The Death of Small Creatures (25 page)

One night I
am high from drinking Neo and freebasing Wellbutrin. My sinuses burn. My nose is plugged, crusted white around the nostrils. The combination of Neo and Wellbutrin makes me manic.

This night I am up late watching George Stroumboulopoulos on CBC, can't sit still, run in and out of the apartment into the night, up the driveway and into the street. I'm in my socks. The pavement is wet but I don't care. Dewdrops gather on the leaves of the blueberry bush in the front yard. I am mesmerized by them, press my face up close to them, lick them in order to taste the rain. My sister is upstairs in the house. I look up at her glowing window and wonder what she's doing in there.

I can't stop thinking about Dr. P. I Google him and find doctor ratings online. He's rated as one of Victoria's top ten psychiatrists. None of the patients who rate him talk about wanting him as a lover.

Richard comes to
visit me several times over the next six weeks. He spoils me, adorns me with compliments, buys me dinners, takes me to movies and art galleries. He has told his wife he is seeing me. She calls and texts him frequently during his trips to see me.

I am selfish, need to be selfish; it is a matter of self-preservation. I must consume as much love and affection as possible. I know he is concerned about me. He sees my scars, tells me I'm beautiful, that these scars make me who I am, that they are my history and not to be ashamed. I am desperately ashamed.

We walk for hours, traversing the city streets of Victoria's magical downtown core holding hands, our arms draped around each other. He buys me a portable keyboard for my little notebook computer, something “to help with your writing,” he says, and portable speakers for my iPod.

It's a six-week whirlwind.

We're falling in love.

I have no proper bed yet, so we make love on a series of airbeds, three in total, each of which collapses or bursts with the weight of our lovemaking. We fall asleep in each other's arms one night, wake up in the morning in the crevice of a deep V, the two sides of the airbed puffed up like large air mattresses on either side of us. We laugh about it in the morning, remain like that, pressed up against each other as the sun bursts softly through my blinds, making delicate slats of the room, shadows and light spanning the opposite wall.

I tell him I love him. But part of me clings to my old life. Still, there are times I miss the anchor of my marriage, that feeling of knowing my life is defined by so many wanted or unwanted details. I long for the old days of being so fervently kept. Like a hostage, I am attached to my captor. Like a cult disciple, I long for my master.

Clinical Note:

Anxiety discussed. She has a recent incident wherein she believed her cat was going to hurt her. Insomnia. Over-the-counter cough remedy abuse continues. Will stop Zeldox to get an idea if this is linked to her perceptual difficulties.

I snort my
skinny little lines on the cutting board on the coffee table, use my social insurance card, scraping across the hard white plastic, making little slender piles of the stuff, little chunks of pill casing throughout. I want to tell Dr. P what I've been doing, but I'm afraid he will stop seeing me if I do. I snort up the powder along with the pill casing bits. The power goes straight up my sinuses, feels like it goes straight to my brain, as if there is nothing between open air and the softness of my cerebellum, as if my brain is a wet spongy mass into which the powder is absorbed. But the pill casing bits get stuck up inside my sinuses and on the inside of my nose, clog the airways. I alternately snort and blow my nose, snort up the powder then blow out the bits. Sometimes I think I am blowing out bits of my brain in the process.

I am talking
to Richard on the phone one night, high on NeoCitran and after having snorted Wellbutrin. He comments on my stuffed-up sinuses. I tell him not to worry, it will clear up soon.

He calls me back a few minutes later, sounds concerned, a little exasperated, asks me outright, “Are you snorting Wellbutrin?” He had previously asked me to list off my medications. I don't know how he thinks to ask if I'm snorting Wellbutrin, except that he is intelligent and intuitive, and he Googles everything. He says, “I want you to tell me the absolute truth.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Why?” he says. I say nothing, just breathe into the receiver, my sinuses plugged. “Why do you do that?”

“I don't know,” I say. I can't even say it's to numb the pain because I haven't been feeling anything but high in recent weeks. I just want more; it's part of my interpersonal style, to want more.

“I think we should take a break,” he says. “I can't handle this right now.”

“Okay,” I say flatly, almost cheerfully. I am not cheerful, not in the least happy about the rejection, but my defences have kicked in such that I feign indifference as a means of protecting myself. So I sound complacent, mildly cheerful.

We say goodbye.

In the following weeks I hide myself away. He calls me several times and emails me afterward, to reconnect, but I am gone from his life and caught up entirely in my own world of self-abuse and addiction.

A few weeks
after Richard and I part ways, I do the unthinkable and stay over at Leigh's house for the first time since I left months ago. When I return home I am met by my sister, in tears, and a police car and two police officers. Sandy finds me inside my suite, making toast. I open the door. She's visibly shaken.

“You're here,” she says. “We've been looking for you.”

The police officers appear behind her. “Oh,” I say, shaken now too, trying to put things together, dismayed that she has gone to such lengths to find me. I haven't told her about seeing Leigh again, fearing her reprimand and disapproval. “I was at Leigh's.”

“Okay,” she says. Then she turns to the police officers. “She's okay,” she says. “She's home.” Then she turns back to me. “Mom and Warren are on their way over on the ferry.”

“What?” I say. “Why?”

“We didn't know what happened to you,” she says. “We know about Dave. And you were seeing that guy, Richard. We thought something had happened to you.”

I console her, offer a stream of apologies. What else can I do? “I'm so sorry,” I say. “I had no idea.” But I'm pissed off too, that they have invaded my privacy this way, that Sandy came into my suite while I wasn't there, that they are treating me like a child.

Mom and my stepdad Warren arrive in the afternoon. Mom is weepy and worn. She holds me so tight in her arms I can't breathe. Her warmth is claustrophobic. I am the exciting factor in the family, however harrowing my excitement might be, however much my illness and my antics have hurt those around me.

We all go out for dinner to San Remo, a little Greek restaurant a couple blocks away. As I sit there in the warm candlelit room listening to Greek music playing on the speakers I feel almost normal, like this is just another family outing, ignoring the circumstances that brought us all here together, several months after my hospitalization in the mental ward. They are here, all of them, because of me—because they worry a sudden disappearance means I have possibly killed myself or gone on another crystal meth binge, or that Richard has slain me in my sleep, or I don't know what. But they are here, all of them once again, because of me.

I've been binging
and purging every night for weeks. Leigh admires my increasingly slender body, seems oblivious to my declining health otherwise. I lie there in bed while he fucks me, my body limp and depleted, my consciousness woozy and off-kilter. Yet sometimes I think I'm in love with him again. We eat out a lot and go to movies. I feign being a wife again. I think he wants me back, I can't imagine why.

Cutting is exhilarating. It cuts through the monotony of daily existence, makes the platitudes tolerable if only for a little while. On one night, it takes my breath away. I say, “Oh, oh, oh, okay, fuck, okay,” and I run to the bathroom for a towel, wrap my wrist, use my free hand to call a cab. The exhilaration lasts from the moment of the cut throughout that first evening, to the emergency room, as the needle is threaded through my skin, because I love the attention, because it makes me feel important, because it makes me feel loved.