The Death of Small Creatures (27 page)

The big shot guy says, “Hey, whatcha got there? Are you stuffing a million dollars into that bag?”

Oh, the irony.

And everyone laughed.

April 18, 2010

In the line at the grocery store just a while ago, I was overcome with a wave of dread.

I have been feeling like the therapy is losing its spark. I think this is because I feel something has died since talking openly about my feelings for Dr. P to Dr. P. He was smiling at first when we breached the subject. I smiled too. Only afterward did I feel stupid about it all, not that I was being ridiculed, no, but that there was perhaps an element of condescension in it, a bit of bravado. But maybe I am just reacting badly because I naturally believe that other people regard me with ridicule.

April 21, 2010

I have been having Technicolor dreams, and I wake up feeling more tired than when I went to bed.

I must have looked like shit today in the therapy group because no one seemed surprised when I said I hadn't slept or eaten in a couple of days. No appetite.

The room felt askew, tilted. When I went to speak the anxiety was so intense I felt myself twisting into a knot, physically, my jaw clenched, my hands were shaking, couldn't breathe. The standard. I fear I may soon be regarded as a lost cause. I was feeling better a week or so ago, wasn't I? I don't remember now. The mood fluctuations are still so unpredictable.

I have to start eating better. Bought yogurt, bananas and Happy Planet Extreme Green smoothie. I'm going to have some combination of these for dinner.

Must get back to the gym, running. I don't know why I keep putting it off.

It's just that everything has lost its lustre.

I have to get the hell out of here.

Eleven

The Dr. Scott Journals

The months drag
on. Just before Christmas 2010, I move into a new little hovel on Fort Street, next to Christie's Pub. My new place is a one-bedroom apartment with hardwood floors, a little kitchen, living room, and a bathroom off the bedroom. There's a little cubby in the living room, two-feet-cubed, where I set up the rabbit beds and litter box. They settle in right away, seem to like the enclosure, piss and shit everywhere to mark their territory.

I once again take up painting in oils, making broad impressionist strokes in bright colours across large canvases, a circus tent glowing gold from within, ochre background, a trapeze wire spanning the top section of the canvas with little colourful flags flying from it, and on either side of the tent, I paint in my bunnies, Marcello on the left, Caravaggio on the right, immortalizing them forever.

I email Dr. P constantly, send him three or four emails between sessions, declaring my love for him. He is a patient professional, rarely emails me back except to offer information about appointment times.

I get high, puke my guts out. My bulimia is still there, always present in my life. Bulimia, from Greek, means, “ravenous hunger.” I have not lived in a single one of my thirty-something places in Victoria where I have not binged and purged.

Early in March 2011 I send an email to Richard:

March 15, 2011

Hi Richard,

Just thought I'd drop you a line to say hello. I was thinking about you today, about our picnic in the park and having coffee at Serious Coffee. God that was such a strange time. You were so generous and giving. I'll always remember that.

Hope you are well,

Trish

March 16, 2011

Hi Trisha,

It's nice to hear from you. I think good thoughts about you all the time. I'm glad you remember me as “generous and giving.” I remember always struggling not to appear as voracious as I felt. I wanted everything.

I have been plowing forward with what I believe to be the best plan for the long term, which you may recall is to bury myself in work, painting for myself and also painting maps for actual near-term money. (In theory, I'll be able to sell the paintings I do for myself at some point.) I almost showed a tiny painting in New York this month, but I didn't have time to let the paint dry to ship it and the deadline could not be moved.

I haven't been going to rock shows or to Le Pichet as much. Those were my two main vices. I'm trying to put together a budget to go to the Netherlands. Well, and everywhere...

Love Richard

I see Leigh
on and off in the following months, unable to break free, caught in my own epiphany of non-existence.

I look for Dr. P everywhere: in traffic, downtown, at movie theatres. I go to movies that I think he might also like, hoping to see him there with his wife. I want to meet her, to size her up, gauge her beauty and elegance against my own. I become shallow and consumed, start walking along Fort Street at five o'clock, hoping he'll drive by and see me walking, that he'll stop and offer me a ride.

Preposterous.

On July 1,
2011 I move into another little apartment on St. Patrick Street in Oak Bay, one of Victoria's most upscale neighbourhoods. The rent is $200 more a month, but I have my disability cheques and have obtained weekend employment back at the University of Victoria in the Residence Services Office, back in the same office where I met Leigh a decade ago.

It's a good job for now. The weekends are quiet and I work alone, have time to write and read. Students come in having locked themselves out of their rooms, and I give them spare keys and update the computer system accordingly. It feels like backtracking though. I am still, or rather once again, a clerk in an office, and my mood swings violently from one hour to the next.

My apartment is a standard box-style one-bedroom with a galley kitchen. It's carpeted throughout. Marcello and Caravaggio love it, can get traction on the rug. They tear around, chase each other from the living room to the bedroom and back again, sprawl out like rag dolls on their tummies on the living room carpet. They are the centre of my world. I feel like I would die without them.

My living room window looks onto a little grassy yard and hedges. The street is beyond the hedges. Across the street is a little deli called De'lish, which serves the best Americanos in town. I get up around noon every day and stumble over there for my morning coffee, go for long walks along the ocean, McNeill Bay, breathe in the salt air, marvel at the glittering green sea.

I sense a shift.

The air becomes lighter and sweeter here, and I am developing a sense of hope, beginning to feel like a normal person again. Perhaps the regime of new meds is working. I am employed part-time, live in a cute apartment in a good neighbourhood, the sea close by.

I have not cut in months. But as time goes on, my obsession for Dr. P grows. I see him twice a week now, for an hour each time. I become more and more convinced that some sort of romantic relationship is possible for us. This belief in the romance is my greatest sickness these days, but I can't see it.

One day, when I am healthy, I tell myself I will not need a man to make me happy and whole. I will walk along the ocean with a sense of levity, breathing in deep and easy, in love with myself and the world around me.

When I say, “I love you,” he simply replies generically, thoughtfully, strokes his eye with his baby finger: “There are many different kinds of love, Trisha.”

“But I really love you,” I say.

One night while I'm at work, Dr. P and I exchange a few emails. He advises me of his vacation schedule, that he will be gone for eighteen days, returning in the new year: January 3, 2012.

I send him a couple emails in which I depict a lavish and elaborate scenario of our possible future together, of the kind of love I half-believe is transpiring between us though he has given me no definitive reason to believe this is true. I am obsessed and cannot accept that there is not a possibility of a future for us.

November 28, 2011

Dear Dr. P,

Eighteen days and five hundred years.

Just stay.

We'll have tea and oranges.

I want a long-term, sustainable, enduring kind of love. The kind marriages are made of. I would not let you down or leave you once the first amazing flourish has subsided. You would not have taken a chance only to be left alone with neither wife nor girlfriend and three angry daughters.

If there is any part of you that feels a sense of absence, that something is missing, and you decide one day you want more, if you choose to fall in love with me, then I could be good for you without draining the life from you. If not, then that has to be okay too. I have to be okay on my own too.

He replies a few minutes later:

The seas are stormy.

The air in your lifeboat is fantasies.

I reply, frantically:

Does this mean we can never be together?

He doesn't reply.

I arrive in Dr. P's office dishevelled and red-eyed, a large bandage covering my wound and stitches. My arm aches. It hurts to lift it.

“What's going on?” he says.

“I cut myself last night,” I say, adding, “badly.”

“I see that,” he says. “What happened?”

“The seas are stormy,” I say. “Is there no chance we can ever be together?”

“We need to talk about what's making you do these things,” he says.

“I love you,” I say. “Please tell me there's a chance we can be together.”

We banter back and forth like this for an hour. I plead with him to love me. He is patient and careful with his words. At the end of the session I plead with him that I can't leave. “I can't go home,” I say.

“You can,” he says. “It'll be okay.”

“No, I really can't,” I say.

“You can call me if you need to,” he says. “You need to go home and get some rest.”

I look at him sternly. “Going home right now—is risky.”

He stares back, assessing me. Finally he gives in. “Okay,” he says. “Let's get you admitted.”

Clinical Note:

Trisha Cull has recently experienced a worsening of her mood (depressed phase). She has increased suicidal ideation, plans to kill herself, wants to die.

Admit.

Certify.

Dr. P gave
me a journal filled with blank pages—to “encourage your writing,” he said. On the front of the journal is a picture of a doctor in white scrubs, cleaning his hands with a white towel. Across from him sits an attractive woman in white pearls and a pink dress. She is smoking a cigarette. The caption reads:
Doctor Scott, a Harlequin Book
.

December 2, 2011

I am in the mental hospital again, second time in two years. I jolted awake at 2 am last night, feeling that something was very wrong. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, gauged the tilt of the room, the boudoir rocking back and forth, stood up and found myself likewise in full tilt, both physically and psychologically. My perception of reality was altered. I felt like I was suspended in ten different dimensions. I say ten, but the numerical quantity of the dimensions is incalculable; I fluctuated in and out of them, each one titillating me to enter into it, sucking me sideways, then the other way, back and forth, forwards and backwards, all at the same time. Terrified, I paced back and forth in the room for a while, trying to centre myself but to no avail.