They tell me how they want to kill themselves. By lying down in the path of a truck. By setting fire to their sleeves.
I'm used to it by now.
Two of the people closest to me -- one a longtime friend and the other a relative -- inhabit private realms of raging misery in which one of them hears spies prowling on her rooftop every night, the other slaps his own face while glaring into the mirror. Carolyn stalks men she barely knows, barraging them with meet-me emails and parking all day outside their places of employment. Jim thinks everyone is mocking him. "They treat me like I'm an ugly fat stupid jerk," he says, "because I am."
They've both been this way as long as they can remember. Neither ever knew a time of bliss or even base neutrality, some casual caesura when they forgot themselves and thus forgot to despise themselves. No, both loathed themselves even while earning straight As and graduating from prestigious universities and, in Jim's case, marrying and becoming a parent. Carolyn has been diagnosed clinically depressed, bipolar and psychotic. Jim, who will not see a therapist, has not been diagnosed. These aren't their real names. They do not know each other.
They know me.
And while both of them function, somewhat, in the real world -- driving, living alone, working part-time -- neither of them has someone with whom they feel they can be their true selves. Estranged from old friends, relatives and exes, mute in the presence of coworkers, they have no one whom they can telephone to describe how the roof-spies tote beeping machines or how crushing it was when the stalked man yelled "Get the hell away" or to narrate nights spent assessing steak knives in the kitchen, furious when each proves too dull to slit wrists. Jim and Carolyn have no one to whom they can shriek "My life is s--t" or "I want to die."
No one but me.
Yes, Carolyn has a psychiatrist. But she keeps certain things from him. Jim presents one face to the world -- a tense, barely-maintaining face -- but with me he can pound his fists on tables shouting "I'm angry, I'm scared," and he can hurl his Christmas presents at the wall because their lovely wrappings remind him that he cannot wrap gifts so well, which makes him feel inadequate. To others, he says, "I'm not hungry, I just ate" but only I know that this is a lie, that he has not eaten all day and will not eat tonight. Only to me can he scream, when I suggest food, "A fat pig like me doesn't need another calorie."
The other people in Jim's and Carolyn's lives have given up and left: abandoned them, you might venture to say. I'm probably handling our relationships all wrong: I listen, I advise, although they never take my advice. But isn't this better than just walking away? These relationships are not just relationships. They're jobs. And sorrow is their sole reward. True, Jim chooses his misery by shunning therapy, by shunning even the idea of medications because "I'm stupid already and I'll be stupider if I'm drugged." You can't reason with him. I know. I have tried -- all my life.
And I've known Carolyn since 1982. I am a bridge between the real world and Jim and Carolyn's semiprivate hells. But perhaps not a good bridge, because all my soothing and listening have not changed or even cheered them at all. They still speak of spies and knives. After an hour or so with Jim or Carolyn -- an hour spent speaking their highly specific languages like a translator for faraway island tribes -- I realize with terror that I am forgetting my own tongue. After those hours with Jim or Carolyn, I must always fight my way back. I wonder whether someday I will lose my way. Having grown up with one of them, I guess it's more or less miraculous that I have any grasp on this real world at all.
