I cough as I scrape the layers of ice off my car in the morning. The air is so cold that there is no moisture left in it. It rushes into my lungs, dry and crackly. It creeps through my many layers, past the long underwear I wear beneath my jeans, and into my bones. My elderly neighbor is painstakingly shoveling her sidewalk, her entire face wrapped in a scarf. We are both silent, slowly growing more and more hunched as the cold weighs down on us, but we continue on. Her with her shoveling. Me with my scraping. There is nothing else we can do.
"I am struggling with depression...again...still." Bill texts me. He is living in a city shelter now, despite a handful of grand plans to move across the city, across the country, across the ocean.
I can't escape it either, and I tell him so. The beauty of his response catches me off guard.
"We are caught between two worlds."
I am here. I am not here.
"I feel like you're slipping away." The Mr. whispers in the dark. I roll over and wrap my arms around him, trying to be reassuring. But that's not what he wants. He wants me to talk to him.
"I never have anything new to say." I tell him.
I'm not even sure if that's true. I am standing in a corner, facing the wall, as my thoughts clamor behind me. Sometimes I steal a glance. I try to focus. How do I feel? What am I thinking? But the words never reach my mouth. They just loop round and round in my head.
I get a voicemail from the psychiatry clinic. They have decided to increase my anti-depressant. Again.
In the news a college girl gets dropped off at her house after a party. Drunk, she stumbles up to her porch only to find the door locked. She falls asleep there on the porch as the temperature drops lower and lower and lower. By the time they find her, her hands have frozen solid to the wood. She will wake up to discover both her hands simply gone.
Worried faces blur until they mean nothing. Everything seems to be in hyperbole. Everyone is telling me my hands are gone, but I am looking right at them. They are right here. I am wiggling my fingers. I am clenching my fists. There is nothing wrong with me.
I am fine.
This is very sad, but beautifully written. "I am fine," sounds like a mantra you tell yourself. If the girl with the frozen hands tells her that, she will still say she's fine even when her hands have frozen off. Eventually, you have to face the truth and conquer your demons.
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