The pain of the dark. Eternal blackness smothering my mind. I felt so alone, lying there, staring at the ceiling. It hadn't changed through all my days of darkness, and neither had I. We were both water-stained. Me by tears, and the ceiling by the rain seeping in through some wayward hole. But at least the stain on the ceiling vaguely represented something: a seagull sailing on the wind, its wings tilted up toward the sky in the exact opposite direction that I represented, which was nothing, miles and miles of nothing, in a spiralling descent downward.
I could hear the clatter of dishes down the hall, but the dissonant sounds didn't mean anything to me. It was just noise. Dark noise. And into that wrenching blackness, a voice — my brother Ryan’s, who could not reach me where I was.
“It’s time to go, Cordi.”
I didn't care about going or staying. I was beyond that. Ryan had to pull me off my rumpled bed and lead me out into the sticky black sunshine. I found myself in his dusty old car and wondered vaguely why I was there. I sat immobile and watched the cars go by as we drove through the congested streets of Toronto, until the motion of the car put me to sleep.
Ryan woke me and helped me out of the car into a parking lot covered with a monotony of cars. We weaved our way through them. We went inside a big concrete building that loomed eight or ten storeys above us, and Ryan sat me down in a crowded hallway and left me there. One among many, sitting on hard metal chairs, waiting. Waiting for what?
It was some sort of hospital because there were people in white lab coats. But I stayed there, where Ryan had left me. I guess time passed and he came back for me, bringing with him a red-headed woman dressed all in white, who extended her hand to me. I stared at it, but I did not take it. Seemed so pointless. Why take a hand when the emptiness inside me would render the gesture meaningless?
“I have to go now, Cordi,” said Ryan, and I looked up at him and saw nothing, felt nothing. He kissed me on the forehead and turned to go. I did not turn to watch him leave.
The nurse babbled on about nothing in particular as she led me to an elevator and we went up and up, the little red floor numbers above the door flashing red as we passed them, until the elevator spewed us out into a small lobby. There were glass doors at either end and a glassed-in nursing station straight ahead. She opened one of the doors and led me down a wide grey-tiled hall with painted cinder-block walls. The room I followed her into was a box with beds. I was vaguely aware that there seemed to be a lot of them, and that made me think for some reason of an orphanage, although I had never been to one.
I was an orphan, too. I was an orphan from life.
She must have told me her name, the nurse, but I hadn't taken it in as she gently placed my belongings on one of the beds and said something else I didn't take in. Didn't care to take in. I looked at my belongings. They looked so pathetic and lonely, just like me. The nurse left and I curled up on the bed, cradling my head on my hands. There wasn’t even a curtain to give me some privacy
“You try to kill yourself?” The voice was soft and quiet. She moved her head into my line of sight. Jet-black hair cut in a Cleopatra hairstyle that made her improbably round face look like a balloon. But there was nothing balloonish about her troubled eyes. They were so sunken that they almost imploded into themselves, reflecting a world surely alien to mine. Or maybe not. We stared at each other, but I did not move from where I lay. Not a muscle.
“Naw. You're too out of it to have tried that,” she said, answering her own question. She’d been there, to that place where you couldn’t even lift a finger to help yourself, the place where I was now. I knew it without her having to tell me.
She sat there and talked at me. She kept talking about her “sieve of a mind.” I do remember she told me a joke that made her cackle with a laugh that went on and on and on. And made me want to cry and cry. It was about two little birds on a telephone wire and one little bird says to the other little bird, “Don't some people's voices make your feet tingle?”
I didn't laugh. I remember that. Looking back now, I wonder if she had sensed what was coming, in some way.
When she left I slept for centuries, dreaming dark dreams and empty hopes. I was in a huge barn, with a man, a man who was not my father, and I was swinging on a swing strung high from the rafters and I saw my parents and my brother crying, because they could not find me. Back when I was a little girl. Back when I was going to be a writer. So long ago. So far away.
And the nightmares mercifully faded and I was conscious only of eating, of swallowing pills, aware of people crowded around my bed asking endless questions to my stony silence.
No, I did not try to kill myself. Of that I was sure.
I lived in a daze, the memories of my mind interlaced with the tendrils of a fog that watered down everything I did, everything I was, till I felt I was but a blur on my mind’s horizon, wearing a caution sign that read Severely Reduced Visibility Forever Ahead.
And then one morning I woke up and the sun didn't look quite so black and I felt a tiny quickening in my mind that I had despaired of ever feeling again. I nursed that little glimmer the way one would a small ember in a hearth and day by day it got bigger until one day I spoke. It wasn't much, but it was a way back.
There was, finally, a grey dingy light at the end of the tunnel.