Except that’s not really true, what I just told you. About wondering. Maybe that part about “we,” but I didn’t say whether that includes me. It doesn’t. Because this thing happened a long while back. This thing that turned me into a held breath, kept my hands shaking for asylum.
People used to see me a certain way. I was a girl who got noticed. Untouchable. Someone people thought they’d never be friends with.
But I’d left town for a while and came back half-dead. A downward spiral bored through my head.
As the sole survivor of a suicide pact I was reduced to panhandling outside of the Mission, just to be able to get in to see a show. I’d grown up in that club, but after I’d left they didn’t know how to fit my name on the guest list anymore. There was no glory for the girl who couldn’t break on through to the suicide.
The Vapids were playing the night I met Aimee. I’d spent a few hours outside before the doors opened, hands out and an eye on the layers of charms at my neck and wrists. I believed they could—would—bring me luck, power, persuasion. Healing. They clicked at my pulse points, dogs’ nails on a hardwood floor.
And maybe I did have some luck that night, because I made enough money to get into the show and enough to buy something extra to dip into.
I don’t know how much time passed between getting inside and getting high, but I don’t think it was long before I was a writhing OD on the Mission bathroom floor. Later, I’d asked Aimee what it looked like.
“I’d never seen that happen before. The skin. You’d think it’d be hot, flushed. A sick exterior. But it’s not. It’s chill come alive, barely.”
I was disappointed. It sounded the same as what I’d seen in others, a look I’d learned between sets when Valium were still playing, still alive. We all liked to tease our bodies to a metronome brink in those days. It was what the cult of the music dictated.
At that Vapids show, though, I hadn’t planned on taking it very far. Hadn’t expected the shit to hit me so hard, so fast.
In the bathroom the ceiling was fogged with pot smoke. I couldn’t see anyone’s faces but I knew other girls were around. I could hear their shrieking laughter. I tried to talk but my mouth was broken. All I could do was sink deeper into the base of the old velour couch, something that once would have been expensive, plush, now balding trash against a toilet stall. My eyes spun, pinwheeled. A silver spool of saliva tore out of the side of my mouth.
And then I was suddenly light enough to fit across a pair of arms. My shallow bones. I could hear the straw of my hair against skin, my head a bleached explosion at the inside of an elbow. I could smell myself. The same white Smiths t-shirt I always wore stained with a dozen other nights. Its blooms of sweat released below the nose.
Aimee kept me floating by asking me questions: what did you take/who did you get it from/where do you live/do you want to go home or to the hospital/do you remember what you did earlier today/do you remember who you are?
Not that I had to tell her my name. She already knew. “I’ve seen you around before,” she said. “You’re Ang. You’re Ang. You’re Ang.” She said it for me, in case I didn’t know it anymore. She recognized me, the way I believed people still should, or would, even though I’d chopped my hair from waist-length to boy-short, bleached it from black to bare-bulb white. My weight had stayed off, though, cheekbones and chin still sharp, jutting.
I could never remember this part, but Aimee told me later I threw up in the sink as soon as we got to my place. Light purple pulp and cigarette ash in the shared bathroom at the end of the hall.
I kept the door to my room unlocked, having lost my key a month before and not bothered to ask for a replacement. I had nothing left that I cared about anyway—the life lesson of depression.
My bed filled most of the apartment because the place was really just a room with a closet. Every other inch of it was covered in plaid shirts and bras, a rough pair of jeans I’d stolen and never worn. With the sleeve of her flannel shirt, Aimee wiped the residue from around my mouth and cleared a space on the floor all in the same motion.
She pulled me down and I pulled a piece of chalk off the windowsill behind her and drew a circle on the floor. I slid a ring off my finger and dropped it into the circle’s center, pronounced us blood sisters. She accepted my sisterhood. For weeks after I would ask her to tell me this story, over and over, as affirmation that someone wanted me close, that someone had wanted to save me.
Aimee stayed with me for a while after that. I didn’t own a blanket, relied only on the clothes piled on the mattress to keep us covered.
Aimee said she hardly slept at all whenever she stayed over. She learned early on that I lacked margins when I slept, a desiccated portrait.
The remains of my past were fossilized on the bedroom walls. Above us a suicide scene played out, all the way from the west coast. The room spat Polaroids and memories in negative images, a high contrast inversion in frosted blues to match the lips of my dead boyfriend, his dead friends.
The story always ended the same, with me being the only one to walk away.
That’s where that story ended, and my question of responsibility began: was that the first moment, the first incident that jarred the universe off its course?
Did we lose the first rhythm because I didn’t die that day? I can’t even remember what dropped off in the beginning: the rush of mornings, maybe. Traffic and alarm clocks and packed subway trains. Not that I ever had a job to go to. Or a routine to maintain.
If I’d died that day, would we still have the rhythm of the seasons? We lost the silk of leaf on leaf in spring wind. We lost the colour green and forgot that branches used to be something more than spider-long fingers that snap in frail air. We lost the stop and start of red lights, green lights, and the caution of yellow. We lost caution. We lost birds at dawn and bus schedules and daily newspapers, the timing of rain after a storm’s first thunderclap and any predictable rise of the sun. We lost, and we lost, and we lost.
And as we lost, people wondered not only where it started, but how, and why. Was it pollution? Germ warfare? Greed? God?
And as they wondered, my conviction grew, intuition tracing everything back to that one day when the knife didn’t go deep enough, and I thought then that I knew the answer.