We were talking in your living room that morning and things were generally normal apart from, oh, right, the fact I found your HIV drugs that morning.
Then the depression slipped over me with a speed and totality I had never experienced before. It was like being covered by a suffocating blanket instead of slowly slipping into quicksand.
Something had just been sucked from my very essence and I sat suddenly lifeless, yet somehow still breathing, on your teal-green couch. I saw you in front of me but I couldn’t see you really through the blanket.
You said something. I remember the sound of your voice and the rhythm of your words but I’ll be damned if I actually even heard them at that time.
“Hm?” I replied instinctually as if repeating yourself would somehow make your speech suddenly comprehensible. The effort it took to make the one inquisitive sound may as well have been a half marathon. I was only still breathing because I hadn’t yet processed the fact there was an alternative.
You repeated yourself, of course, but it made no difference.
I was a fish out of water and I stared at you blankly. None of your edges were crisp as my eyes went unfocused.
“Varity?” you said like a parent trying to get their children’s attention. It wasn’t harsh or sharp, but it was authoritative.
I blinked in your general direction and my mouth tried to form words. I’d just run a half-marathon though and I was out of gas.
“Varity!?” you said more sharply and I saw your amorphous shape in my unfocused eyes lean forward in your chair across from me.
I stared in your direction and willed my eyes to focus. Green eyes under dark, bushy eyebrows were trained on me. Your frame was erect and tense and you were ready to pounce on some unseen danger.
My mouth moved and my body started to feel like jelly as I slumped further into the couch. I wanted to tell you…I couldn’t remember what I wanted to tell you. This was all so much.
Suddenly you were crouched in front of me peering up into my face and cradling it gently in your hands.
“Varity?” you said and the panic was creeping into your voice. Your eyes were the size of saucers and the deep green of a winter pine forest. I swear, when I looked right in your eyes it was all I ever saw. “Varity? What’s going on?”
My pity played hero to your sad face again and gave me just enough of a hit of adrenaline to form words with my tongue and enough breath to put air behind them.
“I’m just so tired. I’m empty. I need to rest,” I said softly and closed my eyes for a moment.
You indisputably had more energy than I did so you did me the favour of crying so I could return to being catatonic. Hibernation seemed like a very good idea.
“Varity! Dodi! Dodi, come back. Please, you can’t do this right now. You can’t leave me,” you said with a simultaneous firm and panicked voice while gently shaking my shoulders, like I was a child who’d run out in traffic in front of their parents.
I tried to speak again. I felt air leave my throat but the words didn’t quite make it. I swallowed hard, took a deep breath and tried again.
My chest bolstered with full lungs, I summoned a little energy to bow my lips to your forehead. I planted a soft, slow kiss on you, before slowly exhaling reassurances closer to your ear.
“I’m empty. I feel empty. I need rest. I’ll be ok.”
I slumped back into the couch as you spun out in a low-grade panic attack trying to fix what you broke and having no idea how to do it. You still don’t, quite frankly.
There was some more chatter but I’m not even sure you could hear the words my mouth struggled to form. Zombies have more life than I did that morning.
I slept most of the rest of the day but the fog receded briefly a few times. I do remember one point where you lavished my feet with special lotion and fretted over me there on your living room floor. It smelled divine and you wanted me to feel special and loved – that much was clear.
After you finished, a hard, painful lump formed in my chest. I felt it grow and words failed me again before I heaved it out with deep aching sobs.
Concern contorted your face again as you came to my side. I expelled the physical pain from my chest as I cried “Bean!” and you wept softly with me for a few moments. You tried to cheer me up and said we could try again but I was still bleeding and there was no time for “next time”.
We played scrabble (and I beat you so bad). That was a happy dream within the nightmare of that day and it was genuinely happy.
I still had to go and I knew it. This was as good as it got and I had to be half-dead for you to treat me with this much empathy and concern and I could still see the red flags, even through my suffocating blanket, and my heart was breaking all around me and I still had to go.
I wanted to do it more peacefully, but you did me the favour of reminding me exactly how large and vibrant those red flags were by flagrantly disrespecting me, and pissing me off enough to give me the energy to physically get up. So I stayed true to our entirely dramatic six weeks and left with a bang.
You could only maintain the princely façade for so long. It made it so much easier to get out. Not coming back and struggling with trauma bonding was an ongoing ordeal, but getting out the door was easy.
Truth and Recovery 