that she had made them and, with her own hands, had raised me and fed me and shaped me into a person. As I wrote it, I imagined her being moved by my honesty, my eloquence and gratitude. I pictured her finishing the email, taking a minute, and thinking, you know, she was more difficult than her sister, but she turned out okay. Finally I know for sure that she understands everything I’ve done for her. I pictured her shedding a single tear. I pictured her looking up the word “inchoate” in a dictionary. I meant everything I said in the email and took pains to express it clearly and with maximum emotional impact.