If I could start again

I'm a person with half formed and vague superstitions. It makes me cautious, and I think most all of my friends have seen it come and go in my behavior. I didn't grow up with a solid set of them, so I've cobbled all of them together over the years. Dates have to be the big one though. It's not so much that I feel the date has some extraordinary power in and of itself. It just seems that things happen with certain days. It makes me feel like a paranoid schizophrenic to actually talk about it, you know.

This day is my strange superestitious marking of the year. For a time I called it my second birthday. On January 13th back in 1997 I tried to die. I didn't think about it coming much this year until I heard that Jim Carroll Band song on the radio a week back. It was a bad place that year, between the suicide of someone I knew and the absolute horror of an abusive situation that I could not escape. After sitting in the hospital with Alan this year, I do have more empathy for my parents and what it must have felt like to see me in a coma with tubes going down my throat. It's a strange think to talk about, and you never know how people will look at you knowing that you once did something this crazy stupid scary.

I took somewhere between a hundred and a hundred fifty pills with a can of coke. I can't remember anymore how many bottles of prescription antidepressants and painkillers I emptied, but I do remember grabbing the aspirin bottle as well and taking six of those. (Do you know how many times I've asked myself why and I still don't have any answer for that moment.) It was the one day it snowed that year, so everything was iced over and in an inch or two of powdery white. My mother said that the ambulance was skidding all over the road, and she didn't know how they were going to make it to the hospital. When I stopped breathing, they rammed something down my throat to force my airway open. In the process of doing that, they tore up the inside of my throat so that I still have some scar tissue.

Days in a coma, with the possibility of severe brain damage. My closest friends from high school slept in the waiting room, and some kind staff person unplugged the soda machine so it would be quieter for them. I woke up in the ICU, in the middle of the night the first time. I remember lifting my finger, puzzled by the red glow around it. I didn't realize it was the heart monitor and I was still alive. The first few days of consciousness were blurry and indistinct. I remember the charcoal in my hair, the smell of it, and the day they pulled the tube out of my nose while I was awake. When they decided I wasn't going to die and had miraculously escaped brain damage, they sent me upstairs to a regular room while my parents made arrangements to send me to a pysch facility. I remember my friends from journalism visiting, and watching the Simpsons in my room. Kevin brought me a little stuffed dog, and Michael held my hand. What really broke my heart though was when John hugged me, because John never touched anyone ever and I think we were all a little stunned by that gesture.

Honestly, I should have died. All the doctors and nurses and EMTs thought I would die. I was so far down in hell that I wanted it to stop and nothing was working. No one took our side in what was happening with an abusive teacher at school, and no one believed it was really that bad. I did all the things you're supposed to do, talk to an adult, talk to a teacher, go to administration, follow the chain of command, etc. Nothing worked. They failed us all. Ironically it wasn't until I tried to die that anything did happen and even that was hardly enough.

I have no good answer for why I didn't die. I spent some time in a mental hospital, trying to avoid the drugged up kids who scared me. I left my high school, went to another one and dropped all my electives and doubled my classes so I could finish my junior year, take all my senior classes and graduate in three months. I went out with one of the boys who waited at my bedside in the hospital. Mostly I tried not to think, and not to feel anything. Then on January 13th 1998, I registered for classes at the University of Texas. My life started over. It was not the life I planned, but it went on.

That's how I feel now. The life I intended is gone and now it has to start over. I wonder if it just gets past this day, that maybe it will be easier. I can't help but wonder that, even when I know it isn't logical and it's just some superstition I've invented for myself. I get so angry because things don't come out the way I planned and while I have learned to cope I've never learned not to be so upset about it. I suppose you could say all these course corrections are necessary on some level, and they are going to take me where I am supposed to be. But I don't have epic vision, and there are times when I am not okay with these changes. Sometimes I really have to wonder if there a point to coping with so much heart break.

But here we are. Everything has been upside down for so long, but maybe on this side of it things will start to make sense. I don't know why I felt like writing about this today, because it isn't something I talk about a lot. Maybe it is because there are several people who haven't known me so long here in the wired world, or maybe because the memory of it was so real this morning. I dreamed about people last night, this strange all souls meeting of my past, present and future. I looked at them all while I poured a glass of whiskey, and I can't even really define the emotion there. It was some strange combination of pride and hope and sadness and wonder that made me want to reach out and touch all of them.

D. if you're reading this, I hope you're writing still and that you always stay that knight in shining armor. You and I both know that you've got that inner Galahad, and that you're a good person under there.

Michael, I may not have been a very good girlfriend. But you were a good boyfriend to me in a time I dearly needed another person. I hope you are well, and happy.

James, I don't know where you are. I hope you're safe though, and that something eases the ache in you that I always saw.

And you John B. I miss you most of all. I found a photo of you taken from the 1996 trip to Gloria Shields in Dallas, sitting on the bed in the hotel room. I wonder what happened to you, if you really are painting in Italy or if there was a darker story. I still have the book of poetry you gave me for a Christmas present the year your hair was dyed blue. Take care out there John.

like a memory in motion you were only passing through

I've spent the night with the stereo turned up loud on Concrete Blonde & Garbage, cleaning my bedroom. It was time to finally put away all those blankets and old clothes I don't wear anymore. In the process I found several cds, including the one I'm listening to now and my Lubos Malina cd I thought lost. I hung up my print of Madame X by Sargent, and it makes my room feel more like my own. finally hung up my calendars too. I took the one from my mother and put it at my desk at work, and the one from Melynda is at home.

Nine years since that other January 13th. That's a wild thought to have, nine whole years since that moment. I think about it less than I used to, and it's easier to talk about. Sometimes I still get worked up describing what happened that year, and I choke. For the most part though, I can talk about without breaking down. It seems less painful too, and that's interesting. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded. It's alright though. Certainly I'm glad that I can look back on those years and feel the distance between who I am now and who I was then. Gods above, I was a horrid teenage girl in a lot of ways. It's okay though. I keep telling myself it's probably okay to be somewhat mortified by your sixteen year old self, and the crazy stupid scary things you did once upon a time.