Issue 21

Lydia Armstrong

The very first time it happened, I was fifteen, walking across an overpass in the middle of the night on my way to see a boy. Midway across the bridge, I looked down at the highway separating my neighborhood from the boy’s and thought to myself, what if I throw myself over? The thought was fleeting enough but came with an urge, brief but powerful, a tug from inside my chest willing me over the railing and into oncoming traffic.

The boy I was going to see was a year or two older than me and lived with his aunt and grandmother. He was from New York, which felt exotic in suburban Virginia where we lived, and told me both his parents had been murdered, a story I felt guilty about not completely believing. I was on my way to have sex with him, the second time in my life I would ever have sex. The year before I had promised him my virginity but gave it instead to my friend’s cousin on the dirty floor of an abandoned townhouse. The boy across the highway had a broken-down car parked in his driveway, where sometimes we sat in the backseat and smoked weed and kissed. He had thick, full lips the color of plums. He knew about my friend’s cousin, pretended to be upset. Invited me over, late at night, after our families were long asleep. His power over me was like the sweet scent wafting off a fresh-baked pie, so warm you could see it, and me a cartoon mouse lifted by my nose from the ground, carried over the highway by his aroma.

My teenage years were tumultuous ones. I decided at fourteen that I didn’t believe in God or his authority, and so didn’t believe in anyone’s authority. I skipped class to read in the woods, ran away from home a lot, spent time in juvenile detention centers. I shoplifted, saved my lunch money to buy liquor and to pay the adults who bought it for me, often strangers coming out of the store. I smoked cigarette butts I found on the street when I couldn’t get packs of my own or filch enough from my father. Home was a boat on a rocky sea. My father started doing heroin again and stayed out nights. My mother worked three jobs to keep the lights on, but drank heavily. When she found out my brother and I smoked weed, she smoked it with us. Sometimes she gave me Valium that she’d gotten from a friend of hers, which I took between slugs of Mad Dog 20/20 and lay on my bed, waiting for my heart to stop because it beat so slowly.

The urge came in other places. In Chesterfield County in 1998, we weren’t much on seatbelts. Highway safety hadn’t really caught on yet. People still rode around loose in the back of pickup trucks, sliding across the bed when the driver made a turn, trying not to fly out when they hit a bump in the road. But the asphalt rushing under my friends’ cars like ink, like a black river, called me to open my car door as we raced down the highway towards the mall. What if, my brain said, I lose my mind for a split second and throw myself out?

I started wearing my seatbelt and locking the car door because I figured it would buy me some time. If I only lost my mind for a second, maybe by the time I unlatched the seatbelt and unlocked the door, I would come to and stop myself. The seatbelt provided a different kind of safety than it was meant to—safety from myself. From the urge in my chest pulling me towards the rolling asphalt, under the tires of trucks speeding around us.

It followed me on rooftops and balconies, bridges, water towers. I avoided the ledges, pretending to follow my friends’ conversations while my insides were tied in a ball, willing me to jump. Was I suicidal? Just crazy? I considered both possibilities. As a teenager, I was obsessed with death. I filled notebooks with poems about it, thought a lot about suicide. I was miserable, most of the time. Killing myself, in the most dramatic adolescent way, often felt like the only option.

But I didn’t want to die, not really. I was obsessed, but I was also terrified of death. I wanted to live forever, exactly as I was in that moment. Never age, never change. When the urge came to throw myself from a moving car or jump off a bridge, I recoiled from it. I fought it, scared and confused. Maybe I was crazy.

I spent some time in a dilapidated motel the November I was sixteen, after running away from home with my best friend. The motel was situated off a run-down turnpike in a shitty part of town, and the door to our room had a hole in it, so we could see people’s sneakers shuffling by on the walkway outside. We shoplifted potato chips and Mad Dog from the grocery store, lived off snack foods for a week. One night I sat on the cold tile of the bathroom floor and felt my mind break apart. I had a notebook on my lap and tried to record what I was feeling. I still have the notebook. The pages from that night are scrawled with large, crooked letters that look like the writing of a stroke victim. I’m goin crazy / I’m fuckin psycho / I have this cigarette in my hand / But I can’t feel it, one passage reads. I thought it was poem.

When I was twenty-five, I took a weekend trip to the beach with a few friends. It was Saint Patrick’s Day, and originally the trip was just supposed to be for me and my best friend Erin, but at the last minute she invited our friends Paul and Austin. Austin and I had dated in our late teens, and again a couple of years later, and had since maintained a weird, strained friendship that occasionally led to making out and Austin telling me he was still in love with me. We had been sleeping together that spring, and I didn’t want him to come on the trip. Things were tense; Austin still wanted a relationship, and I just wanted company on nights I was drunk and lonely. I kept telling him we weren’t getting back together, and I kept sleeping with him.

We went to a bar on the boardwalk and got in a fight. I got jealous because a local girl was hitting on him. He was hurt that I could be jealous but still not want him. Back at the hotel room, we cried and yelled. I went to sleep in one of the double beds with Erin curled around me. Outside on the balcony, Paul tried to calm Austin, who threw a plastic chair off the balcony and then climbed over the railing himself, clinging to the metal with his flip-flopped feet perched on the edge of the deck. Paul quickly hauled Austin back over the railing to safety, but the image of his body falling twenty floors to his death was already ingrained in my brain. That night as I fell asleep, I watched Austin’s body fall through the projector screen in my mind, and I had a new thought: What if I sleepwalk for the first time in my life and throw myself off the balcony?

The plausibility that I will lose my mind and do something out of my control is low but measurable. The plausibility that I will lose my mind for less than two seconds and do something out of my control is pretty slim. I’m certain the break, if it ever comes, will last longer than that, and maybe require a hospital stay and some medication. But people sleepwalk. They do it. Normal people, sane people. There is always the first time they do it, the time where they have never done it before, they don’t know what has happened.

People take Ambien and drive their car into someone else’s living room, brains asleep and inculpable. People claim sleepwalking as a defense against murder. They eat in their sleep, have sex in their sleep, order large quantities of clothing and perfume online, pee in their roommates’ hampers. I had never done more in slumber than roll over and snore, but I could start. I could jump.

By my mid-twenties, I no longer kept a pen in my bedside table. I hid all my scissors at the bottom of rarely used drawers, under layers of junk. It was inconvenient every time I needed to cut something, but it gave me peace of mind to know if I rose in the middle of the night, with only part of my brain conscious, I would probably not have the wherewithal to dig the scissors out and drive them through my eyeball into my brain. When my mother and I stayed in a highrise hotel on a trip during that time, I never undid the lock on the balcony door or slid it open myself. I didn’t want to know how it worked, in case my mind would remember the mechanics in sleep.

I slowly started to tell people. “I have this weird phobia,” I would say. “I’m afraid I’ll kill myself in my sleep.” When I was nearly thirty, I met a standup comedian named Bill and we began to date. I told him about my father’s recovery from drug addiction and my stints in juvie. I told him how my past made me feel damaged and unlovable. I told him about the urges I felt on rooftops and the scissors hidden at the bottom of my junk drawers. “That sounds like something Maria Bamford talks about in her act,” he said. “You should look her up.”

I did.

Online videos of Maria Bamford show a small blonde woman with an odd, high voice and poor posture talking wide-eyed into a microphone about something she calls Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome. Maria’s syndrome tells her to murder her family, molest animals, lick a urinal. She’s made a comedy career out of the disgusting things her brain comes up with. I googled “unwanted thoughts syndrome,” but the only references were Maria’s own. Then a Wikipedia page popped up in my search results, titled “Intrusive Thoughts,” describing a disorder in which a person is plagued by unwelcome thoughts that can be violent, disgusting, and unrelenting, causing the person anxiety over the root of the thoughts and rumination. In some cases a person changes their routine or behavior in response to the intrusive thoughts, like avoiding knives when you are consumed by the fear you will stab someone. The thoughts almost always surround something the person absolutely does not want to happen, something that scares or disturbs them, something they would want to avoid. Then Wikipedia told me intrusive thoughts are a subtype of obsessive compulsive disorder—I was nearly thirty years old, and for the first time since I was fifteen, my urges had a name.

Bill was smothery nice at first. He walked so close to me in the grocery store that I tripped over his feet. If I got up to get a napkin while we were eating dinner on the couch, he would follow me to the kitchen. I liked waking up to his overnight messages; I liked the way he told me how much he liked me, how special I was. I had never dated someone who seemed so normal. I was sure the problem was me.

After a few months, he started doing things that felt inconsiderate, hurtful sometimes. He had a conversation with his brother on his public Facebook wall about how much he wanted to fuck Ellen Page. We went to a comedy open mic that his friend Joe hosted, and the two of them spent the evening talking loudly during other comics’ sets and laughing in a way that felt cruel. He spilled his beer on me and laughed, mopping the mess from the bar and floor but leaving me to clean my own soaked lap and legs. We fought, and he withdrew, and then, inexplicably, we moved in together.

The year and half I lived with Bill was cold and lonely. Mostly he ignored me. He would sit at the dining table with his laptop or at the far end of the couch, not looking at me, never engaging me unless I asked him to. When I talked to him about our problems, he shut down or lashed out at me. He called me names, told me he resented me, that I was the worst thing in his life. He said I was better at arguing than he was, so he had to cut me down to level the playing field so he could win. That was how he phrased it, so that he could win.

Something else happened while we were living together, though. I stopped going to bed each night rattled with fear that I would kill myself in my sleep. Maybe it was the security of another person in the room, someone to wake up and ask me what the hell I was doing if I started rummaging around for a pair of scissors in the middle of the night. I spent a lot of time sleeping on the couch, my face red and salty with tears after brutal fights, while Bill snored peacefully in our bed. I would look at the things hanging on our living room walls and think about the logistics of moving out, the expenses I couldn’t afford, the headache of it all. So I stayed.

Bill’s birthday was coming up. He wanted a handgun, not for his birthday, just in general. I had told him I didn’t want any guns in the house. Really I didn’t want any guns in his hand. I thought Bill was a coward, the type of spineless man who hides behind a firearm because he doesn’t have enough gall to defend himself without it. The kind of man who makes a woman cry and laughs at her for it.

Something else came up that fall. I had pushed Bill for over a year to tell me why he never wanted to have sex with me. He never initiated, and usually lost interest midway through when I tried. For months he’d avoided the subject, or gave weird excuses. Once he told me that it was normal to no longer be attracted to your girlfriend after you lived together for a few months.

A few weeks before his birthday, I sat him down and insisted he tell me the truth. I expected him to say he was cheating on me. He worked an hour away in Charlottesville, stayed overnight sometimes. He was oddly protective of his laptop, would never let me use it, shut the lid every time I came near him. I wasn’t expecting the words that came out of his mouth. That he woke up an hour early every morning, before dawn, so he could watch porn in the living room and jerk off. That he preferred pornography to having sex with me, his flesh-and-blood girlfriend. That he thought he had an addiction.

He said he would stop, cold turkey. No porn. A day or two in, he texted me from work, peppy and jovial, “It’s funny how much you want to have sex with your girlfriend when you stop jerking off for a few days!” I was numb inside. I had taken the cruelty and cold distance, the rages and name calling. This was something else. It felt beyond my control.

I decided to buy him a gun for his birthday. More than I didn’t want him to have a gun, I wanted to give the perfect birthday present. I wanted to be the perfect girlfriend. I wanted his present to be something he really wanted and would never expect to receive. My father took me to Bass Pro Shops, where we picked out a .22 caliber Ruger handgun, good for beginners. I wrapped it in a box and picked out a kitschy card that had an illustration of a pistol on the front. Bill unwrapped the gun and turned it over in his hands, repeating, “You got me a gun, you got me a gun.” He took pictures of it on his cell phone and sent them to his brother. That night in bed, he turned away from me. The next morning, I didn’t get out of bed. When afternoon came and I still didn’t get up, he knew.

He brought me burnt toast and sat on the edge of the bed looking sheepish and sorry. He was silent as I ticked off reasons why we would never work. He went for a walk, and when he came back, he packed some things into a duffel and left to stay at his parents’ house.

“I’m keeping the gun,” I said. He’d had it less than twenty-four hours.

I spent most of the first year after Bill and I broke up listening to Janis Joplin in my apartment, chain smoking and drinking whiskey by myself. It was dark times. I felt reckless, the way you do when you are broken and there is nothing left to hold together for. I worked, I saw friends occasionally. I thought about killing myself. I started compulsively checking my locks at night, touching the deadbolt and knob lock over and over, urging them into the locked position that they were already in. I checked the knobs on my kitchen stove, running down the line repeatedly, ensuring that each one was off. Sometimes I went upstairs and cut the lights off and got into bed, where it would occur to me that I was thinking about something else while I checked the locks and stove, I’d been distracted. Maybe my eyes weren’t really seeing, maybe my hands weren’t really feeling, and I would get up and check them again.

I left for work in the morning and circled the block to come home and check the stove, one more time, again. If I left the stove on and the house caught fire and my cat suffocated, I would never be able to look in a mirror again.

I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t check. Something bad. An intruder would break in, a fire. I started tapping the sun visor in my car every time I ran a red light, every time I passed a police car, a dead animal on the side of road. I made the sign of the cross every time I saw a cemetery. I made the sign of the cross when I walked by a man coughing violently in a restaurant on my way to the bathroom. I made the sign of the cross when I arrived at work late. Any time my heart leapt or dropped into my belly. Any time I was afraid.

The handgun sat in its plastic case on the top shelf of my closet for the span of that year. I never took it out, never looked at it, never held it.

My father kept offering to buy the gun off me. He thought it was wasted in my closet, unused, untouched. But something in me would not let it go, even as I avoided it. Each time he offered and I considered, the voice inside me said no, keep it.

I cried when I woke up. I hated my job. I felt depleted, like the years with Bill had drained my insides, hollowed me out, and I wasn’t sure what was left. The old fears crept back in. I avoided my father’s offers to teach me how to use the gun until one day he showed up, the way he sometimes did in those days, and told me to go get it. He showed me how to remove the clip, load it, chamber a round. Where the safety was. I was nervous, hesitant, watching. He handed it to me.

“Do I leave it loaded?” I asked.

“Not much use if it’s not.”

“What if,” I said, “something happens?”

My father tilted his head. He looked confused. “That’s a well-made pistol,” he said. “That thing’s not going to go off on his own.”

If I told him the question my brain had been asking me for more than fifteen years, I knew he would take the gun with him when he left. He would never see his strong, capable daughter the same again, this small feminine version of himself, pure granite. I remember my father coming to pick me up from the juvenile detention center when I was sixteen; I’d been locked up for nearly a month after running away from home and committing who knows what crimes. There was a pack of Camels on the dashboard, the brand I smoked and my father did not. “I never worried about you when you were gone,” he said then, referring to when I’d run away and was living on the street. “I knew you could take care of yourself.”

I kept the loaded Ruger in my bedside table, its narrow barrel pointed towards the far wall in case it misfired in the night. There was one small bullet ready in the chamber, a stack of its siblings in the clip, waiting.

I met a man with bipolar disorder and a pending divorce and fell in love with him immediately. Ryan spent the first weeks of our relationship detailing for me his various neuroses. He was so casual when he talked about wishing he’d never been born, his stints in rehab, his hatred of himself, I wasn’t sure whether to be unnerved by it. I was better by then. I’d been working on myself, felt comfortable in my own skin, was practicing the power of positive thinking. I was healthier than I’d ever been. I sat on the edge of his bed, watching him from inside my bubble of positive energy that I sent into the universe each day, waiting to be rewarded. Ryan shrugged and told me he’d wanted to die since he was a kid.

One afternoon in a taco bar, Ryan told me he was still in love with his wife. I was standing beside him when he said it, with an unlit cigarette in my hand that I was about to take outside and smoke. I turned without answering and went out to the patio. When I returned, Ryan’s jaw was set and he was signaling the bartender for our tab. He threw money on the bar and stormed out without speaking to me. I followed him onto the sidewalk, calling his name, but he broke into a jog and ran through traffic, across the street, and disappeared. I later found out he was angry that I’d gone outside without responding to him.

I was drunk. I’d been drinking with a friend earlier in the day, and then had drinks with Ryan at the taco bar. He lived nearby, so I walked to his house, confused, calling his phone which just went to voicemail. I got to his house and sat on the front porch, repeatedly dialing his number and hypnotically listening to the ringing, the click of his voice message coming on, again and again. At a certain point, I knew he wouldn’t answer and I no longer wanted him to, but I couldn’t stop tapping on his name on my phone screen, listening, tapping the red End button, starting over. I felt entranced.

I went back to the bar. I was too drunk to drive home, and my phone was dying. I got in the way of the servers trying to charge my phone near their station. I was sure I looked desperate, and lost, and derelict. Ryan’s band was playing a show at the same bar that night, and he came back. He sat outside on the patio with some guys I’d never seen before. Quietly I sat beside him, hoping to make peace, but he leapt up from his seat and took off down the sidewalk again. On the drive home that night, I fantasized about running my car into the guardrail.

In the morning, the sun illuminating my shame, I made a decision. No more checking. No more tapping the visor, no sign of the cross. I wasn’t relieving my anxiety; I was feeding it.

My friend Chris and her brother grew up shooting guns. They took me to the shooting range, where I had to watch a safety instruction video and pass a brief quiz before I could be admitted into the range. Chris showed me how to hold my handgun, how to aim, how to gently squeeze, not pull, the trigger.

It turns out I am a natural shot. Chris’s brother lent me his .45, and I nailed the red center of my target’s heart with my first two shots. The Ruger is accurate and easy to fire, with little recoil and a bang tolerable to the ear. I fell in love with it. I take it on weekend trips to my father’s home on the Potomac River to ping beer cans and empty bleach jugs. He gave me a cleaning kit and taught me to oil it. It feels at home now in my bedside table, loaded and pointed at the far wall, at home in my gripped palm. Mastering the Ruger meant more than target practice, more than making use of something that would otherwise rust and rot in my closet. Since learning to fire my handgun, I have only had a few fleeting fears I will off myself in my sleep, and only when I have been under marked stress. I fall asleep each night barely aware of the loaded handgun six inches from my skull. 

Today the bottles and jars in my medicine cabinet are evenly spaced, with labels facing uniformly outward. Same for the cans in my pantry, the things in my refrigerator. I find I can relax more easily in my home if the floors are vacuumed, the throw pillows arranged in each far corner of the couch. I have not checked my locks or stove since the night I compulsively called Ryan from his own front porch. At first, a few stray shoulder taps would still find their way to my fingers during stressful moments. The first time I made the sign of the cross after attempting to give it up, it felt so good, so orgasmic, I knew I could never do it again. I felt like an alcoholic sneaking a drink after a dry spell, how luscious that stringent gin must taste, how pure against the back of the throat. Calling to you, yes, this is the way, haven’t you missed us.

On my thirty-fifth birthday, I attempted unsuccessfully to take my rambling party of friends to two different rooftop bars in Richmond. Both were total failures, not because of my anxiety, but because the first had a ridiculously long line and the second, atop a boutique hotel, was full of sorority girls and had a weird vibe. We ordered cocktails in the hotel lounge and took an Uber to a lesbian bar famous for playing the same Whitney Houston song six times in one night. I keep meaning to go back to the first rooftop bar, the one with the long line, to try their grilled octopus. I hear they have an amazing view of the skyline.