by Julie Barton
Big-city culture shock and this difficult breakup made it clear that there was something else very wrong with me. It wasn’t just that I was young, insecure, naïve, and heartbroken. It wasn’t just that my boyfriend had chosen other women and his band over me. There was something dark and immovable churning inside my mind.
My roommate, Leah, had left Manhattan a few weeks prior to the day this story starts, and at the time, I was sure her swift departure was my fault. We’d met in college and roomed together in New York—not because we were great friends, but because the timing was right. She was graceful, beautiful, small, and blonde with deep-set azure eyes. She also had a boyfriend who’d graduated a year before her and lived in the city. After a few months in Manhattan, they broke up too, but she seemed fine. She went on with her life as if the breakup was his loss. When Will and I broke up, I turned lovelorn. I obsessed about his life, what he did, who he was with, which rendered me distracted and inconsistent, terrible qualities for a friend.
I woke up blinded, unable to see anything except dull gray. I put my hands in front of my face to see if my vision really was gone. My fingers barely appeared through a thick fog. I coughed hard. My lungs seemed filled with hot cotton. There was a bleak smell, like lit charcoal. I waved my arm, and the back of my knuckles hit the refrigerator. There was the drip that didn’t belong.
I smelled smoke. I fumbled from the refrigerator to the stove, wheezing now. If my apartment had an operative smoke alarm, it would have been blaring. I turned off the burner and listened to the pot crackle before I lay down and fell back into the darkness.
When I awoke, the sun was shining. Cars were honking. Morning.
Home. I need to call home.
Through a still smoky haze, I became aware that I was sobbing. I’d been on the kitchen floor all night. I coughed and wheezed. My teeth clenched. The sorrow rushed in so fiercely that I imagined it might vaporize me, burst me into millions of tiny molecules. The terrible, lonely, indescribable feeling that had lingered just beneath my skin for so long had finally taken over. As I wept, the thoughts came: You’re so stupid. Get up and go to work like everyone else in the world. What makes you think you’re so special that you get to lie on the floor all day?
I woke again, no memory of falling asleep. I crawled across the floor, one elbow at a time, stopping to cry and cough, then tumble back into slumber. Sleep came as such a blessing. I was so tired.
Mid-morning, with the smoke mostly dissipated, I reached the phone. I slept with the receiver cradled on my chest and startled awake when it screeched off the hook. I pressed the button, heard a dial tone, and called my mom at work. She was a high school teacher. I rarely called her at school, but left a message with the secretary. “Please tell her it’s her daughter, and it’s an emergency.”
I shocked awake when the phone rang.
“Mom?” I said, my voice raspy from smoke.
“Julie? What’s wrong?” she said. She waited. “Julie?” she said again, already nearing panic. Her tone came as a panacea. Someone cared. Thank God someone cared.
“Something happened,” I said. I choked out a loud sob. “I think I had a breakdown or something.” I lay in a nearly empty apartment with tangled hair and dark-circled eyes, and weakened legs that wouldn’t stand. I had a tightness in my chest. I wanted to end my life.
“I’m coming to get you,” she said. “I’m getting in the car. I’ll be there in nine hours. You’re coming home.” I let go of the phone and it skidded across the floor.
“Thank you, Mama,” I whispered, and drifted back to sleep.
My mom has since told me that she walked straight into her principal’s office and said, “I need to leave. It’s a family emergency.” She raced home, packed a bag, and started the nine-hour drive from Columbus, Ohio, to Manhattan. Worry kept her awake until about halfway through Pennsylvania. When she nearly fell asleep at the wheel, she exited the highway and checked into a motel, slept in her clothes, and called at 7 a.m. to tell me that she would be at my apartment before noon. “You’re coming home,” she said, again. I wasn’t about to argue.
I was twenty-two, one year out of college, full of promise yet unable to function. I have since learned to call this feeling depression, but then I had no name for it. It was a presence, a haunting, and it had taken over. It squatted on my chest, telling me to do everyone a favor and just go.
• • •
As far as we can tell, based on American Kennel Club (AKC) records and old journals, the day I gave in to the sorrow was the same spring day that Bunker Hill was born. He was a tiny golden retriever puppy, birthed on a small family farm in central Ohio. He was one of seven in the litter, not the biggest, not the runt. He entered this world inside a laundry room, on old towels that smelled like Tide and wet dog. There was a lady there, though he couldn’t see or hear her, only smell her skin. Bunker entered the world helpless and nearly inert, until his mama, big, red, gentle, and dutiful, licked him clean and he took his first breath. He was healthy male number two, a furry mass of longing and need. He was blind and deaf and toothless, unable to regulate his body temperature, unable to even relieve himself without his mama’s stimulation. He wasn’t anything but a wiggly worm of a pup, eyes closed, ears not grown. He searched desperately for his mother, for her nourishment, her touch, her warmth and care.
Just like me.
VERY SPECIAL ME, OHIO
FALL 1982
I still have a journal that my parents gave me for my ninth birthday. It was one of the first places I looked for messages from my childhood after collapsing on the floor in New York. The journal was called Very Special Me: A Book About Myself from Head to Toe. The book’s bright-yellow cover had a smiling unisex kid holding a paintbrush. After my last birthday party guest left, I rushed to my bedroom to begin writing my fill-in-the-blank autobiography. I snuggled in my bed and wrote that my hair was the color of straw and my eyes were like brownies. I said that my favorite color was green. My favorite TV shows were Fame and Smurfs, and my favorite books were Charlotte’s Web and The Wind in the Willows. I wrote that on rainy days, I liked to write and sleep.
The book’s page about feelings said, “I have a lot of different feelings . . .” I filled in the blanks.
I’m really happy when my dad’s happy.
I’m really sad when I’m alone.
I feel mad when my brother teases me.
And I really feel hurt when my brother hurts me.
I drew a small frowning face with two teardrops coming out of each blackened eye. I wrote, “I can count to eight without blinking and my dog is beautiful and bruises are ugly.”
By then I had a lot of bruises. They were on my arms, mostly. My brother’s favorite place to hit me was on my upper arms, but I also had marks on my legs where he would kick me or toss a chair in my path. The hitting came sporadically and usually when we were alone. When my parents weren’t around he’d hiss, “Loser. Look at you and your ugly face.” He’d fake a punch and laugh when I flinched. Those fake punches left me nervous and jangled.
Many older brothers are mean and unhappy. I didn’t think it was out of the ordinary that mine called me names: bitch, whore, loser, idiot, ugly, weirdo, fuck-face. And he hit me. Hard. He spit in my face. He pushed me down. He stepped on me. He pulled my hair. He chased me with knives. I didn’t understand that Clay was struggling. I thought that this was how all older brothers behaved. I didn’t know that our father’s long hours at work affected him, or that our mother’s emotional disconnectedness left him adrift. I just knew that he hated me, that I could do nothing right in his presence, that I was unsafe in my own home. It didn’t help that I was an intensely sensitive kid. I imagined that my stuffed animals had feelings, so I read them Beatrix Potter books and then gently tucked them in bed.
Once, Clay pushed me so hard that I ricocheted against a wall and then fell headfirst into a hinge on our laundry roo
m door. He pushed me because I asked, one too many times, which girl he and his friend thought was the prettiest in the 1983 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, the one with Cheryl Tiegs on the cover, leaning into a waterfall in a nearly transparent white one-piece bathing suit.
My dad heard the crash and came running from his office to find me lying unconscious in a pool of blood. I woke disoriented, my father hovering over me, yelling, panicked. He carried me to the car and raced to an emergency room where the loveliest nurse held my hand as a female doctor with a brown ponytail sewed five stitches into my head. I remember thinking that those women glowed like angels. When we got home, my father screamed at Clay behind locked doors, and I felt responsible. I shouldn’t have bothered him and his friend. I wanted my father to stop yelling, because soon, I knew, Dad would go back to work and I’d be defenseless again, with an even angrier foe.
The scar has since healed into a pink crescent moon on my right temple, the opening like a slow leak that drained me of hope, self-love, and faith. I’ve spent countless hours trying to sort out my sibling relationship both in therapy and in writing. I have tried to understand where my parents were during these attacks and why they weren’t helping.
My father worked extraordinarily long hours as a litigator in a firm in downtown Columbus. Money always seemed tight, so his work was paramount. Our family’s mood fluctuated with his stress. If he had a big trial coming up, we were not to bother him. If he lost his most recent case, we were also not to bother him. He did not have time to pay attention to what he perceived as inconsequential sibling squabbles. He grew up an only child, had no familial comparison against which to gauge his children’s battles. When, as an adult, I asked him why he didn’t help us, he said that he wasn’t around to see much of the drama, and that he honestly did not know that our rivalry was that bad.
My mom couldn’t handle us. She said that, growing up, she and her two sisters fought, but it was over things like hair curlers, and they rarely raised a hand to each other. This was new territory for her, too. Her approach to our dysfunctional relationship was to simply hope for the best. She would try to pretend that things were fine. Maybe then, she reasoned, they would be. She sometimes left the room when we started physically fighting. When I was an adult, she told me that once she hid under the bed during a particularly bad fight. She said that she’d seen on a TV talk show—maybe Phil Donahue—that siblings fight for their parents’ attention. If the parents aren’t around, they said, the kids won’t fight. I can’t help but picture my mother rolling under the bed as I got pummeled a few rooms away. She was trying to do the right thing.
I understood early on that my parents felt ill-equipped to deal with our rivalry, and that I was on my own. I know now that the reasons Clay hurt me are his alone. He has since apologized in a way that is both sincere and distant. He feels bad, but the fact that he doesn’t recall many of the incidents between us that are seared in my memory makes me wonder if his trauma was so deep that his mind has erased his past, or worse, if I’m remembering it wrong. Which is why I still finger the crescent moon scar on my right temple. It’s proof that this happened, that I was hurt. Of course, it’s possible that I would’ve become depressed around age twenty-two even if I’d grown up with no childhood trauma. Most cases of mental illness start in the late teen years and culminate in the early twenties, so I was right on time.
The moon on the day of my birth, October 1, 1973, was a crescent moon, waxing, its bulbous surface 24 percent visible from earth, the exact shape and size of the scar on my temple. This is how I am certain that this sibling trauma is part of my story to tell. But these stories push and pull at me and leave me mercurial and conflicted. One minute I feel deep empathy for my brother, who must have been hurting terribly. The next minute I am furious: deep-down, want-to-smash-something enraged. Why did no one help me?
Of course, I didn’t yet understand, when I was lying on the floor in Manhattan, how any of this had affected me. I simply thought that I was weak and stupid. As I broke down on that kitchen floor, I was divorced from my brain—just a pinging signal in there—bouncing back and forth between expectation and demand, not at all connected to the little girl buried under all that dark and heavy moon dust.
QUARTER ECLIPSE, NEW YORK CITY
APRIL 17, 1996
I woke disoriented. My head pounded. It took me several seconds to realize that the phone was ringing. I crawled to it and pushed the answer button. “Hello?”
“Hi, honey,” my mother said, her voice its usual singsong. “I’m just east of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I’m fueling up and I’ll be there by noon.”
“Okay,” I said, my voice hoarse.
“I’ll see you really soon,” she said. “Start packing. You’re coming home.”
I heard the phone disconnect. I wanted to ask her what time it was. Morning? Night?
I woke again. This kind of falling asleep was like fainting. There was no warning; here one minute, gone the next with no inkling of how long I’d been away. Waking up proved a perpetual disorientation, but now I had to pee. I sat up slowly. The room spun. This room, that I’d planned to use as my living room after Leah left, held nothing but a dresser that I’d salvaged from the street and a phone base dangling from a kinked wire. The singed pan squatted on the tiny stove; the ripped-open pasta box littered the counter.
Sitting up made me see stars and blue spots. I sat, legs straight out, hands limp, until the roaring in my ears stopped. My skin squeaked on the floor. I pushed myself up, ass high in the air, wobbly, like a drunkard. I leaned, winded, against the brick wall. The thoughts in my head that I did not yet recognize said: You are stupid and weak. You are fat and ugly and you can’t handle anything. This whole apartment can’t wait for you to take your terrible energy and go. Thoughts become beliefs—and I believed I was worthless. I believed that inanimate spaces hated me. These thoughts were as normal to me as hunger pangs or fatigue, simply part of my being.
Eventually I made it down the stairs into the shower with one urgent thought: My mom would be knocking on the door in a few hours. I didn’t want her to see how bad it really was.
In the shower, the water on my face felt like an angel’s hands. I was so grateful for the touch that I began to weep. Then the crying became strange: jagged and shrieking. Because what kind of person imagines that water is an angel running her fingers through her hair? I knew what kind of person imagined that—an insane person. A person bound for life with a garbage bag coat, urine-soaked pants, and a shopping cart for a bank account.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I saw the me that was really me, the little orb of untouched soul deep in there, and she was giving up. All I heard from inside the water was, “Let go. Just let go. It’s too hard. It’s time to let go.”
So I began to do exactly that. I sat on the floor of the shower and howled. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I’d lost my boyfriend, yes. I was bored at my job, yes. My friends were sick of my malaise, yes. But those problems did not warrant this kind of agony. I began to contemplate the relief of ending my life.
For years I had worked to build an emotional dam to fend off the sorrow. But somehow, after college, it was as if a bigger crack in my temple had developed. The moon was waxing. I hated to be looked at. Riding the subway to work every day was torturous because of all the eyes. So many eyes. The terrible thoughts in my head convinced me that everyone looked at me with disgust.
The door’s buzzer woke me. I had once again fallen into sleep like an untethered astronaut drifting into space. I shivered, failing to stay warm under my scratchy old bath towel with the blue and red sailboats. The buzzer squawked again, relentless. I sat up, my naked body heavy, and climbed the stairs clutching the damp towel to my chest. The buzzer blared and I wanted to yell that I was coming, but I didn’t have enough air or energy or will.
I pushed the button to unlock the building’s front door. Then I und
id all four locks, my eyes barely opened. I knew that this moment was a turning point. When I let my mother in, I was going to give up and go back to Ohio. I would leave behind any hope of reuniting with Will, the man I thought I needed. I would give up on life in New York. I might even give up on living.
• • •
On April 17, 1996, the second day of Bunker’s life and my second day on the floor, there was a partial solar eclipse. The moon passed between the sun and the earth, obscuring the light. Though only visible from the deepest reaches of the southern hemisphere, the moon, always my ally, was blocking the sun, allowing for darkness.
No light for me. No light for Bunker, whose eyes were not yet open. Like round pegs sliding into round holes, darkness was our meeting place, our psychic gathering spot. We didn’t know it, but we were, at the dark moment when the moon slid over the sun, beginning the long and difficult rest that would precede our union, and the light.
SUBURBAN GRAFFITI, OHIO
1983
I was ten, my brother thirteen, and we were fighting again. He chased me down the hallway to my bedroom. I leapt into my bedroom, breathless. There was just enough time to slam the door and lock it. I climbed on my bed and scooted back into the corner as he reached my door and began pounding. He kicked it and it wobbled, echoing with a strange, hollow sound—like a slide guitar. He punched the door and it rattled so hard that the wall behind my head shook.
“Open the fucking door!” he screamed. I pulled my knees to my chest, pressed my back into the corner, and watched my door shiver under the weight of his force. I don’t remember why he was so mad. My mom was home but outside raking leaves. My dad was at work.
