REWRITE:
My husband is in Addis Ababa, so I spent the weekend with friends in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, and on Sunday evening, when it was time to return home, they drove me to the King George Skytrain station.
Vancouver's Skytrain is an ALRT, an Alert Light Rapid Transit system. I remember this because in 1986 the transit company sent representatives into the school system to explain how the Skytrain worked. Our representative explained that the trains are run by computers, not people, and that in spite of this the train is very safe.
The other thing that he told us was not to fall onto the train tracks because you could be electrocuted.
So Sunday I was on the train, tired. I'd taken the train a million times. I was used to the rhythm of it. I was used to the three-toned hum the trains make when they leave a station, to the swishing and the rocking, and to the sound of pulsing wind when a train traveling the other direction passes yours.
But this time the train lurched and braked violently. We were thrown; about half of the passengers gasped loudly.
We were stopped above a Safeway store. It was getting dark. I wanted to be outside, to be on the ground. We were trapped; how long would we be trapped?
There's a rumor among transit-takers that train delays are caused by suicides, and that is all I could think of: someone had just died. Was he hit? Or did she get electrocuted?
I told myself to relax. Maybe a teddy bear had fallen onto the tracks.
But I couldn’t relax with that thought; I imagined a panicked mother, clamoring after her track-bound, teddy-bear-retrieving daughter. What an awful feeling.
The train ws mostly full, but we all sat silently for a few minutes. No one knew anything. My body kept remembering the lurching feeling, the break-neck stopping.
It was nearing nine o'clock and I wanted to be at home. I wanted to return to my cat-children and take off my shoes. I wanted to have a glass of water, put on sweatpants, and hold my pet-children in turn -- first Brie, the one who hates to be held but purrs while you do it, then Willow, a people-friendly cat that constantly squirms. I would grab the nearest cat and flop onto the bed with her. Maybe I would fall asleep like that. It would be good to sleep like that.
The train was full of garbage; I'd never seen it like that before. We started moving.
I was thrown like that when my Nissan was rear-ended. I had been stopped at an intersection, waiting to turn. And then I started screaming, and afterwards it dawned on me that I had been hit from behind, hit so hard that my fully-stopped vehicle was thrown an entire car-length and had to be written off. I spent three months taking Advil and massaging my temples.
I was also thrown like that in 1993, when a bus I was on abruptly stopped. A woman across the aisle from me began to shriek, and I remember thinking that she was panicked for no reason, until I learned that the bus in front of us had hit a child. We all sat in the windows, staring out at a freaked-out little boy, covered in a veil of orange blood.
In hindsight, my life has felt a lurch like that every time I've had severe depression, which was so often and for such long periods that I don’t know when one episode ended and another one began. I felt a lurch when my friends Bethany and Jill died, both very young, or when my grandfather died of lung cancer. My life lurched when I was falsely accused and almost fired, and another time when I was mistreated at work and actually fired. My life lurched when I had depression again, this time as a married woman, and the world stopped again. But the world doesn't really stop, it goes on and you stop. It's like getting hit by a car. You scream, a few come to help, maybe somebody watches; most others keep driving.
Last night I dreamed that a friend killed himself and that my husband and I were forbidden from telling his family. We had to wait until they found out some other way, probably by finding his body. It was another lurch. I woke up upset, terrified and angry and shocked. It was midnight. I touched the cats; they are my touchstones. They had not had the same dream. Their good vibes would quiver along their furs, touch my hands, and shoot like good electricity into my bones, veins and heart. I would be revived.
It didn't work as I had hoped. I was left with the nightmare imprinted in my mind and the soft feel of fur on my fingertips. Each cat acknowledged her stroke with a sleepy half-gesture. They selfishly retained their good vibes.
I felt another lurch in a dream when I was first getting counseling for depression. In the dream I was driving and a bright orange roadblock appeared out of nowhere. I gasped and braked and it woke me.
Things have been going so well for me that I subsequently worry that the Worst Thing Ever is just about to happen. Perhaps I'm a fatalist, though I've never thought of myself that way before. I'm still jarred by things that happened seven years ago, or seventeen, or twenty-seven, and sometimes I feel that I'm living my life as a person in shock, that life is one wreck after another, and the only reason we try to recover is to brace ourselves for the next pileup. Maybe I'm so used to coping that I can't imagine life being good and staying that way. I know that hard times will come no matter what I do and there’s no need to lure them in sooner with my moods, but it seems like there's an emotional-spiritual kink in my neck that's a throwback to old whiplash, reminding me of whiplashes to come, of heartbreaks and pains and soul-sucking days. And I rub that kink like an old, silvery scar.
I have a scar from a routine mole-removal. The doctor who did it chose to cauterize the area, and now the scar is of burnt tissue, smooth and watery and flat, and it occasionally itches. One time I unknowingly scratched it so hard that I drew blood. And that’s a good comparison for me, me and my kink in my neck, my spiritual scar, reminding me of the wounds, of the lurching and surprises and the hard times. Sometimes that scar itches, and if I scratch it could bleed.
And then I have to breathe.
I tell myself to enjoy life, to enjoy what I have, and to do what I feel is right. I can't ward off depression or sickness or heartache or death. These things will happen -- or not happen -- independently of what I think. Pretending that the Worst Thing Ever is just around the corner does not keep it away; it only causes undue stress.
My husband is in Addis Ababa. I know that he is safe. He is going to Awassa, too, and will be safe. He is going to Entebbe and Kigali and Gisenyi, and will be safe. I know to my roots that he'll be safe.
But I still have that scar, so I miss him fondly and pray.
Recent Comments