confused, disoriented, scared.
When I get lost as I drive through the streets of my city, I tell no one. Every night, after a day of writing, I open the bottle of wine, and Julian and I settle in for an evening of drunken glee. I make the fancy meals and wash the wedding dishes and write the thank-you notes for all the million wedding gifts on stationery stamped with my married name.
Crazy people don't have stationery, do they?
The wineglasses will stave off the madness, surely, or the breakfast nook will, or the husband himself. I'm not going crazy.
Not again.
It seems to happen overnight: one day I am calm, and the next I am raging. It's very simple. Happens like you're flipping a switch. Julian and I are going along, having a perfectly lovely evening, and then it's dark and I am screaming, standing in the middle of the room, turning over the glass-topped coffee table, ripping the bathroom sink out of the wall, picking up anything nearby and pitching it as hard as I can. The rages always come at night. They control my voice, my hands, I scream and throw myself against the walls. I feel like a Tasmanian devil. The room spins, I run up and down the stairs, I can't stop. Julian tries to grab me, holding my arms until I scream myself out and collapse, exhausted, in tears—but there are nights I manage to squirm free and run out the door. Sometimes I just run as far and as hard as I can, until I can't breathe, until my heart is about to explode, or until, stumbling drunk, I fall and hit my head on a tree stump or the curb and lie still.
Sometimes, though, I get in my car.
I peel out of the driveway, roaring up Thirty-sixth Street, away from my pretty house and sleepy neighborhood.
Slow down!
I am screaming at myself,
Marya, slow down!
And the madness screams back,
I won't!
It slides under my skin, borrowing my body without asking: my hands are its hands, and its hands are filled with an otherworldly strength. Its hands feel the need to lash out, to hit something, so it tightens its white-knuckled fists on the wheel, its bare foot slamming the gas. My head jerks back. Half in abject terror, half in awe, I watch the lights streak across the sky, bending as I careen around corners, up Hennepin, down through the seething nightlife of Lake Street, past the spectrally brilliant movie theater marquee, the crowds a blur,
stoplights are not for me!
Streetlights
smear behind me like neon streamers. I hurtle forward. The only thing that matters is motion,
forward motion, propulsion,
I veer onto the freeway, playing chicken with the cars. The road comes at me full speed, it looks as if it will hit me dead between the eyes, but then it swerves around me just in time. The other cars, the median, the guardrail flash around my face, and I in my roller coaster am clattering and screaming along. I wind up in some unknown neighborhood, over by the river or on the north side of town. I turn the car around and, my rage spent, find my way home.
Rage swings into a stuporous sleep, and sleep swings into the awful morning sun. My head slides off the edge of the bed, and my mood plummets from shrieking high to muffled low, my heart beating dully on the inside of my ribs. I fall out of bed and stumble down the stairs, heading for coffee, but get too tired on the way and lie down on the living room floor, a painful hole yawning open in my chest. This old, familiar ache does not feel so much like sadness as it does like death, if death is blunt and heavy and topples into you, knocking you flat.
Julian comes in, carrying a cup of coffee. He sees me there on the floor. "Do you want help up?"
I mean to shake my head no, but my face is pressed into the carpet, and it would be too hard to shake it anyway. He picks his way through the wreckage of the night before, clears a chair of debris, and sits down, crossing his legs, an action I find futile and absurd. Slowly, I lift myself up. I'm dizzy—I always am after a rage—and I try to focus my eyes.
When I get lost as I drive through the streets of my city, I tell no one. Every night, after a day of writing, I open the bottle of wine, and Julian and I settle in for an evening of drunken glee. I make the fancy meals and wash the wedding dishes and write the thank-you notes for all the million wedding gifts on stationery stamped with my married name.
Crazy people don't have stationery, do they?
The wineglasses will stave off the madness, surely, or the breakfast nook will, or the husband himself. I'm not going crazy.
Not again.
It seems to happen overnight: one day I am calm, and the next I am raging. It's very simple. Happens like you're flipping a switch. Julian and I are going along, having a perfectly lovely evening, and then it's dark and I am screaming, standing in the middle of the room, turning over the glass-topped coffee table, ripping the bathroom sink out of the wall, picking up anything nearby and pitching it as hard as I can. The rages always come at night. They control my voice, my hands, I scream and throw myself against the walls. I feel like a Tasmanian devil. The room spins, I run up and down the stairs, I can't stop. Julian tries to grab me, holding my arms until I scream myself out and collapse, exhausted, in tears—but there are nights I manage to squirm free and run out the door. Sometimes I just run as far and as hard as I can, until I can't breathe, until my heart is about to explode, or until, stumbling drunk, I fall and hit my head on a tree stump or the curb and lie still.
Sometimes, though, I get in my car.
I peel out of the driveway, roaring up Thirty-sixth Street, away from my pretty house and sleepy neighborhood.
Slow down!
I am screaming at myself,
Marya, slow down!
And the madness screams back,
I won't!
It slides under my skin, borrowing my body without asking: my hands are its hands, and its hands are filled with an otherworldly strength. Its hands feel the need to lash out, to hit something, so it tightens its white-knuckled fists on the wheel, its bare foot slamming the gas. My head jerks back. Half in abject terror, half in awe, I watch the lights streak across the sky, bending as I careen around corners, up Hennepin, down through the seething nightlife of Lake Street, past the spectrally brilliant movie theater marquee, the crowds a blur,
stoplights are not for me!
Streetlights
smear behind me like neon streamers. I hurtle forward. The only thing that matters is motion,
forward motion, propulsion,
I veer onto the freeway, playing chicken with the cars. The road comes at me full speed, it looks as if it will hit me dead between the eyes, but then it swerves around me just in time. The other cars, the median, the guardrail flash around my face, and I in my roller coaster am clattering and screaming along. I wind up in some unknown neighborhood, over by the river or on the north side of town. I turn the car around and, my rage spent, find my way home.
Rage swings into a stuporous sleep, and sleep swings into the awful morning sun. My head slides off the edge of the bed, and my mood plummets from shrieking high to muffled low, my heart beating dully on the inside of my ribs. I fall out of bed and stumble down the stairs, heading for coffee, but get too tired on the way and lie down on the living room floor, a painful hole yawning open in my chest. This old, familiar ache does not feel so much like sadness as it does like death, if death is blunt and heavy and topples into you, knocking you flat.
Julian comes in, carrying a cup of coffee. He sees me there on the floor. "Do you want help up?"
I mean to shake my head no, but my face is pressed into the carpet, and it would be too hard to shake it anyway. He picks his way through the wreckage of the night before, clears a chair of debris, and sits down, crossing his legs, an action I find futile and absurd. Slowly, I lift myself up. I'm dizzy—I always am after a rage—and I try to focus my eyes.
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