Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (39 page)

Before getting emergency married in Alex’s kitchen, Nico and I had planned on doing it at San Francisco City Hall, that hundred-year-old, gold-domed Beaux Arts block at the edge of downtown. On almost any afternoon, you could watch couples in wedding clothes and in love, from the city and all over, line up for their licenses. Suits and tuxedos and all manner of dresses—big traditional ones, little cocktail ones, white ones and blue ones and gold ones—wandered around the marble all day, lingering for pictures and for the stately but sweet ambience. As a reporter, I’d watched a lot of gay couples get married there, if that happened to be a year in which they weren’t blocked by legislation. After each time the legislation was overturned, couples flocked to the building, love and justice prevailing. The judges performed short ceremonies at various scenic points in the architecture: in the rotunda, on the midway landing of the cascading grand staircase, under an arch. In their black robes, they looked kind and no less sincere for the facts that they didn’t know the couples and performed dozens of the ceremonies a week. San Franciscans running errands in the building stopped to watch respectfully. Everyone involved in the weddings at City Hall felt like a constantly evolving and expanding community. It was secular, and full of strangers, but we were all united by our belief in this one thing.

Nico and I couldn’t get married by a judge anymore because we were already married. But San Francisco’s City Hall is for everyone—you could do pretty much whatever you wanted there, not excluding cartwheels or protesting in the nude. So we stuck with the planned venue, having Alex remarry us under the 300-foot dome. Nico and I hadn’t been in touch much when he was in France, and when we had, we’d continued to fight. He’d been gone for three weeks, as planned, taking care of his mom, painting her apartment, doing whatever she needed. They’d talked. She said she’d made a mistake and promised she wouldn’t again. They parted on good terms, if tense. When he got back, we stopped questioning our relationship. We concerned ourselves now with finding the best way forward.

I didn’t write my vows. We had decided to write our vows, but I failed to prepare much. “I wrote vows for you in February when you asked me to marry you originally in France,” I admitted, standing there on the pink marble in an ivory lace gown, “when I had jet lag and you were sleeping and I wasn’t.” The dress was heavy, unwieldy, with a train—exactly the kind of to-do we wanted. The weight of it tried to compensate for more important elements that were missing, the out-of-town friends and relatives and reception. The night before, Nico’s best friend Jimmy, who I’d met with him in the pool in Haiti, had called and put together his best English to say he wished he would be there and asking me to take care of Nico please. He may have been crying. I wished he were there, too; Nico was surrounded entirely by my friends and my family, and it didn’t seem right to have a party with only my loved ones. His mother said she didn’t feel up to it.

“When you asked me to marry you I was having a lot of very, very bad days in a row and was in the middle of a serious nervous breakdown,” I continued. “So most of those vows that I wrote were about having nervous breakdowns.” Those nights I’d lain next to him in France, keeping myself from touching him by telling myself how toxic I was, I’d passed some of the hours by writing in my head what vows I
would
say if I were ever in a position to accept his proposal. In them I brought up the way I could feel the certainty and rightness of him even in the depths of my deepest spells. As I composed and recited the sentences, I’d squeezed hot tears all over my pillow, silent, my face twisted with the pain that I’d never get better enough to say them.

I decided not to use them now. I was making our audience uncomfortable enough with my multiple mentions of nervous breakdowns, and the following sentence: “We don’t have to do the sickness-and-health thing, because you were around for plenty of sickness already.”

Instead, I said that he was a miracle, and that I would hold him, keep him, and respect him like the miracle that he was, forever.

When it was his turn, Nico said he wouldn’t forget what a beautiful creature I was, every day, and that he would let me put my fingers into his glass of milk to dip Oreos even though he hated that. He said his conscience and all his body and spirit were engaged in keeping me satisfied and making me happy for the rest of his life. “I’m not a military yet,” he said, then paused. One of the many absurdities of the French language was that
yet
,
still
, and
again
were expressed by the same word. “Anymore,” he corrected himself. “But this is my mission now.”

At the end of his speech, Nico said that destiny put me in his way in Haiti. I thought about that as we abandoned our guests after the ceremony, driving north out of the city in a rented car. Nico sometimes said that if his father hadn’t died, he wouldn’t be the man he was now. He wouldn’t have been lost and listless and joined the gendarmes; he wouldn’t have been sent to Haiti; he wouldn’t have met me. I had the same connection between him and the worst event of my life. If I hadn’t gone through the exact set of experiences in Haiti exactly when I went through them, I probably wouldn’t have got PTSD, not then, and quite possibly not ever. But I also wouldn’t have met Nico. Without all our stinky, sticking, death-black compost, we wouldn’t have each other at all.

San Francisco seemed whitewashed under a bright sun, passing by our windows as we sat, overdressed and holding hands, on leather seats. We stopped on the Golden Gate Bridge, delighting the tourists with the opportunity to add pictures of strangers in wedding clothes to their catalog of snapshots. Suddenly starved, we drove to a taco shack in Sausalito before continuing north. Up into the hills, up past the pastures, into the eucalyptus and redwoods and sequoias. We celebrated in the stillness at a cabin there, my dress, spilling over a chair, a reminder of what we’d done, but the feeling around us the same as in my hotel room that night in Haiti: relief that we were near. Permanently relieved, now, that we would never be another way.

*   *   *

Over that honeymoon weekend, we may have had an episode, between us.

Maybe one and a half.

Maybe it had been sex-related, as sex was turning out to be one of the most lingering problem spaces for me, as it was for many like me, every surrender an effort. Maybe not all of it had been about sex. “Maybe this is just what I’m like now,” I’d been starting to think. I ran that by Denise in her office a few weeks later.

We’d cut our sessions to once a week, with the agreement that we’d see how it went. Two years after my diagnosis, sometimes I had long strings of days where I felt fine. I also had days where I woke up not-fine. A day where I woke up with Chris in my bones, and let him in and sang to him softly out loud, feeling static start to crawl through my limbs, a light threat to disappear, but opening up across my shoulders and letting it ride, the tingling in my nerves, breathing deep, singing, then crying, then up and out the door and on with the day holding on to the thought that the sadness would pass. And then a day where I strode through our apartment and rolled up my sleeves, not to accomplish anything but because they were too long, regardless feeling nothing but tall, broad power and openness and possibility.

“Maybe that’s how it is now, fine sometimes, and not-fine sometimes,” I told Denise. Some wonderful honeymoon afternoons, one bumpy honeymoon night. “Maybe my Tootsie Roll center is half darkness, and it’s going to surface, but then it will recede, and that will be my life. Maybe it will always be like this.”

I realized I would have preferred for her to contradict me—to tell me that eventually, PTSD patients who worked hard enough always emerged like a perfectly buffed and eternally gleaming coin—when she asked, “And how would that be? Could you accept that?”

I would think about that a lot, in the coming years.

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I can accept being destined for that degree of grief sometimes. I feel pretty good right now. I get more used to the bad days and get better at rolling with them, and, you know, my depth of experience will be better in the end. Like you always say, if you can feel the force of sadness and if you weren’t freaking out about it, there could be an exquisiteness to it, like it’s valid and amazing as its own emotion.” This would not have been one of the riches I’d yet attained. “Obviously I still think it’s better not to get traumatized in the first place,” I said, because I still wasted a lot of energy bemoaning both that the world was unfair and evil, and my reactions to that—which were, in my defense and thanks to my disorder, quite drastic. “Mac’s problem,” Denise showed me she had written in her notes once, “is not that she can’t fix it but that it shouldn’t be that way.”

But I had acquired some personal enhancements over my pre-trauma self. I enumerated them regularly for Denise. My self-awareness was vastly improved. My patience and compassion with myself and others were more developed and advanced. I had an increased presence in the present, and an increased consciousness of whether I was present or not. I was starting to accept Denise’s assertions that negative emotions were acceptable and appropriate and could come on regularly. She encouraged me to picture them like a wave. Picture letting myself be taken up in their swell, relaxing into them. After they crested, everything would wash out level again on the shore. I was still bitter, because I probably could have acquired those qualities less painfully, but in general everyone said people with trauma should be optimistic. The vice president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, whom I interviewed for Brannan’s story, felt optimistic about the field, because there are treatments that work, and a lot of people get better, even
better
better. On good days I did feel relieved that I wasn’t suffering as I did on bad days, which made good days even better in a way. The flip side to that was that I was always in mind of suffering, even when I wasn’t.

But as Denise always said, “Your room gets messy, and you clean it up.”

And just days after that calm, collected session, I was a disaster again. Suddenly, I struggled to stay on the right side of nihilism again. Hard. I took nihilistic showers, shifting my weight neurotically, psychotically, from one leg to the other, repeating to myself a combination of a mantra about nature being evil by nature and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies VP’s quote that the normative response to trauma is healing and that even for the non-normative healing could be attained. I alternated these with Denise’s oft-repeated aphorism: Your room gets messy, you clean it up. That was the cycle of physical and emotional life. Your room gets messy, you clean it up. The moments of enjoyment when you weren’t cleaning made it worth it. When you weren’t cleaning, you were free to relish in love and beauty.

If you got really good, you could relish the cleaning itself.

You couldn’t avoid suffering. The trick was accepting it. Not fighting against it. Not trying to escape it. Not wishing it was something else. Integration of trauma was the goal, Herman wrote, not exorcism. Not flying to a faraway cave and establishing residency there; just being with reality as it was. The simplest-sounding trick. And how hard it was to perform it. You could never stop practicing. And just because you pulled it off once didn’t mean you’d pull it off every other time.

Demoralized as I was, I was more on the path to accepting it than usual. I wasn’t yelling at anybody, or drunk. I wasn’t numb, though continuing to inhabit my body was still depressing me half to death. But the more I did it, the better I got at seeing my emotions and feeling and moving them through.

Even in the midst of my nihilism relapse, I brought Denise good news. The day before, I told her (in the second half of our session—obviously I spent at least the first half bawling), I’d been making out with Nico when I knew I had to stop. “Something’s wrong,” I told him.

I took a minute to breathe, and realized I couldn’t feel the connection between my torso and my limbs. I was dissociated. Lost. I stayed with it, and could name the nature of the dissociation in minutes.

“I don’t know who I am,” I said to Nico.

I reached into my belly for the things I put there. Work was there, but I couldn’t get hold of it in any meaningful way. Nico was there. I knew I loved him, but if I didn’t know who I was, what was my sexual identity? Did I even like having sex? I knew I did, or had at some point, so tried to conjure a time I’d desired my husband, picturing a moment that resonated. I pressed my belly to his and kissed him, putting my hands on him, and the connection brought my limbs back, plus one little piece of my identity: I was a woman. I was a woman with a body and desire.

It worked.

It was the first time I’d used sex to get
out
of dissociation, rather than sex being an activity that threw me unwillingly and miserably into it.

*   *   *

“You
wanted
him,” Denise would say about Nico after we’d been married for more than a year.

I had. He was the centerpiece of my second foundation of healing: choosing the life I wanted to live going forward. And going for it.

As the months passed after our (second) wedding, I shed the concern that I would never be healthy enough to share a life. After our second wedding, my only regret about getting married was that we’d already got married and couldn’t get married anymore. I plotted a lot of remarriages for our future. I asked him to marry me again every couple of weeks.

But as my biggest reward, he was also the source of my biggest challenges. I woke up in the middle of the night often to make sure he was still breathing. Often when he left the house I was paralyzed with fear that he’d die and never return. I continued struggling to surrender as fiercely and easily as he did.

“That’s my gal,” Denise said a few months into my marriage, when, on the table, I for the first time achieved the magic mix I’d been striving for. At the end of that session, I was completely open and connected. But completely together and ready for anything.