The lady vanishes

Content warning: depression and suicidal ideation/attempted suicide

-----------------------------------------

It had come on so gradually that it took a while to notice. Even for her. That while the days got lighter and the spring blossoms—egg yolk, white and amethyst—congregated in ditches and on patches of ground free from snow, she turned ever more towards darkness. 

It is not the first time, so she knows how these things usually go. Call loved ones. Make plans. Go outside. Do your homework, do your job, try to take it day by day and don’t go all the way down into the valley from where you can no longer see the sun. Almost, it has become routine, she thinks, with one of the very last wry smiles she has to offer. Already the small quirk upward of the corner of her mouth seems unnatural. Is this how her face is supposed to look? Is this how muscles move? 

She picks up the phone, willing herself to call her parents, but finds she cannot make her hand move, make her fingers push the buttons. Was it the worried tone in her mother’s voice that held her back? How yet again she had to put her in this position? Or her father’s well-meaning comments that always sounded like something you might see in a dentist’s waiting room or stuck to a middle-aged woman’s fridge. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But what if it does kill her, what then? She can’t say that of course. And so, she says nothing. 

A thought occurs to her then. She doesn’t remember when she last spoke. To anyone. 

She lives alone now. No plant, pet or paramour to care for, or to care for her. She has only her books and her big, wide window. A window through which she can observe life happening to others. Children playing hopscotch, students on unsteady legs late at night, adults in cars. Always in cars. She has never been able to imagine herself as one of these people. As a driver. As someone with a family, a steady job. Maybe that was because she was never meant to have such things. 

She used to watch the sun set, lighting the fjord on fire, tingeing the mountains pink and orange, and sometimes it would be enough—merely to remember that such beauty existed, and the she need do nothing to deserve it. It was simply there. 

Now she drinks cheap wine and watches soap operas. You might think it is to numb herself, but in fact she is desperately trying to feel. 

Two days ago she last went to a lecture. Arriving just as the professor cleared his throat. Sat in the back, hood up, eyes down, pencil poised over a page that remained empty. She wonders if anyone noticed her come or go, if anyone thought “hey isn’t that the girl who used to ask questions, sit up front, take copious notes?”

Three days ago she went to the shop. Did she say hello? Goodbye? Thank you? Did she nod and smile? How long ago was it that she had taken part in her life? 

It’s not that she doesn’t have friends. Of course she does. But those are “watch the footie” friends, or “writing group” friends, or “night out” friends. They are not “everything is meaningless and I want to die” friends. She only has one of those. And even she, who has seen all the ugly and dark sides of her, who has held her hair when she threw up, held her hand when she cried, held her heart—always—even she cannot be reached. Subtly, slowly it has become irreversible. Irredeemable. 

The world around her starts to tilt and shift. She can’t breathe. She’s sweating, nauseated. Reaches for the phone again, in a panic this time. Her fingers moving automatically. Her friend answers after two rings. 

“Hello?”

….

“What’s wrong?”

…

“Are you okay?”

She opens her mouth, tries to force the words out. But the problem is that there are no words for this. There is no magic that can save her. And so, from a distance she watches as someone disconnects the call. These fingers that she thinks may once have belonged to her. In another life. A life where they flew across piano and keyboard keys alike. Where they twined around another person’s fingers, fitting neatly. Where they gripped the the stem of a champagne flute. Waved high above her head as she swayed to the music. 

There had been happiness. Many moments of real, true, happiness. She knows this even now. And some small part of her even knows that there is chance of more such moments. If she can only get through this one. And the next. And the next. 

There’s the rub. 

This moment stretches out endlessly in its vast nothingness. A gaping maw of indifference. The chasm howls at her to let go. To end it. 

In a daze, she stumbles to the bathroom. The fingers curl around a bottle of pills. And then she’s back in her bed. Pouring pills onto wrinkled, sweaty sheets. Counting. Why, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know that she is waiting. Waiting. Waiting…

Slowly, unsteadily, the fingers gather all the pills together, bring them up towards her mouth—a mouth, anyway. It’s a matter of seconds now at most, before the darkness wins.

She hasn’t locked the door. She knows this, because someone has just ripped it open, called her name, rushed inside. Bringing with them breath and wind and movement. 

Quickly, she covers up her shame under the duvet, and looks in bewilderment but most of all relief, at her friend, her twin soul. She understood. Of course she understood. She knows the darkness too. With her, the words are simply not necessary. And so they share a look before they slump into each others arms, twin breaths heaving. Hearts finding their way down from the peak, to a steady, synchronised beat. 

Recovery. Yes that will still be a long, arduous process. This she knows. But she also knows that the immediate danger has passed. Her bones, her fingers, her eyelashes, they are all once again undeniably hers. She has taken abode once again in flesh and feeling. She can smell her friend’s chamomile shampoo. Feel the label of her jumper scratching her neck. See the dust motes dancing in the glow of the setting sun. She feels hunger, thirst, and a deep tiredness. Like she could sleep a week. But first she will go outside to see if the lily of the valley on the knoll outside her kitchen has started blooming.

It turns out the magic word does not exist. The magic is that sometimes you do not need words to be perfectly understood.