Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,63
morning feeling like she was about to die. Instead of dozily getting ready for school, elbowing Kayla at the bathroom sink and eating a sloppy bowl of cereal as she had every day up until this point in her life, she’d stayed pinned to the bed, unable to move. There was a weakness in her legs and arms and a tight feeling in her chest and stomach. Her throat clenched and her heart raced. She told her mom that she needed to stay home from school because she had a stomach bug, and spent the rest of the day in bed, occasionally trying to read or watch TV. But the characters in books and TV shows were all so annoying and everything they did was so pointless. Didn’t they understand that we were all going to die?
The next day she got up and the crushing sadness was still there. Some instinct told her she would be better off making herself go to school than she would be lying in bed, and it turned out that she could distract herself from the weakness and icy clench and ache for short periods of time by forcing herself to go through the motions of being a person. But she worried, as she sat in class and ate her lunch and hung out with her friends on the playground after school, that everyone could somehow see how fake she was being. In every moment, she was trying to figure out how the real Marie would act, and then act that way. She could make herself smile, and even laugh. Sometimes she would even get caught up in the moment and be real Marie, but almost as soon as she realized this was happening, the replacement sad Marie would come back, and she would have to start pretending again.
The feeling had come and gone like that for a few days, and then it came and stayed. She knew that she had to tell her mom what was happening, but when she tried, she couldn’t talk at first, only cry. Laura sat next to her on the couch, rubbing her back, trying not to show how much she was freaking out. Marie felt her trying, and that made everything even worse. When she was done crying, she didn’t feel better. She told Laura that all she looked forward to, all she wanted to do, was sleep.
Laura took her to the doctor, who referred them to a psychiatrist. It seemed like he mostly saw much younger kids. His waiting room had a heartbreaking box of wooden toys next to the coffee table covered in New Yorkers and New York magazines. He prescribed an SSRI and a benzodiazepine for Marie to take as needed when she felt panicky. She had taken one the of the as-needed pills on the subway on the way home from the appointment, breaking it in half as instructed. Nothing changed immediately, but by the time they had reached Seventh Avenue and emerged from the subway she noticed a faint floating feeling and a loosening of the invisible turtleneck corseting her chest and neck. She took her mom’s hand and they walked down the sidewalk together, a little bit cautiously and slowly, as though Marie were a toddler again and just learning how to walk for the first time.
“Your dad—your biological father, I mean—also struggled with depression,” Laura told her as she tucked her into bed that night. “I’m sorry we haven’t talked about that before. I feel like we should have been prepared for this, or that we should have prepared you.”
Marie didn’t want her mom to feel bad, too. She already felt bad enough for everyone. Laura looked like she wanted to say something else, but she didn’t. She kissed Marie on the forehead and said she would stay till she fell asleep if she wanted, but Marie told her it was okay, she could go. Then she lay in the dark alone for hours, listening to her own breath, thinking about the endlessness of the universe, which they had learned about in school. At the center of all the endlessness, it now seemed, was Marie. Inside of her was black emptiness. Outside of her was something terrifying and large and inexplicable with no known limit. The next morning she woke up and there was blood on her sheets and she felt a little bit better; she had gotten her period. That was the beginning of her life as a woman.
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