shades of blue

when my grandmother saw me standing in the doorway of her hospital room, the first thing she said was, you look thin. she was right; i was very thin at this time. i wasn't eating because i was Not Doing Well, as i've established, but i'd also recently gotten food poisoning at an airport burger king on the way back from my bachelorette party, so where eating was already unappealing it was now scary as well. my therapist at the time told me i should start journaling about it.

the only journal entry i ever made reads, there's something going on in my life. every morning i wake up and wonder if i'm dying, and then i keep wondering that, all day, and sometimes i eat maybe half a cookie, but with a fork and knife. like it's some sort of quiche or something. i don't know.

the sort of upsetting double-edged sword of being thin was that i understood that i was sick. i couldn't articulate it, but i did know it. however, i also really liked it. i would stare at myself in the mirror for hours. in my underwear. in the jeans i now needed a belt to wear. swallowed up in my fiancé's waffle-knit shirts. i would fall in love with myself, and then i would cry so hard that my fingertips hurt. i hated this. i loved this. there was no winning.

in the same way that i sometimes wonder if i need to be sad to write, i wondered if i needed to be sad to be skinny, as if being skeletal were a prize to earn via also being depressed. i was miserable in a way that made me irrational. i said to one of my friends once during all this, if one thing in my life were going well i would be fine. well. now i had something. now i was skinny! and, fascinatingly, i was not fine. local girl remains mentally ill; no one is surprised except her.

—

something i became increasingly aware of in my spiral was how impossible it felt to open up to someone about what was going on. part of it was that i barely knew what was going on, and couldn’t even be honest about it inside my own head. the other thing, though, was that my body would not let me confess. i would steel myself for hours, run through a script about how unokay i was, open my mouth, and… and nothing. a hiss of hot air from the closed stem of a kettle. the only thing i could reliably say to anyone was, i've just been stressed.

my experience of my own life began to take on a certain dreamlike quality. everything felt like an omen. meaningful. consequential. yet, i was incapable of participating. i was careening toward a guardrail, unable to turn the wheel.

i found myself sitting in the middle of someone's bedroom at one point. the floor was this yellow-toned laminate made to look like white oak. my stomach hurt (my stomach always hurt) and i was surrounded by things. just clothes and packaged paper products and half-emptied boxes of lime cucumber gatorade and bags and bags and bags. the lights were all on. around me, people were moving furniture, but i found myself tethered to the ground. if i had looked out each window i would have seen a perfect silhouette of myself projected onto the wet street haloed in yellow light. i hate this, i thought to myself in that cluttered yellow room. i hate this.

—

i've always been a very friendly person, i think. i'm a good listener. a known smiler. something that scared me a lot about this period in my life was how disillusioned and distant i felt. how divorced i was from what i’d once felt was an innate ability to connect with people.

every day i was kicked in the gut by how far the tumult had flung my soul from my body. nothing felt natural. would i ever find myself again?

—

i had a dream in december of 2022. in the dream, my grandmother had just died, and it was the day before my wedding. dozens of people were pressed against me, asking me questions.

what do you think of these table settings?

how many boutonnières did you want?

where are we putting the guestbook?

when do i start the cocktail hour playlist?

i kept pushing through them, asking about my grandma, but no one would answer.

at a point in this dream, i walked past the ruins of a library. there were a few shelves still standing, each full of water-damaged, yellowed books. i approached one of the shelves and picked one up. the cover was a gorgeous oil painting of a mirror over a sink, and in front of this was a much rougher charcoal sketch of a girl. she was staring into the mirror, but there was no reflection. the book was called she is okay.

at the next shelf, i picked up another. it was called i looked in the mirror for too long. the cover showed an illustration of a person pulling their own reflection out of a mirror.

i woke up feeling like i was made of lead. for a moment, i thought i was still in florida, and realizing i was both in baltimore, maryland and seven minutes late for work made me start to cry.

—

on december 24, 2022, i went to a christmas festival with my fiancé and a couple of his coworkers. i think he was trying to remind me that there was still joy in the world and stop me from lying listlessly in bed, which i’d been doing for a while.

the festival was mostly outdoors. it was eight degrees and windy in a way that burned my skin. i ordered mulled wine and watched it erupt with steam as they pumped it into my cup from the urn. it was cold before they handed it to me. the vendor’s tent was making strange popping sounds in the breeze. i felt tears soaking into my scarf. when we got home, our pipes were frozen.

i didn’t decorate for christmas that year. i just didn’t have it in me.