The Closer Side of Nightby
I never expected to live long enough to write poetry and essays at the age of twenty-four. I never expected to live to see nineteen, much less to be happily married and still writing five years after my expected demise. I’m not entirely sure how or why I had chosen nineteen as the end of life as I should know it, but ever since childhood I remember thinking of that age as the End. While I lived a happy and normal childhood, I carried around this morbid fancy that I would not live beyond the year 1989. This idea remained safely unrealized until I began attending Penn State in August of 1987; things changed then. I succumbed to a depression that arose seemingly from out of nowhere, and that fully consumed my life by spring semester. As with the idea that I’d die at the age of nineteen, I still don’t fully understand the origin of the depression. I’d previously lapsed into periods of malaise during high school--any student does, it seems--but never to the depth that I sank at Penn State. Some standard reasons figure into the equation: adjusting to college, money problems, homesickness, and living alone--but they do not suffice to explain the virulence of my depression. It drained me. I slept through most of my freshman year, up to twenty hours a day, four to six days a week. I left the architecture program, and attended one of my literature classes a total of five times. I lost thirty pounds. As purpose and significance vacated my reality, I ate the occasional meal, played pinball, slept, and wrote in my journal, where I vented the angst of someone willing and able, but not quite ready, yet, to kill himself. Writing tied these episodes of consciousness together, and wove the strands into a patchwork tapestry I would not now choose to call life. Excerpted from a letter a professor never received:
Sometimes I think writing was all that really mattered, that as long as I wrote, no matter how insufferable life seemed, I could survive. Simultaneous with the decline in my GPA and will to live, I began to write the first of what I consider worthwhile poems. Partially as a result of my sleeping habit, and the introspection to which the depression drove me, my early poems emphasized dreams, the subjectivity of reality, and an obsession with light and dark. Light and darkness were the twin stars around which my poetry and my life revolved: reflections of my state of mind, each mirrored the life and threat of death that I lived on a daily basis for two and a half years. One strove to explore and realize life as a living poem; the other eclipsed dreams, faith, and hope in a black-hole-like-collapse toward oblivion. The problem with binary solar systems is that they are destroyed from within by the gravitational forces interacting between the twin suns. I’ve always been at home in darkness. My eyes are photophobic--literally "light-fearing"--and bright light hurts them, so I own photogray glasses. They darken as the light intensity increases. Sudden shifts in light levels can inflict me with migraines, so I habitually avoid well-lit rooms and camera flashes, and prefer cloudy, gray days to sunny ones. I thus perceive a dark world in the brightest sunshine. The dark enfolds, soothes, and shields me from the searing light. At the same time, I revel in the imaginative opportunities the dark offers, concealed, awaiting discovery; light reveals such secrets and spoils the hunt, the finding. My love for monsters and "bad guys" grew side by side with my interest in things dark. I attracted to characters like Darth Vader and Captain Ahab because such doomed figures offer a greater potential for redemption, for finding light from within darkness, than the Luke Skywalkers or Ishmaels of the world. They call to me like no other characters can, by appealing to the darkness I harbor inside: the despair of depression, with its constant temptation to succumb again, and my inability to pull completely free from it; and the lost faith that now challenges me to find any meaning in existence, to believe in my own soul. I turn to these fallen characters and draw them within, where, with them, I succumb to the dark, and hunt mythic whales the world round. Through these fictions, I explore my self and my universe, seeking some assurance, some trace of faith, to cling to. I know now, however, that I do not desire light or the illumination that it brings. I prefer the closer side of night--half-hidden in twilight; from there, I cherish the perspective, the edge, the vertigo. I want no more to be blinded in the light than I want to be lost in the dark. It’s this questioning doubt, this between, that summons me, that I cannot resist. It molds not only my attitude toward dark and light, but my writing as well. Enchanted, I probe the gloom and seek a flicker--however faint--while the dark whispers words of despair and submission, luring me toward the abyss. I listen attentively and steal the words that echo in the chasm, and with each word I glean, I gain the poetry, the vision, and the blood in my veins sings the thousand suns I scatter across the night. Each slip further into darkness allows me another scrawled attempt to ignite the pit toward which I sink willingly, so long as the words flow. During my depression, I had a system for determining how bad my day was; normal days fell within the range of zero to ten, zero denoting a spectacular day, four or five being average, and ten hideous. Exceptionally awful days could proceed as high as thirteen, which represented a day on which I attempted to kill myself. The counselor I saw twice a week had suggested that I track the depression in this manner, so that she could gauge exactly how out of it I thought I was (I actually plotted it on graph paper). My average day from February 17th to March 4th, 1988, rated a 9, and worsened as time passed. At night, I often sat on the fourth-story window sill at the end of my dorm hall, staring out across the trees toward the parks I’d occasionally walk, and watch the sparse traffic filter across the edge of campus. The air seeped down the corridor, raising the hair of my legs and arms, cooling my bare feet. I thought about shifting my weight forward, about falling through the screen. About whether four stories would suffice. I never quite managed to push myself off to find out. The days and months blurred together, and my reasons for living, for not taking that leap, grew fewer until I had one left, my four year old sister Alison. She always flew to me with leaping hugs when I arrived home for a weekend. I couldn’t imagine my parents telling her I was dead, that I’d done it myself. So lived for her, for awhile. Eventually the nightmare came:
The dream flooded me with the potential lurking within my depression--that my sister could be the one to find me, that someone would have to; that I might kill myself at home, or with a gun. I think the dream is what drove me to counseling. Even the resolve provided by that final excuse waned, however--you can live for someone else for only so long--and nothing stopped the sleeping pills and vodka. The hardest part about part about attempting suicide the first time was waking up. My first thought was, "Fuck. I’m not dead." I wondered what I had to do to get it right the next time, knowing that four sleeping pills and a few shots of Absolut weren’t enough. That I’d need more. That there would definitely be a next time. No one knew, I just drank and took the pills, one by one, whether after parties, just hanging around in my room, with forethought, or on a whim. I spiraled through weeks wondering what kept me going through it all, and why I was still alive. I don’t recall exactly how many times I attempted suicide, but I think it was less than ten. I don’t know how I survived that depression, and I’m not entirely sure that I did. I certainly tried to assure myself that I wouldn’t, but things didn’t work out that way: I never quite found the combination of necessity and opportunity. Fortunately my learning curve for overdosing on sleeping pills was rather steep, and I was probably saved more than once by the high alcohol tolerance I’d built up. Then, one night walking north of campus, listening to my Walkman, the depression lifted. It disappeared as if it was never there, gone as it had arrived. I came home for the summer and began to live my reassembled life. I feel as though I somehow deferred the deaths I’d attempted, and gained an unearned reprieve. That one day I would have to finish the job and get it done right. Maybe in ten years, ten months, or tomorrow. Just not today. Even as I write this essay, I flirt again with darkness and the death I’ve deferred there, expecting, but no longer seeking the final denial to my appeal. Going through old journals and summoning their demons once more, I explore another’s life, some other Allan’s words, and remember. I don’t live despair to that same extent any longer. My world of shadows consists of the grays of twilight that tend toward night and the abyss that stares back with hungry eyes, balanced by the gloaming before morning that moves me toward acceptance and release. The remembering still haunts me. It always will, if only a little. And, while I still cringe in direct sunlight, within this territory of shadows I’m less at risk, and still stalk the dark with vivid abandon, seeking. Return to Imrryr. |