Choose Your Own Disaster

by Dana Schwartz

  The truth is you don’t really know why you’re crying. You just cry now, almost all the time, and for no reason. It’s as though a reservoir of tears had been accumulating for a drought throughout your entire body and now some lazy intern at the water reservoir has accidentally leaned on the OPEN DAM lever.

  That had happened once your senior year of high school. You had locked the bathroom door mostly to be dramatic, but when you heard your parents murmuring on the other side about breaking it down, you forced yourself up from the floor, clicked the lock open, and returned again to the tile before they could get in, as if the door had been unlocked the entire time. You’re still sobbing.

  “Do we take her to the hospital?” your mom asked.

  You sobbed louder. You didn’t want to go to the hospital. If you didn’t do anything, if you just stayed there sobbing on the floor, then they couldn’t take you to the hospital.

  Your dad tried to help you up and you liquidated your muscles like a rag doll.

  “Nooooooooooooo,” you managed to get out between gasps.

  “What do we do?” your parents asked each other.

  “Noooooooooooooo,” you moaned, and your sobs became even louder. You were making a spectacle of yourself and you didn’t know why. It was as if the black pit of teenage angst in your soul could be excised like a demon if you cried loud enough and long enough and acted like enough of a hassle to everyone in your life so that they would eventually have to leave you alone. It was only when your dad managed to pick you up and began to pull you down the stairs (“Don’t hurt your back, Michael!”) that you realized they did intend to put you in the car and bring you to the hospital and that that was something you wanted to avoid at all costs.

  You were still sobbing but the words you were able to garble out through the snot changed: “Please, no, no, no. I’m better now. I’ll do whatever you want.” Over and over again. “Please, no, no, no. I’m better now. I’ll do whatever you want.” You will see as many doctors as it takes. You will eat the Mallomar cookies and glasses of whole milk your parents carefully set in front of you. You will get fat; you don’t care: You hereby renounce ownership of your body. You were contemplating killing yourself. Becoming pliable to whatever recovery efforts your parents hoist onto your person can’t be worse. In that moment, when you were eighteen, you felt so certain that you would recover. But an hour later, when the crying dried up and you got the oxygen back to your brain, that certainty had evaporated. Recovery felt a thousand miles away, uphill across a gravelly desert with no rest stops along the way and no cell signal. Your parents let you go to college because by then you seemed fine. Sometimes you were fine, but fine is not the same as better.

  You know the animated Beauty and the Beast movie you watched over and over as a kid? Remember how even though it was the Beast who turned away the enchantress-beggar woman back when he was a prince, she punished everyone who worked for him too? The Beast got turned into a Beast, which was bad, yeah, but at least his general shape was humanoid. His servants became clocks and chairs and flatware, which never seemed fair; they didn’t do anything wrong and now the Beast (did he ever get a name?), whose fault all of this was to begin with, gets to wear clothes and eat at the table and in general enjoy a basically human existence just with a little more fur and much bigger muscles while they’re trying to figure out how a candlestick is supposed to go upstairs. But they don’t leave the house. They don’t revolt or band together or form a new furniture-only government. They just keep on being servants, doing the best they can as goddamn furniture, serving the guy who got them turned into furniture and who has been making no effort to unturn them into furniture. Just leave! you wanted to shout through the screen. Why are you serving him food?? They’re just going about their normal routines as if they don’t realize they’re now goddamn pieces of wood and metal. It makes no sense. Anyway. That’s what being depressed is like. For some reason, you’ve transformed into this inanimate object version of yourself and everyone else seems to be functioning perfectly normally, keeping jobs and falling in love and passing tests and they expect you to do the same. “But I’m a coffee table now!” you want to shout. “There’s no way that I, a coffee table, can get out of bed to study for a bio exam. That’s not a thing coffee tables are capable of doing!”

  And then someone who is not a coffee table will say something like, “My cousin started running marathons, and it made her mornings so much more productive. Honestly, I feel like if you could just start training, even twenty minutes a day, your sleep would improve; your mood would be better—it’s like magic.”

  “But I am a coffee table!” you want to shout back into that person’s smug, stupid face. “I cannot do the thing you are telling me to do!”

  But instead you nod seriously and say, “Oh, totally,” and then go about your life trying as best you can to do the things a human is supposed to do even though you aren’t a human anymore.

  When you are forced again from the safety of the bathroom floor, they take you to see a psychiatrist who has pharmaceutical brand names on his pens and on his prescription pad. He meets with you for fifteen minutes, you and your mom in chairs opposite him at his desk, and then he hands you a fistful of Lexapro samples and an order for you to pick up more when you need them.

  The next psychiatrist will look at you aghast when you tell her what you’ve been taking. This one meets you at an office across the highway from an outdoor shopping mall. She shares this office with a marriage counselor and a child psychiatrist. There are always crying people in the waiting room flipping through weeks’ old issues of People magazine.

  The third one meets you in her living room. The fourth meets you in his basement. You try to remember why you’re going through this in the first place (it’s because you were having “suicidal ideations” on your bathroom floor). It all seems like such a hassle for things to feel like they’re barely getting better.

  The pills don’t affect you, not at first. You’re hypervigilant, waiting for the effects to kick in like the soundtrack of a movie—suddenly a rush of chemicals hits your brain and you’ll be happy. “It’s like the sun is always shining brighter,” your brother tells you when you come home bearing the crinkly pharmacy bag. He was on this brand of antidepressants, too, until he took himself off them cold turkey one night and ended up at the hospital in a panic attack so bad your parents thought he was dying. “I just prefer to feel like myself.”

  You still feel like yourself, at least for now. Taking these pills reminds you of the time you ate half of the pot brownie that a friend of a friend had sold you from his mini-fridge for $20. You log your thoughts like you’re a captain of a submarine marking the enemy position. Normal. Normal. Normal. Normal. Maybe waiting for something to change with a hypervigilance that negates any possible change. The pot brownie was a dull disappointment—not even dry mouth or a disorienting awareness of your thoughts being trapped in your head (you wonder now if they had been regular brownies all along).

  But after one day of forgetting to take your pill, you become irritable and moody. You snap at the people you love and lose focus at work, checking your phone every fifteen seconds like an animatronic Disney character on a loop, clawing at the Internet for validation and distraction. After two days, the brain zaps begin.

  You didn’t come up with that phrase, brain zaps. You found it on a website after you Googled “cymbalta withdrawal symptoms electric shock no pain.” It was right there, listed first among the grouping of likeliest side effects: brain zaps, irritability, nightmares and sleep disturbance, diarrhea, aggression. Seeing the seemingly inexplicable sensation explicated, neatly wrapped up into two words and offered emotionlessly on the Internet makes you less afraid. They say misery loves company—the same goes double for strange medical side effects.

  Because you’d been afraid, when the zaps first started, when one morning of running out the door and forgetting to take your pill had become two mornings, and you are sitting at a desk in
your Bio 0200 lecture and it suddenly feels as though your brain has dragged its feet along thick carpeting and then touched a doorknob. It’s painless—perhaps that’s the strangest part, that you get the sensation of an electric shock without any pain, leaving you unsure whether it actually happened, at least until the second and third zaps follow. When you try to describe it later to your mom (tentatively, casually, nonalarmist), it feels like trying to describe what “salty” tastes like. You’re fumbling with a new sensation and without the proper vocabulary. You are describing color to a blind man.

  Now that WebMD has given you the phrase brain zaps, you feel comfortably normal about it. It’s just one of those things that goes along with being one of those people who take antidepressant and antianxiety medication.

  And so you take the pills every day, right before you put on your deodorant (the irony there is if you forget one, it means you forget the other, and those days are both incredibly anxious and incredibly sweaty).

  You don’t cry anymore, but you don’t feel like yourself anymore either. So start again. Start from infancy, get better, and rebuild an identity for yourself.

  Who is your identity going to be?

  A. The coquette. You’re only young once, and you’re presumably never going to be as attractive as you are now. Put all of those tips you learned poring over Seventeen magazine as a teen to good use and actually flirt.

  Turn here.

  B. The adventurer. Who says you need to be divorced to pull an Eat Pray Love? You’re an upper-middle-class white lady. You can Eat Pray Love if you want to.

  Turn here.

  The next time Married Guy comes to Providence is during your senior year. The two of you take giant cups of tea to go from the coffee shop on the corner and walk the streets, talking mostly about how much you connected last time. Had it only been that once that we met? the two of you exclaimed. I feel as though I’ve known you forever. What a spark we felt. What magic.

  The casting works perfectly. Benedict Cumberbatch and a young American newcomer playing intellectual soul mates bound together by sexual chemistry and a mutual love of macabre steampunk as a ten- (er, fifteen) year age difference and a pesky marriage threaten to tear them apart. Doomed lovers from the start. It’s beautiful, in a certain way, if you can keep pretending that’s how it is.

  You talk about Night Vale again, and your crush on Neil Gaiman, and high-concept fantasy novels you’ve been meaning to read, but the conversation is so much more fun when it circles the drain, when you go back to your two-man Romeo + Juliet.

  Married Guy comes back to the apartment you share with five other people, and he stands in the kitchen drinking a beer, pretending you and he are just friends. He comes back to your room and sits on the bed, and then lies on the bed until you’re face-to-face and he leans in to kiss you. The temptation of him intoxicates you. You know how much he wants you, and this terrible game is more exciting than any you’ve ever played and now the two of you are kissing.

  It’s wet and amateurish. The explosion of fireworks, the swelling of a John Williams score never occurs. It’s just you and a thirtysomething man in your bed, awkwardly making out. But this is Married Guy, you think to yourself. Your doomed lover. There has to be something between you, or else what have you been talking about for the last two hours? When he pulls away, you surprise yourself with how much you want him to come back.

  “I love you,” he says.

  “This is crazy,” you say. “We’ve only met once before! We barely know each other.”

  “I feel like I know everything about you.”

  “Me too,” you say, and you think you’re telling the truth.

  He stands up and pulls on his pants. Somehow his pants had come off.

  “Stay,” you say.

  “I can’t,” he replies.

  You flip your hair as sexily as you can and arch your back.

  “I can’t,” he says again.

  “I love you, Married Guy,” you say, and with a pained, yearning glance, he leaves and says goodbye, that we’re going to have to try and be good.

  The next day, an email alerts you to the fact that he’s gifted you a song on iTunes, and then another. They’re mournful songs over techno beats, sung by warbling altos. One was called “Women Scorned.” Another had the lyrics “You’re no good for me, but baby I want you.” He sends you a song about a passenger making his last phone call aboard a crashing plane. You make a playlist and listen to them over and over again, persuading yourself to cry into your pillow for your love story cut short.

  He emails you two months later.

  I can’t stop thinking about you. I’m more than a little jealous keeping up with all of the exciting things you’re doing on Twitter (or seem to be doing? It’s hard to tell where online personas stop and real life begins). Last time I was in London, there was this graffiti I remember seeing scrawled in the men’s room of some pub:

  The legions of Lilith, thrown out of Eden to meet the Morning Star, for that is the land we inhabit.

  I don’t know why, but for some reason it makes me think of you. Anyway, this is a roundabout way of me saying I’m coming into town soon—beginning of October soon, and I was wondering if you might want to meet me for dinner.

  He signs the letter with love, and his first initial.

  What do you do?

  A. You don’t go. Of course you don’t. Your little fantasy has run its course, and it’s time for him to get back to his life of being the type of married thirtysomething who tells college kids he loves them. Say a silent prayer for his wife, and focus on healthy, tangible steps to make yourself happy instead of the brief, destructive ego boost that comes from his attention.

  Go back here.

  B. You go. You wear a fitted, long-sleeve top and a miniskirt with tights and boots with a stiletto heel even though it’s icy outside and you’re more likely to stumble to his car than gracefully enter with the Brigitte Bardot vibe you were going for. You’d pressed a credit card against the corner of your eye to make your plum purple eye shadow into as neat of a wing as you could. You put on lipstick.

  You worry, when you do eventually manage to (gingerly) get into his car, whether your effort made you feel more “prostitute” than you intended. It probably has something to do with how awkward it is, the two of you, actually face-to-face, when you’d spent the last two months playacting as desperate paramours.

  “How are you?” he says after kissing you on the cheek. Neither of you sure where the kiss was going to land.

  “I’m good,” you say. “You know, the usual.”

  Falling in love with a married man is not a complete disavowal of your character, you reason with yourself. Carrie Bradshaw was in love with Mr. Big when he was married. She even cheated on Aiden with him when Mr. Big was still married to his perfectly fine wife. Olivia Pope was the other woman. Rory Gilmore slept with Dean right after he tied the knot. You learn that Sally Jay Gorce has a married lover within the first ten pages of The Dud Avocado and it’s supposed to make her endearing. Perhaps you’re just the complicated antiheroine of your own life.

  You keep building this narrative for yourself for the entire car ride, of how you just got carried away, how of course, any college student would fall in love with a wealthy, cultured, older man who portends to be in love with her. It’s not your fault, no matter what you do tonight, you say, absolving yourself of all guilt and the pesky burden of morality. You’re the innocent ingénue, a tiny, delicate flower, you try to tell yourself. Or a femme fatale. Seducing men is a fun and sexy thing to do to pass the time in between smoking a smoldering cigarette and uncrossing your legs.

  But, when you look over at his profile, his Adam’s apple bobbing with the motion of the car, a patch of downy blond hair on his neck where he missed a spot shaving, you don’t feel like the delicate flower or the femme fatale; you feel like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, except you have no idea how to drive a stick shift and there’s no way you would look anywhere
near as good as her in a blue minidress that connects to a crop top with just a little metal ring.

  Your knee shakes up and down while the car snakes its way down icy hills, from College Hill down to Providence proper. Married Guy stills it with his hand and looks over at you, smiling.

  “What?” you ask. He tells you that you’re beautiful.

  There is no parking when you make it down to the restaurant, but you, in full fly-by-night manic-pixie-college-girl mode, have a plan. “Just valet it at the restaurant next door,” you say. “It’s fine. It’s not like they’re going to notice, or care.” He agrees, and gives his keys to the valet at the Italian restaurant a few storefronts from your actual destination. You, the adventurous lovers, pretend to enter the Italian place until the car is nearly out of sight before slipping into your actual destination: a tiny, gourmet spot with about a dozen seats total, all stools around a central bar.

  You hang up your coats and settle into your seats, and the warmth. You have done it. You are lovers out to dinner together, where no one knows you and you can finally, if temporarily, be together. His hand is on your knee again as he looks down at the menu and orders you both a first glass of wine. There will be one glass of wine per course, you learn.

  You lean into his warm shoulder and return the gesture of hand-on-leg.

  Just then, the front door of the restaurant opens and the valet from the Italian restaurant appears, flustered and determined. You panic and contemplate hiding in the bathroom. Married Guy rises from his seat.

  In front of a tiny restaurant filled with well-dressed Providence professionals, the valet tells you that you aren’t allowed to leave your car with him if you aren’t going to eat at the Italian restaurant. Married Guy apologizes and leaves—to move the car presumably. “Turns out, the wait was too long at the other restaurant,” he says as means of excuse, a pretty good one on the fly, you think.