Vladimíra D
Vladimíra D is clawing her way to a future that lives up to the hopes of her young self— towards writing and art, and leaving something behind. She loves dense texts and slow cinema. She misses her dog dearly. She hopes to eventually finish her Master’s degree in Anglophone Literatures. She spends much of her time thinking about creating and aspiring towards practice.
I Lost Years
The break comes at the very end of September, two weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday. I sit on the communal balcony and sob into the telephone as my mother oscillates between comfort and sharp admonishment. I watch the unkempt concrete of the inner courtyard move in and out of shadow as the motion sensors acknowledge the people returning from elsewhere. The brown rot stomped into the cracks is soon to be submerged in a fresh layer of leaves shed by the central oak. Sometimes I dream of asking for the keys and scrubbing it all away. More often I dream of impact and a final crack, of the elsewhere. I don’t tell my mother this.
I take the train in the morning. My psychiatrist clenches her jaw as I walk in. “I can’t help you unless you cooperate.” I didn’t phone when I was supposed to and pushed the repentant call away until days trickled into a year. I had my cousin prescribe the medication, more for the routine than the effect, whenever I ran out. In the end, Mother was the one to make the appointment. New medication. Third type of antidepressant we’ve tried. A slow glide from SSRIs to SNRIs. “We’ll work this out,” she promises.
For a week I trudge up a ditch of apologies, and I finally begin to feel like I have waded through the mud and am clutching at the first of the tentatively emerging rungs. I sleep for most of the next five weeks. At the end of it I no longer wake up in a panic. I no longer wake up with the thought of wanting desperately not to. When I get up to drink or pee or wash, my limbs feel like they are not mine. I stop checking my email.
I move back home, though it is home only in name. I stand in the bathroom and realise I can’t remember which toothbrush is mine. The next two weeks are a systematic dispersal of my belongings into closets and onto shelves where the space I had left empty has long been subsumed. I wash and iron the mildew out of all my clothes. I stand over the ironing board in eight-hour shifts and it gives purpose to my days. I toil towards a pat on the back at the sight of a living room void of clutter. I wash and iron my mother’s scrubs. I wash and iron my brother’s shirts. I wash the dishes and scrub the mould out of the grout under the bath mat. I ask for vitamins when the keratin layers of my nails begin to separate. I take caffeine pills to help with the alprazolam-induced fatigue. At the end of the month, I finally message all of my friends.
Christmas comes and goes, and January pulls me back under—not deep enough to drown but enough to constrict the airways. My limbs are mine again. Mine in all their flesh and lead that leaks from the metal fist that lives in the hollow of my throat. I stop answering when my best friend asks me how I am, what I’m doing. “I’m okay. I’m a bit woozy. I walked the dog, I have the washer running.” I lie on the sofa and watch YouTube videos I’m only mildly interested in. Some days I tell him about all the things I want to do—the art I want to make, the stories I want to write, the books I want to read. Week after week, he asks me about progress. I have nothing to present. I answer questions with questions that loop back to him.
The SNRI dose is doubled. Some days the dishes pile up around the sink. The floor is not quite as shiny. When we fight, my mother stabs me with failure and laziness and the emptiness of my days. It doesn’t hurt—I keep the wound open and fresh. I lie on the sofa and wonder if it’s my head or some flaw woven into the very fabric of my being. It’s funny how you become a series of fragmented entities—the evil organ somewhere outside of the self. As my body remains inert, my mind is indefatigable in its lashing. The propeller remains tangled. It only moves for others.
I’m so tired I tip over every time I attempt to stand upright, so I pull a chair to the ironing board. I stumble to the kitchen to make breakfast for Mother. The rest of the time is ruled by oppressive languor of the body and asceticism of soul. I take my pills in the morning and despise myself for the lack of will with every gulp of water. On days when I spend early afternoons in bed, I think of radical accountability and how far I can stretch it over my petrified corpse.
Five months in, the cool clinical distance of my psychiatrist melts into something like a worried frown. She adds a psycholeptic and I don’t argue. She tells me to call in any time, and I nod, but I know the next time we speak will be at the next appointment. The alprazolam might curb the panic, but the failure to pick up the receiver is still all mine.
My best friend tells me that if I can function fine for others, perhaps I should lean into it, seek coping mechanisms outside of medication. But the truth is I’m selfish and mean and I want so badly to live for myself. Myself. I stare at the ceiling and wonder if it’s a lack of genuine hardship. I think about bourgeois ennui and wonder how come my friends don’t despise me.
A friend lends me his flat in the city for a weekend. Eight hours on the train, then collect the keys and unpack. I settle and suddenly I want to crawl out of my skin. Flight. The default response is always flight. The gasping urge to crawl back to the sofa and the inert rot of my daily bread. But I can’t waste the money I spent to get there, so I toe at the crumbs around the kitchen counter, finger the dust caked in the corners of the bathtub. I pull the hoover and the mop out of the cupboard.
Whatever else is there to do?
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