The Death of Small Creatures

by Trisha Cull

  Clinical Note:

  Anxiety discussed. She has a recent incident wherein she believed her cat was going to hurt her. Insomnia. Over-the-counter cough remedy abuse continues. Will stop Zeldox to get an idea if this is linked to her perceptual difficulties.

  I snort my skinny little lines on the cutting board on the coffee table, use my social insurance card, scraping across the hard white plastic, making little slender piles of the stuff, little chunks of pill casing throughout. I want to tell Dr. P what I’ve been doing, but I’m afraid he will stop seeing me if I do. I snort up the powder along with the pill casing bits. The power goes straight up my sinuses, feels like it goes straight to my brain, as if there is nothing between open air and the softness of my cerebellum, as if my brain is a wet spongy mass into which the powder is absorbed. But the pill casing bits get stuck up inside my sinuses and on the inside of my nose, clog the airways. I alternately snort and blow my nose, snort up the powder then blow out the bits. Sometimes I think I am blowing out bits of my brain in the process.

  I am talking to Richard on the phone one night, high on NeoCitran and after having snorted Wellbutrin. He comments on my stuffed-up sinuses. I tell him not to worry, it will clear up soon.

  He calls me back a few minutes later, sounds concerned, a little exasperated, asks me outright, “Are you snorting Wellbutrin?” He had previously asked me to list off my medications. I don’t know how he thinks to ask if I’m snorting Wellbutrin, except that he is intelligent and intuitive, and he Googles everything. He says, “I want you to tell me the absolute truth.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Why?” he says. I say nothing, just breathe into the receiver, my sinuses plugged. “Why do you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I can’t even say it’s to numb the pain because I haven’t been feeling anything but high in recent weeks. I just want more; it’s part of my interpersonal style, to want more.

  “I think we should take a break,” he says. “I can’t handle this right now.”

  “Okay,” I say flatly, almost cheerfully. I am not cheerful, not in the least happy about the rejection, but my defences have kicked in such that I feign indifference as a means of protecting myself. So I sound complacent, mildly cheerful.

  We say goodbye.

  In the following weeks I hide myself away. He calls me several times and emails me afterward, to reconnect, but I am gone from his life and caught up entirely in my own world of self-abuse and addiction.

  A few weeks after Richard and I part ways, I do the unthinkable and stay over at Leigh’s house for the first time since I left months ago. When I return home I am met by my sister, in tears, and a police car and two police officers. Sandy finds me inside my suite, making toast. I open the door. She’s visibly shaken.

  “You’re here,” she says. “We’ve been looking for you.”

  The police officers appear behind her. “Oh,” I say, shaken now too, trying to put things together, dismayed that she has gone to such lengths to find me. I haven’t told her about seeing Leigh again, fearing her reprimand and disapproval. “I was at Leigh’s.”

  “Okay,” she says. Then she turns to the police officers. “She’s okay,” she says. “She’s home.” Then she turns back to me. “Mom and Warren are on their way over on the ferry.”

  “What?” I say. “Why?”

  “We didn’t know what happened to you,” she says. “We know about Dave. And you were seeing that guy, Richard. We thought something had happened to you.”

  I console her, offer a stream of apologies. What else can I do? “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I had no idea.” But I’m pissed off too, that they have invaded my privacy this way, that Sandy came into my suite while I wasn’t there, that they are treating me like a child.

  Mom and my stepdad Warren arrive in the afternoon. Mom is weepy and worn. She holds me so tight in her arms I can’t breathe. Her warmth is claustrophobic. I am the exciting factor in the family, however harrowing my excitement might be, however much my illness and my antics have hurt those around me.

  We all go out for dinner to San Remo, a little Greek restaurant a couple blocks away. As I sit there in the warm candlelit room listening to Greek music playing on the speakers I feel almost normal, like this is just another family outing, ignoring the circumstances that brought us all here together, several months after my hospitalization in the mental ward. They are here, all of them, because of me—because they worry a sudden disappearance means I have possibly killed myself or gone on another crystal meth binge, or that Richard has slain me in my sleep, or I don’t know what. But they are here, all of them once again, because of me.

  I’ve been binging and purging every night for weeks. Leigh admires my increasingly slender body, seems oblivious to my declining health otherwise. I lie there in bed while he fucks me, my body limp and depleted, my consciousness woozy and off-kilter. Yet sometimes I think I’m in love with him again. We eat out a lot and go to movies. I feign being a wife again. I think he wants me back, I can’t imagine why.

  Cutting is exhilarating. It cuts through the monotony of daily existence, makes the platitudes tolerable if only for a little while. On one night, it takes my breath away. I say, “Oh, oh, oh, okay, fuck, okay,” and I run to the bathroom for a towel, wrap my wrist, use my free hand to call a cab. The exhilaration lasts from the moment of the cut throughout that first evening, to the emergency room, as the needle is threaded through my skin, because I love the attention, because it makes me feel important, because it makes me feel loved.

  I thought about the possibility of checking myself back in. But the problem is I’m not ready to die. I’m not here because I’ve tried to kill myself. I’m here, now, sitting in the ER waiting room, waiting for the doctor to come and stitch me up, because I am enthralled by the process of self-injury, because I love that sudden and terrible splitting of skin, because I enjoy my own screwed-up heroics and ploys for martyrdom, because I’m a complete fuck-up.

  Eleven stitches later and I am free to go.

  Clinical Note:

  Trisha has been attending my outpatient group weekly for weeks. We discuss her emotional behaviour in some depth. She describes her past angry destructive behaviours: cutting; stabbing walls with knives; throwing goblets out of kitchen window onto street below. We explore her problems with emotional intimacy. She speaks of the wall that blocks her feelings and her ability to express emotions.

  December 1, 2009

  Dear Trisha,

  Let’s be friends again. I read your journal because you are a great writer, your stories are fascinating (and true), and—it seems so fictional now, three months later—I actually knew you once. It feels tense and unnatural for us to pretend as if we never spoke.

  I miss our friendship. I love your writing. I want to go back to that time when we were friends. That felt right to me. Is it wrong to imagine that we can go back six months, before I visited?

  I’m sorry for how I was. Everything was up in the air and I felt stressed and insecure. If you are still upset with me, please let me know. Even if you no longer wish to know me, please at least give me a chance to explain myself and apologize.

  I’ve been wanting to write this whole time, but I didn’t think you wanted me to. I still don’t know, but I hope at least you feel a little bit of how much I miss our friendship.

  We’re meant to be friends.

  Please.

  Love,

  Richard

  December 6, 2009

  I fell asleep on the love seat again last night, woke up at 1:30 am and was awake all day until about noon, then I fell asleep again for three hours. Felt much better afterwards, surprisingly better, sort of gleeful even, eager to get out and do some writing.

  But the morning was hell, one of those awful unbearable ones when everything feels hopeless and dull, when you are crawling out of your skin, you feel nau
seous and dizzy, your skin is grey and toxic. Oil in the veins. Tar at the back of your throat. You feel alone and irrelevant.

  You think, Maybe in the new year.

  One of those emotional storms the eyes of which is my despair, and whose centrifuge spins my mouth shut, threaded lips sewn. In the whir of it, car parts, two-by-fours with nails in them, a barn full of hooks and knives, and a cow, maybe two, torn apart, split hides, blood and bone, bodies torn apart by wind. Poor broken cows.

  Dirt in the eyes.

  A one-ton flatbed truck falls on your back. Glass in the corner of one eye.

  Nobody cares.

  But after the nap, I felt good, remarkably okay, wrote for a couple more hours, and now this, writing to you.

  How is such a dramatic shift possible? I will tell Dr. P when I see him. I need some mood-stabilizing meds to keep me balanced.

  This cannot be normal. If I could turn down the volume on these emotional shifts, particularly the despairing ones, I could hook into life, find an angle, a loop to hold onto.

  December 22, 2009

  I have a horrible battle waging between my private and public personas. It’s hard to know who to be. I am one of those slow-moving white dashes drifting back and forth across a black screen, static in the background, a green glow emanating from a secret sky that may or may not be the universe, that may or may not be real. I want to crack open the box and find a shiny golden egg inside, or maybe a caterpillar.

  I wish it would snow. I don’t want it to snow a little bit. I want it to snow a lot, so much that this island town shuts down and surrenders to a broad blue tint.

  I want the sea to storm, to be green and frothy while snowflakes descend upon it.

  To collect shells and rocks, pieces of driftwood and broken bits of tree. To acquire a collection of storm glass, enough to fit inside my jeans pockets. To take the pieces home and place them on my coolest porcelain surface, on the ledge under the bathroom window, and notice the little granules of sand that cling to them.

  I wish to do all of this after the storm, to pick up the pieces from the aftermath and remember as I do this the savagery of the Pacific.

  Snowflakes falling upon the ocean.

  To lay to rest my becoming of a wife, then my unbecoming of a wife. I want to return the fur to all the dead animals, to unstill their deadened heartbeats. To send the trap line back to antiquity. Just this once, to perform this miracle on Christmas day.

  January 30, 2010

  Leigh took me to dinner for my birthday last night. We went to this great restaurant downtown called Bon Rouge, French bistro style, red walls and high ceilings, black and white velvet upholstery and wall applications. I felt very bordello riche, decadent, draped in subtle lavishness. Felt sexy in new taupe Guess dress, my vintage bolero cream jacket with lace embroidery, red satin inlay and velvety lapels. Wore my knee-high, three-inch black boots. I think it worked, felt comfortable—out there but not exhibitionist.

  I like to be as sexy as the wallpaper will permit. I want to be sexy in semi-latex couture but I don’t want to squeak when I walk.

  Awful admission. I feel guilty, had two glasses of wine with dinner last night. Okay, more like three. It hit me hard. It actually just made me sleepy, probably because of the medication.

  We went back home, to Leigh’s, and I fell asleep on the couch by 10:30 pm, was out for the night. Not what Leigh had hoped for I’m sure. He’s out running now, will be back soon. We will have a decadent morning together. I’m writing this in the living room of my old life. The red bordello couch is beautiful in the light. It’s misty rain outside, feels like spring. I have a great and sudden desire to go buy daffodils.

  February 24, 2010

  I am applying for bankruptcy.

  March 23, 2010

  I’ve been up since 1:30 am.

  I am ultra-aware of the weight-gain issue with the new medication I am taking, Epival. I have been regarding my body with horrific fascination, pinching and squeezing to the point that it, my body, has become quite foreign to me. I become this purely physical flesh and blood thing, an abstraction that loses its specificity the more I try to pin it down. I have no idea what I look like.

  Last week, I once again asked Dr. P for clarification on what’s wrong with me. As in, what’s my label? He explained that the lability factor applies to me, and from this factor we can draw a number of diagnostic conclusions, which could range from bipolar to borderline personality disorder. Or, I suppose, plain old instability that does not fall under any particular diagnosis. So I am labile.

  I find this summation so unsatisfactory. It strikes me as a general adjective that can be ascribed to any number of things, the way the colour blue can be ascribed to any number of things, that is to say, The sky is blue, and I am labile.

  So what?

  March 29, 2010

  It’s 2:42 am. I am wide awake and hyper as hell. This feels distinctly chemical. I have run out of trazodone, but tonight would have been my first night without it, so I don’t think I can attribute my current state of mind to missing the trazodone.

  The last few days have been awful. I am amazed at the different people I become. One minute I’m okay, even sort of feeling good (as in recent weeks), then a big crash and burn and I feel like I’m nothing, my life is pointless, I’m ugly, and there is no hope for things to get better. As I write that I know intellectually that it’s the illness talking, that I will undoubtedly swing out of this slump (I am simultaneously manic and depressed), but emotionally I feel that this is it, that I am stuck here, and I can’t bear that idea.

  So conflicted about Leigh.

  I think I have already gained weight from the Epival, plus I haven’t run in a few days because I’ve been feeling sick. I have to get back into that routine again. That will help.

  I’m going to start studying French in the evenings.

  I want to learn to play the cello and the piano.

  It’s very windy. I hung my chime in the tree outside my living room window, and tonight is the first night I’ve really heard it chime. It sounds pretty and cold. That tinkling of the chime, it scares me, reminds me that life here on earth is finite, that one day we’re going to die, reminds me that it’s cold in outer space.

  March 30, 2010

  I was momentarily displaced in time today.

  I had just broken a twenty-dollar bill at the corner store on the corner of Fort and Douglas, by the bus stop, walked out into the sun, found myself dazzled by the sunlight, the noise, the screech of tires, the whir of traffic, people walking by, clicking heels, dude on his iPod, whatsherface on her cellphone, guy in his suit, young hippie girl, young rocker guy, homeless lady in the midst of it all. And something distinctly mental happened: I forgot where I was. I mean literally, for a split second, I didn’t know which direction to go, nor where I was standing in relationship to other streets. Everything was suddenly off the grid and unfamiliar. I could have stepped out of that store into the light in an entirely different city, and it would have felt the same way. The universe was stripped of context.

  There was just me, street-side, pale, blonde and blue-eyed. A woman. A girl. Both. Canadian for god’s sake.

  It lasted longer than a split second; I lied about that. Maybe it was the oversized sunglasses with the amber tint, the iPod singing in my ears, the Beatles, but I was moving through haze.

  There was a building I was supposed to be going into, yes, to drop off payment to the bankruptcy people, the trustees. That building, that door, it was close to here, close to this door, this door to the bank, but not this door, or is it this door? I can’t be sure. (My tenses are slipping, the continuum is ripping now.) What I mean is, I couldn’t be sure, but there was a door behind me leading into a tall building that resembled the building I was looking for. I walked through that door, gazed at the panel for a minute, realized I was in the wrong building, then
turned and walked out again.

  Here, I oriented myself. The vertigo was leaving me. I remembered my city again, my universe. My feet were on the earth again. I was not skipping off the stratosphere into outer space after all.

  The building I was looking for was two doors down.

  I rode the elevator up to the tenth floor, to Hayes and McNeil (I have decided to just call them the bankruptcy people). I was alone in the elevator and held a yellow folder in my hand. It was a flimsy plastic yellow folder, like a Fruit Roll-Up. Inside the folder was $250 cash plus my application for bankruptcy, a little packet, a ten-page questionnaire and so on, the application checklist. (Most of the items on the checklist were missing from my application, but it’s okay, I’ll forward those later… that’s what I do: I forward stuff later.)

  I surveyed myself in the shiny reflective door, a kind of warbled me. I was wearing the jacket everyone loves, the one with the collars, cinched waist with a belt, the little trench coat that looks like upholstery. And my pink spring scarf that floats about my décolletage and makes me feel Parisian when I wear it. I thought the warbled smear of me looked promising, a smudge, waiting to happen in the world.

  I am always a precursor to myself, never myself.

  I dropped off the application and payment without incident.

  I still had the yellow folder in my hand, empty now, didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t want to carry it around with me for the rest of the day, didn’t want to toss it in the garbage because it is, after all, plastic. So I folded it in half. I decided to fold it and slip it into my bag. I was crouched down, folding the yellow folder in half when this older man dressed sharply (a big shot of some sort, I could tell) and a few other men trailing him in suits passed by me. I looked very awkward. (I am forever looking awkward, always trying to cram stuff into a bag or dig stuff out of a bag.) And here’s the funny part, the part I’ve been wanting to tell you, the part that all this has been leading up to.