“But you’re still, you’re bright, you’re quiet in the heart of it.”
When I look back now, the images appear in my mind like talisman: a little green room in a dark bar. A hollowed-out tree at the edge of a lake. A claw foot bathtub garden. They are a few tokens of a past; all symbols of a life, of a friendship. They are suspended above my head in reverie, these tokens, and I reach out as if to hold them, as if it were possible to experience their sweetness anew.
In those sweet golden days the weight, the burden of living this life, of garnering experience, getting battered and bloodied, was a refuge that we gladly sought. We had no one to think of but ourselves. Utterly free to make asses of ourselves; and we often did, sometimes merely for sport. It was one of many exquisite luxuries of that time that we would only be able to truly admire when it had long sailed away from us.
I thought I knew myself and I was wrong. My image of myself turned out to be much at odds with the reality. It was jarring. I was encapsulated in a falsehood of sorts; held prisoner by my own devices. I was completely unaware of the source of my distemper but it fell upon me like a woolen cloak, clumsy and suffocating.
I didn’t mind the night fits. The darkness seemed good company for melancholy. It was when I fell apart in broad daylight that alarmed me most. Busses rumbling by, friends conversing as they walked, birds perched upon street lamps, everything humming along and me on the floor in my pajamas in a puddle of tears in the middle of the afternoon. Surely it was unseemly. Surely there was something terribly wrong with me.
And then came that night. I had been up waiting for hours in the dark for him to come home. In my misery, I watched the clock as the hands slowly dragged themselves around, but still the sound of the key in the lock didn’t come.
I had been crying for some time. It was one of those crying jags that scoured me clean, like a seashell that’s been bleached. I felt empty and impossibly light, but in a dangerous way, as though there were nothing left inside.
So I opened the window. The night air blew the curtain into my face. I scrambled out onto the fire escape. I made my way up the ladder on auto pilot. I was already in a trance at this stage. I made my way to the very lip of the rooftop, sat down and dangled my feet over the edge.
I was six stories up. I looked down and tried to absorb what was passing by below on the street. I wanted to see busses and people and street lamps. What I saw instead was like looking out a windshield in a bad storm. Streaks of color and light and noise, all of it slurring below me, and drawn out as though I were trying to see it all, hear it all, from underwater.
I don’t know how long I sat there like that. Long enough to have become cold without realizing and long enough to have become treacherously fatigued. I started to fall forward. There was no conscious intent in that motion. It was just something that happened to me.
And then an arm wrapped itself around my neck and pulled me from that edge and I was saved. I had been spared a certain horrible and senseless death. He didn’t know why he stopped working early that night. He didn’t know why he found himself rushing home. How could he have known? And yet when he stepped into the room, saw the curtain blowing in and out in swells, he knew where to find me.
What if he had continued with his work? What if he had gotten caught at a light? What if he had made himself a sandwich before seeking me out?
But none of those things happened. He pulled me back. He saved me from myself.
Gregory Alan Isakov – ‘Unwritable Girl’
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