I raked my hands through my hair until my scalp hurt. My stomach was tied in a legion of knots, each aching and pulsating and throbbing to the point of near explosion. I kicked my bed and my laptop toppled onto the floor. Watching it hit the carpet was like a gunshot, detonating a built-up rage that had lived inside of me for the past year.
My heart wasn’t an organ with valves and blood and arteries. It was another creature entirely. One that couldn’t be ignored, no matter how quietly I told it to beat.
I grabbed a pillow and screamed into it.
The first scream was for my mother. One loud, screeching, teary cry for my mother. I hated her. I wasn’t supposed to say that, and maybe one day I would regret letting myself think it, but I couldn’t stop. I hated that she didn’t try to understand me. I hated how she turned her nose up when she walked by my room at night and saw me crying. I hated that I wasn’t the kid she bragged about to her friends in church group. All she saw in me was a walking mistake, a sin to be forgiven, a disease to be cured. I hated that she looked at Snake and saw the same.
Then I screamed into the pillow a second time.
I screamed for myself. I screamed because she was right. I was a disease. I was sick and vastly spreading and untreatable. But I wasn’t my depression. Depression was a symptom of another illness. Being human. Being me.
I screamed again.
The third time, I didn’t know who I was screaming for. Maybe Snake. Maybe my dad. Maybe another pity round for myself. The shriek clawed from the cords of my throat without intention. But once it was out in the open, sucked into the pillow, it became increasingly clear.
My screams were of lost souls and Cherry Coke and acrobats and geometric shapes and pill bottles and uselessness and flashing red lights and lightning and loneliness and babies crying and brevity.
I hated having to live each day knowing that, good or bad, I would never get it back. And I hated to resent time simply because it couldn’t be taught to stay. And it took me until that moment, falling to my knees at two o’clock in the morning, to realize that all the things I hated, I hated only because they wouldn’t let me hold on. Because they didn’t know how to outlast themselves.
I hated that the world wasn’t empty, but I was.
Whispers from the living room interrupted my Stage 2 breakdown.
“She will never be okay,” I heard Karen say. My dad was trying to shush her, but she only got louder. “She’s been dealing with this depression issue for an entire year. I prayed about it and meditated on it and talked to Pastor James, and, against my better judgment, tried the antidepressants and the therapy, but nothing works. And now she’s running around with this boy, God help her. He’s only going to tear her down. It won’t be long before she’s the one having his baby. What are people going to think? I can only hide so much.”
“She’s being a teenager,” my dad said quietly. He didn’t sound like himself. “They all go through rebellious phases. You went through one yourself.”
“I would have never shouted at my mother like that.”
“I agree. She shouldn’t speak to you that way. But she’s lashing out. This will pass, Karen. It’s a phase.”
“You always make excuses for her,” she snapped.
There was a brief silence in which all I heard was heavy breathing. And then the sound of the couch shifting as someone stood. It was my dad’s voice, a shallow whisper.
“I don’t think you make enough excuses for her.”
I had to leave. That was what all the screaming and pillows and echoing conversations amounted to. I couldn’t stay there that night. I needed to think. Needed to breathe. Needed to be anywhere but there. I grabbed a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt, shoving the clothes into my messenger bag. I sat crumpled on the floor for minutes, focusing on nothing but depression issue. Depression issue. Depression issue.
The words whooshed in my ears like a wave crashing against my eardrums. Depression was a symptom of me. Depression was an issue. I was an issue. A problem. A mistake.
I had no logical place to run to that late. I had no logical person to turn to. None but one, and he was hardly logical.
When I went downstairs, I headed straight for the front door. My mother sprang from the couch, her brows furrowing the moment she noticed my bag.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m leaving.”
“No you’re not.”
My dad met me where I stood, watching me with a hint of something my mother’s anger lacked. “You don’t have to do this,” he whispered. “Let’s talk.”
“There’s nothing to say. You married a lunatic. There. We talked.”
“She loves you.” He laid a hand on my shoulder mechanically, observing me through his glasses. His gray eyes were fading. Had they always been so lifeless? “I love you.”
“I know. I know you do. But you can’t speak for Mom. You may want your words to replace hers, but they don’t.”
My mother moved toward me. “Regina,” she said, anger ebbing in her tone. She wasn’t even looking in my eyes anymore, but at my hands clasped tightly to the bag. “I love you. I want you to stay.”
I love you. Three words. She wanted three words to rectify a year. She wanted three words to heal two completely different people. It was a nice idea, that words could do that. That they had the power to fix and repair and transform even the most shattered of people. But unfortunately for us, words were nothing more than a string of nice ideas.
“Why am I depressed?” I asked, grasping at the niceness of ideas until they vanished.
She looked surprised. “What?”
“Why am I depressed?”
She glanced at my dad, who was watching me, maybe knowing the answer. Maybe wishing there wasn’t one.
“Well, it . . . it was what happened to Bree,” she stuttered, still eyeing him for help. “But now? I don’t really know.”
“That’s the problem, Mom,” I said, tossing the bag over my shoulder. I opened the door and it creaked in the stillness. “You don’t know me.”
My dad held my mother back and ordered her to let me go as I took off running through the front yard and down the street. It was the ideal dramatic exit. The girl leaves her overbearing parents behind and runs to the boy without ever looking back. It was cinematic perfection. It was real-life destruction.
My feet were clunky like wooden blocks and my chest wouldn’t lift to let me breathe and my temples were throbbing with an excruciating headache unlike any other I’d experienced. The streetlights were guiding me forward, but the sway of the clouds was drawing me back. I stopped running the instant my brain caught pace with my rage. I was trying to run to Snake’s house on foot. Snake, who lived at the pond a ten-minute drive away. And me, who couldn’t run for more than a half mile without getting a side stitch. I stopped in front of this hideous yellow house down the street that my mom always said reminded her of a lemon. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and texted Snake.
I’m in front of an obscenely yellow house near the end of my street. Please come pick me up as soon as possible. I may have barely survived that execution we were talking about.