Seeking A Valley

                                              Seeking a Valley

Life isn't the number of days, hours, minutes you live; life isn't if you achieve what you want, if you give what you should, if you learn something from each mistake you make. Life is a box. An intangible box that holds every moment you experience: the good of your son's birth, the bad of his suicide, the highs of your marriage, the lows of your divorce, the things you did and the things you didn't. Time is just a way to quantify the moments, a way of measuring the dimensions of the box. My box isn't pretty, it reflects the moments contained within: scary, dirty, raw, painful, full of tears and blood and unhappiness. I am talking about one of two boxes I possess, the one of my real life. The pristine other holds the mask I wore to perpetuate a myth that nothing in my real box was happening. Onlookers found it hard to tell the two boxes apart. To this day they blend and merge with each other, but even for me it was hard to tell what was real and what was the mask.

The happier everyone perceived me as being, the less I truly was. All anyone ever saw of me was the mask I had created to hide the fact I was dying. My mask wasn't a wig to hide cancer, it wasn't loose clothing to hide a stomach swollen with new life; it was the polar opposite of everything real. If I was tired, my mask was radiant with alertness from a good night's sleep; if I was hungry, my mask was satiated with delicious food; if I was crying, my mask was laughing. During the early years of my life, I had no mask, no need for one. During the early years of my life, who I was, was good enough. The older I grew, the shorter I fell of standards I demanded of myself and I created my mask so that none would see how desperate my life was becoming.

At first my mask was like a veil, a distorted view of the real me. I was fine when I wasn't, I wasn't hungry when I was, I wasn't perfect, but I was happy with myself.

I'm shaky, weary to my fragile bones, and perched on the edge of a molded blue chair in the hospital, distraught at the seventy-six calories I've eaten. For a bleak moment I feel hopeless and wonder why I'm here. Am I sick after all? Is there some horrendous flaw in me, some defect I can't see? An overweight doctor is brandishing lab results in my wan face and exclaims, "You're starving! Child, your heart could stop any day because you won't eat. You will die!" I simply smile and tell her I'm fine. I wouldn't let my diet reach such extremes. I'm dying and I can't see it.

With every lie I told myself, the veil molded to the contours of my face. Before I knew it, the veil was a mask. No longer was it a disguise; it was an identity. I grew enamored of the belief that my mask, what everyone else saw when looking at me, was the real me. It was a wave of denial I rode the crest of, straight into the rocky shore of reality.

I'd run to the locker room to change before anyone could see my grotesquely    bloated figure. As I struggled to keep my gym shorts on my hips, I recognized two voices and walked closer. I registered the words. People were sick of me and my "food problem," they wished I'd just go and stay away because I was too "high-maintenance." In shock I sunk to the floor for a minute, then, I plastered on a smile and greeted my two best friends like I hadn't just been cut to the quick by their words.

Alluring, breathtakingly exquisite blood trickles off my arms and I watch in ecstasy as the red stains the virgin white carpet. For seemingly an eternity the scarlet drips, eventually worry penetrates my rapture. The blood won't stop; it won't stop! As I look for a towel, the room spins. The last thing I see before slipping into darkness in my own face, full of terror, reflected from a mirror I never look into. Yet, I tell myself it's only a little blood.

I'm floating above the earth on a chemical high and giggling maniacally at the nonsensical ramblings of the newscaster on television. Off-balance, I get up to put on some music, but the floor won't stop jumping and I trip. On my way down I bash my temple on the corner of a glass table. When I regain awareness, I don't remember anything, but as I struggle to my feet I order myself to endure the excruciating agony and even smile.

When I went to put my mask back on after a brief respite, observers saw it for what it was: a farce. They saw me as a "faker," a "player," sick, crazy, scary. They ran from me as if my mental sickness was a contagion and I sought to unleash a plague of depression. The horror was that because all they had seen for years was the mask, people didn't believe the real me. People said I wanted attention, they weren't prepared; their faculties were not equipped to believe I wasn't the charismatic, perfect, happy girl they thought I was. The true me was so far from the façade that I was alienated, gossiped about in the halls, disgraced. The one thing I had managed to keep intact during all the years of self-destruction in my pursuit of perfection, I had finally lost. I had lost my reputation. 

I used to ponder the level of severity one must reach for those around that person to give up. Two hospitalizations, four, ten, did the person need to attempt suicide; did the person need to be imprisoned, what was the criteria? I am not able to say I met the criteria, I didn't even know what it was. The only thing I knew was that my foolish pride, my stubborn refusal to admit that I was not even remotely perfect was killing me. I had exchanged perfection for numbness. My mantra of "there's always room for improvement" slipped into: "if I can't feel something, it can't hurt me. If I don't care, I won't be disappointed. If I can't be disappointed, I don't need a mask." Need a mask? I needed a coffin.

My hand reluctantly drops from my parted lips and the pills spill out onto the car upholstery. The water is half-gone, the pills too. I have my goodbyes written, and my belongings are neat. My mind, my own worst enemy, dares to wonder if I truly desire to finish this. I realize I don't. I don't want to finish the pills. I don't want to give up. I don't want to die. Then I shake my head and reason I'm just nervous, even petrified, but not one to leave something undone, and most importantly not weak. I must still seek death. I scoop the poison capsules into my palm, and with renewed will, do something I cannot stop, something I can never take back or change. I don't do it wholeheartedly, though.

I sought an end that I truly didn't want. After the fires of depression had burned down my will to live, I was convinced that all innate goodness had gone. Somewhere, somehow, a tiny ember of humanity had struggled to stay lit. It had. This ember sparked into a fire. Where there once existed an encompassing desire to die burst into being a passion, a rage, a fight to live. I learned during the most-tender of years that there is a difference between being alive and living. For too many years I was only alive.

The crunch of beautiful dead autumn leaves underfoot and the faint whispers of the wind as it coaxes more from the trees are the only sounds that penetrate my reverie. I reach the precipice of the cliff I've climbed and my heart thuds with a freedom that courses through my veins, as fear is wont. Spread below me is a valley so vast that all my sorrows and hopes, each regret and joy, all that's in my box could be poured in and not submerge the fading grass and carpet of chestnuts and pumpkins. This is the existence I've sought for so long: deep and unhurried, not perfect, but passionate, exhilarating, and full. At long last the mask is not only off but put away, and for this moment I am living.