When We Collided

by Emery Lord

depression, it settles like a shadow over your body while you sleep, and it mutes every frequency into blankness, into fog. Everyone thinks you can’t laugh when you’re depressed, but I couldn’t cry either, because I couldn’t feel.

looks at me like I’m absolutely off my rocker. Or maybe it’s a look of amazement, like I’m a whole galaxy, glittering and vast and unchartered.

they curled their inky arms around me until my Technicolor world became crackling gray static. Until I felt nothing but blankness.

To the deepest, most cellular level of my being, I resent people who believe that depression is the same as weakness, that “sad” people must be coddled like helpless toddlers. So to think that Jonah—my own boyfriend, my friend, my lover, whatever he is—would believe that he knows what his mom needs better than she does? That her grief makes her unaskable, voiceless, unreliable? This is very hurtful.

In Vivi’s presence, it’s impossible to deny that I’m weighed down. She’s buoyant, feet barely tapping the sand she walks on. Her body seems subject to less gravity than the rest of us.

mean. “Yeah, Viv. I do.” I know I’m being horrible—snippy and unyielding. Sometimes I can identify facts in my mind, but I can’t feel them. What I mean is, I know that I am not malnourished and I don’t have aggressive cancer. I sleep in a safe, warm bed at night, and I can eat ice-cream cones whenever I want. Even right this minute, I smell the salty ocean and wet sand in the breeze, which ruffles my hair. Cognitively, I recognize my good fortune. But I don’t feel lucky. I want to start my whole life again—like I want to float my soul back up to the cosmos and come down as a different girl, in a different life.

Maybe I should be thinking that Hayashi had all the right in the world to tell me to deal with what I’ve got. But all I can think is that the world seems so pointlessly sad sometimes—so harrowingly, impossibly, uselessly sad.

On the grouchy to blissful spectrum, she spends zero time in the middle.

I am bleak, and the sky is incongruously blue. If the weather walked into my hospital room, I’d slap her face and demand, How dare you?

“What . . . if this . . . ruins . . . my life?” “No,” she whispers back. Her tone is fierce, eyes unblinking. “This is going to ruin a few days. It might make some weeks harder. A few hard weeks in a great, big life. You can do that. We can do that. Look at Uncle Mitch. He has really tough days, but his life is so great that we’re jealous of it!” My little sob noise almost becomes a laugh. My uncle has severe anxiety. And a sweet little apartment in San Francisco and my cousin Pip and these great friends whose laughs sound like a big, cacophonous symphony together. My mom and I lived with Mitch for a short while when I was little. I used to fight to stay awake so I could hear the group of adults laughing around the kitchen table. Mitch has his work at the museum; he has Golden Gate Park runs and wonderful food. He has medication and therapy. He’s had some hard weeks in a great, big life.

But I thought it was teenager stuff. Acting up. A sign that she was definitely okay. I had no idea they were symptoms until it got really bad. Then we got her help. And different medicine. There’s a lot I didn’t know.” She turned her gaze to the ground. “There’s a lot I still don’t know.”

Why would you even come here? she asked me. Why? Because I’ve been having a hard time since before the day we met. She never walked away from me because of it. Her feelings for me weren’t contingent on how easy or hard it was to be in my life. She doesn’t have to be sunny for me. That’s not how it works.

medication at a good dosage for you will help more than you can imagine. I also think continued therapy will help you work through everything you’ve experienced and how bipolar disorder affects your identity.”

“Yes. I hear you when you say you don’t want to have bipolar disorder. It’s very trying and can be frustrating to manage. But you’ve got a loving family and a home and access to health care.” His smile is tentative—warmer and less professionally clinical now. “And you’ve got a lot of fight in you. That much I can tell.”

I thought Ellie was what I call a Lovely. I don’t tend to like Lovelies because there’s a lot of posturing and holding back of real human emotion.

I scream for every time it’s felt impossible to get out of bed, for every time it’s felt hopeless, for every time I’ve felt out of control and terrified, for the guilt and unfairness.

an untranslatable term. I could tell him that sometimes it feels like being on a carnival ride, so fast and dizzying and fun at first. Then it goes on for too long, and you can’t stop. I could tell him how I hurt friends without meaning to. I could tell him that depression made me feel like a husk, empty and lifeless. Those comparisons might help, but bipolar disorder is so complex, and it’s mine. My feelings have back rooms and trapdoors, and I’m still learning them. I can’t quite articulate what bipolar disorder is for me, exactly, but I can articulate who he is to me, and so I take a deep breath.

It’s a nasty voice, the one in my head that hisses, You do not deserve them. But maybe the universe knew that things would be hard for me sometimes. Maybe it gave me the very best people because it knew I’d need them. And wouldn’t I be rude, to not accept the love I was offered? Wouldn’t I be spitting right in the face of destiny?