When my trial came, the worst thing wasn’t the sentence – which after evidence was read out from a psychiatric report about my drinking and my depression and my coming off my drugs too fast meant a stint in a psychiatric hospital. It was the fact that Luke was there, looking at me across the dock from where the good people stood.
We had switched roles now and he didn’t like it. He stared at me, daring me to look at him, and I, shaking all over, avoided his eye contact.
Even after my outburst at the hospital, my parents tried. My mom wrote long letters, sometimes asking questions, sometimes filling me in on the neighbours’ sweet granddaughter and the new recipe she had started making with English cheddar cheese. Had I tried it? It really was delicious. Wittering, across an ocean. I never replied.
She called too, every week I was in hospital, but I stayed resolutely silent as she spoke.
‘Please just tell me you’re okay,’ she would sob. ‘And if you’re not, let me help.’
I stared at the wall. Finally, one day, I replied.
‘I am an adult,’ I said, working hard on not crying once again. ‘I told you, this is what I want. If you want the best thing for my recovery, you will leave me alone.’
My mom’s tears rung out in my ears before I buried mine in my thin, sad hospital pillow. After that I refused all of her calls.
It was rage mixed with shame mixed with nostalgia mixed with love and that combination was too much for me to handle. It’s easier to cut off your family when you live in another country. It’s easier to cut off your family when you are locked away in an institution.
I stayed in hospital for three months, and then I had intensive therapy and a higher dose of antidepressants.
When I came out, friends fell into two camps. The ones who had in the meantime blocked me, deleted me, cancelled me from their worlds, and the ones who tried, but who I pushed away anyway. But there was one I needed. One I couldn’t let go.
‘Do you think you could still be my friend?’ I said quietly, hopefully, on the phone in bed to my dear, dear Frances.
We were no longer as close since I moved, since Luke, but she had written me a postcard once, when I moved out, saying ‘You will always be my bestie.’ I kept it in a book of Emily Dickinson poetry next to my bed. It was one of the only things I took with me to hospital. It was the one and only time anyone had called me their best friend. And Frances had no ties to Luke; unlike everyone else, first and foremost she was mine.
‘I love you, Harriet,’ she sighed. ‘But I’m sorry, I have to go now. I need to put some dinner on for the kids and feed the dog. I’ll call you though, yeah?’
The noise of her family chaos sneaked into our line and she went back to her packed world, while I went back to silence. She did call but it was awkward, dealing with such huge events over the phone when so much distance had been created between us. Over time that distance stretched and grew. I always had the sense that I was putting her in an awkward position, just existing. Eventually, I stopped contacting her and made it easier for my Frances to move on.
I know Luke went back to the States, from one rogue social media site he left public accidentally, but I know nothing else. After the trial it felt like Luke cancelled himself; Naomi, too. I couldn’t find a trace of them online, no updates, no pictures, no signs of life. They went off the grid, in social media terms at least.
So I was left only with my barely there contact with David and with me, knowing that I wasn’t that drunk, and I didn’t trip, and that I picked up that mug and I made that decision.