kierkegarden | To Me, if I Succeeded

To Me, if I Succeeded - Creative Nonfiction - by Kierkegarden

It was a bitter cold October in an unheated apartment at the corner of Ramsey and Kathleen. Snow had arrived before Halloween this year, something that you were informed was quite common in Northern Idaho. If not for their warnings, you wouldn’t have expected it. Like always, you were a newcomer to this town. You had no expectations and you didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Like a discarded doll, you had let them place you here. You were seventeen years old.

The last four years had been spent in and out of rehabilitation, traveling through Utah, Texas, and California. Perhaps that’s why time meant so little to you, and space even less. While most teenage girls took this particular span of time to experiment with identity, you had never really gotten the chance to create your own. You had spent the entirety of high school as a traveler, always the new girl in every school, thoroughly examined by your peers until diagnosed as normal. You had learned to act, had learned to be quiet and pliable. You were a passive bystander to your own life.

Of course, the implication of having a life never fit on you either. You spent high school in a variety of different houses, apartments, and wards, but you never had a home. A home implied a seat by the fireplace, family game nights, petty quarrels with your brothers and sister. By the age of sixteen, you forgot what your parents looked like between their visits. You saw them once a year, if that, the imprint of those visits on your psychology lessening every time. One day, you realized that you had not been raised by your parents, or anyone. You had simply sprouted. You were a weed.

For the brief time you spent in psychiatric care in Texas, between guardians, you were allowed a ten minute phone call with each of your siblings. It struck you then, how gentle they were with you, as if they had been told you were fine china or a feral dog. They didn’t prod you or tease you over the phone, they simply talked in slow, quiet voices. This was your identity.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, at the advent of tools like the bicycle, the telephone, the camera and the expansion of the railway, the meaning of time and space shifted. It rattled in its grave before dying entirely, taking Europe with it. It was beautiful, they said, an Englishman could travel to the continent in mere seconds by telephone call. His world suddenly stretched around empty space, light and color blinding him from all angles. The fierce white Russian winters, hot red Spanish summers. Things that the masses could have only shaped with the written word and imagination became vivid reality.

Humans, confused and frightened in shoes too big to fill, stuffed the void where space and time had once been defined with war. I remember sitting in my Modern Poetry lecture in college learning so much about the human impact of such inventions, through the eyes of other writers. I was effectively wearing the skin of Walt Whitman looking out on bountiful, diverse America in all of her hopeful, brutal glory. I remember reading old poetry zines, published in 1919. War, having squashed creatives under his angry boots, milked them for their lifeblood. That’s what we get for trying to play God, by the way, a lot of dead people and some really great writing to add to the portfolio of human suffering.

In the 21st century, narrowness does not exist. Our minds have been stretched so far around space and time that they are aching. The only cavities still left full are the locked perspectives of our neighbors and the vein-like missed opportunities that twist out of our past selves. And we are still probing them. I don’t believe objective truth comes when all space and time has been shed like lizard skin. I want to hold onto something concrete and grounded, even though I know you never believed in it. I hold on so tightly to God, using words I think you can understand to describe his majesty. Then again, you were always cynical.

In a 1952 Dublin lecture hall, Erwin Schrödinger told the crowd that, mathematically, they were inconsequential. He said that the suspension of different histories, the possibility of different realities, were “not alternatives, but all really happen simultaneously”. He warned the listeners that this was lunacy and I believe he was right. I know you would think of me as a zealot for believing that some stones should not be turned over, but God’s shoes are too large for you, and me, and Dr. Schrödinger. Then again, you never went to college.

Here’s a laundry list of things you never did. You never looked in the mirror and saw a woman. You never pulled your own strings. You never sat passenger while Tyler drove you to the Safeway parking lot, talking God, and life, and love over cigarettes and The Pixies. You never quit smoking. You never fell in love with anything but yourself, and her reflection in other women. You never learned how to stop being a pendulum between love and hate, happiness and sadness, chest-tightening fear and total calm and by that, I mean you never conquered addiction. You never had the confidence to publish your poetry. You never fell into another person and had them bear your entire weight without faltering, like you would do for them. You never walked down the aisle wearing your mother’s dress and watching your father cry with joy. You never forgave your parents for fucking you up, and you never let them forgive themselves. You never lived to see eighteen.

The crinkled leaves make me wistful and leave me wanting. I live here still, not because of someone placing me, but because I love it. I wouldn’t want to leave. Last year, I graduated college and this year, I’m going to get married. The snow hasn’t fallen yet and it’s already January, but I suspect that has more to do with climate change than divine providence.

My savior was a girl I’ll likely never see again, and I don’t even see her as my savior. She was the Anyman, the good Samaritan. The weight of savior is too heavy for a stranger so instead I am just grateful that time and space lined up to help me, despite the fact that I had forsaken them.

On the ride to the hospital, my vision was blurred, I was slipping in and out of consciousness, humming to the radio under my breath. I could feel myself dying, the pills aching in my stomach as my head knocked against the window. I crashed into the threshold. The driver kept trying to make conversation desperately, bless his heart, trying to keep me with him as he sped past fast food restaurants and neon, the landmarks of this physical body. The radio was loud. I still listen to that station sometimes.

Once I was there, they put tubes in my body and fed me charcoal. I remember thinking vaguely that I had ruined my nicest panties when I shat black and vomited black on my winter coat. It didn’t cross my mind until later how funny such a thought is, when you’re dying, and you’re only thinking about your name brand underwear, the only pair of name brand underwear you own. In the psych ward, I watched Signs on VHS no less than three times as I tried to drown out the screaming child with schizophrenia. I missed the adult ward by a month.

You never lived to see eighteen. You never lived to meet your best friend or the love of your life, to travel to Prague as I did last summer, and stand on the edge of a Tesco cart, picking out cheese that only cost a few cents. You never lived to grow old, to remake the construct of family and home, build a fireplace with your bare hands and prove you are more than fine china. Somewhere inside of your rotting corpse, there lives a dragon. You never lived to get it out. To hell with the other timelines, I am a dragon and I’m here to burn them down.

Some choose to worship the emptiness, the stretch of free will that enables us to bomb or run or smoke or scream at the top of our lungs that we are the highest power in the world. Some worship the erosion of consciousness and meaning that comes with a many-tiered reality, a multiverse where simultaneously, I am you and me, dead and alive, free and in chains. There is no right or wrong in this fog and snow, there is no meaning in this endless winter.

I worship the unknown, the workings of time and space that pushed together so that she would find me lying half-dead on the bed, fingers loosely wrapped around a bottle of pills. So call me a zealot, I am worshiping my purpose. I am paying back this mortgage on my tiny inconsequential life, with every shred of hallelujah. I am relishing my existence.