The Spells

Maybe she just didn’t understand anymore.

She was fine until her daughter came home from school. Every time, when her daughter came home, though she loved her so very much... It was as if her world were ending, the day was meeting closure, there was no promise of anything when before there had been hope of something happening. Something.

The poetry website, for some months now, had given her a reason for being. She would alternately write poems for the site and enter competitions, and on the side work on self-publishing her own poetry collections. So far, she’d published three books.

But somehow it all changed when he left. When he wouldn’t respond to her letters anymore.

It had changed gradually, but there was definitely something different.

She began having the crying spells when, as said before, her daughter would come home from school. Suddenly it seemed she did not want to be in her own head anymore. She knew there was nothing inside there anymore, all hopes and dreams had been squelched forever, and she knew, somehow, at 41, it was the end.

She was physically ill and it wasn’t helping. Her mouth was perpetually dry; maybe it could have been from the endless litany of medications. She had to force herself to eat, she only ate because her stomach seemed to suggest it.

She had failed at everything. Lost every job, failed college (three times under three different degrees), lost her car and own domain due to the emptiness inside her head, which never, ever seemed to go away.

During the spells, a torrent of thoughts would race endlessly in her mind. For certain reasons she wanted to keep secret, she knew she would always be alone. Finally, she seemed to accept it. He had been her last hope, in truth. There would never be another friend, another lover. Not how sick she was, not for certain reasons she did not want to disclose.

The last thing she had left was her writing. It had defined her; it was the only thing she enjoyed in her life. And now, she couldn’t write anymore, she saw it as a futile gesture, as everything else seemed.

She really didn’t understand the reason for living anymore. Things about people and their lives made her sad. Families, dinners, people who worked out in gyms, her own daughter and the possibility of her dying (though she was not sick or in any danger of passing). The piano she once was a virtuoso at, now dusty in a corner, marked with crayon from her daughter’s infant years... She was supposed to teach her to play but when her child was finally ready for it she couldn’t do it, she’d lost the ability, it had all fled her memory, the memory in her hands. So her daughter had learned to watch YouTube videos and plunk out melodies of pop songs with incorrect fingering and no knowledge of what the notes meant, how they even had a mathematical symmetry, a plan.

Everyone and everything else but her seemed to have a plan. School, work, exercise, the art of fun.

She could never remember what real fun felt like. She had never known true joy, her mind was not capable of such things, only manic reactions and grandiose visions and expectations that when, of course, did not come through, made her feel as if she’d never try again... She’d always end up trying, though, again, after some time, when the hurt seem to slip a little further away.

She thought she should be in a hospital. But after so many hospitalizations she’d had, the last time they had threatened the state hospital miles and miles away from her family. A place with as frightening a reputation as Bedlam and where it was possible she could not be released from, ever again.

But it was like clock work; she couldn’t stop the spells when they happened, they had to run their course until she was so exhausted that she yearned for sleep, her family relievedly permitting her off to bed for some hours. And when she woke up two or three hours later, not crying, but still that same feeling of mental and physical emptiness.

Her mother kept insisting it was because she would still let herself think of him. Of course she did, she hoped every day she would find an email from him on her computer. She knew he was gone forever, but she could not stop hoping.

It was much the things he had said indirectly to her. Hurtful words. Mocking her adoration of him. How she hated him for it, and longed for him so badly... Her daughter constantly playing a song by Lana del Rey, “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful...”

No. The answer, she knew, was no.