Crossed Over

by Santana Knox

If I couldn’t break from a depressive episode? I wasn’t trying hard enough. I was weak, allowing myself to succumb to it.

It was no one else’s problem that I’d shut myself in for the last five years, both externally and internally. I lacked practice socially, and it always made me self-conscious, uneasy, constantly second guessing every word and interaction and then

torturing myself for hours, even days, following events in an unstoppable cycle of self-analysis and brooding. I used to be more carefree. I used to not care. Maybe it was easier when I was a teenager, or maybe this was just the result of trauma.

Then, my mind did that thing where I played back that interaction for the majority of the ride on repeat until I’d found every flaw in the seven words I’d spoken in those fifteen minutes.

“We’re a lot of things. Lacking boundaries, mutually emotionally manipulative, codependent, damaged as hell, but close?” I shook my head. “Surprisingly, I don’t think my mother knows a single thing about me that actually matters,” I admitted out loud for the first time in my life.

“I would have done it before had you just asked.” She shrugged. “But you’re not an asker, are you?” I shook my head. “I can’t read your mind.” She grinned. “Pity. It’s wildly entertaining in here.”

“Is that what she said?” Trixie looked around, as if in search of Harvey for confirmation. “That doesn’t sound like her.” “No, but I’m exhausting to deal with.” I switched sides, bending my left leg into the same stretch.

Everything about me felt tiresome, too much to be burdened by.

For girlhood, for sisterhood, for softness and laughter.

I was good at self-destruction. It was my best quality, actually. I could come together and break apart, then reinvent myself until the old Antônia would be so unrecognizable, I’d have no choice but to create an entirely new name for myself again.

Half of me was tied up in a chair in my mind, locked behind the back porch of my consciousness, screaming for the imposter to remove their Antônia costume and let me take the wheel again. I couldn’t let this be my end. I couldn’t just ruin everything we’d worked for. The other half of me knew I was both versions of myself, and that the dead and numb version of me was the only one who could finish what we started. Through was the only way out.

When you’re a woman, your anger is either childish or irrational. It’s never justified. So I didn’t care to try to explain myself anymore.

“I’m disgustingly insecure, and I literally live inside my own head.

“I want the moon, the stars. I want an entire constellation made of us.”

I could be my own damn hero, and that meant sometimes letting someone else do the saving.

My mother, my enemy, my best friend.