Letters Written in White (6 page)

Every morning when I walk Desiree and Devin out to catch the bus, I smile and wave at the other parents. It’s the neighborly thing to do. The other mothers and fathers smile and wave back, many with their overly sugary coffee in hand. Most are dressed for their professional jobs, while I’m dressed for my stay-at-home mom gig wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt. I’m smiling and waving with my truth expertly disguised. If they came any closer, they’d see my coffee is black and my eyes are empty. I’m pretending right along with them. We’re all liars. We’re just pawning our souls to different devils.

When they’re at school and I’m home alone the whispers get louder and the volume in my head reaches levels that are nearly impossible to turn down. This is my suicide song. It plays loud and proud, thumping and clanging around in even the quietest parts of mind like a metal spoon on pots and pans. I’ve tried everything to switch it off or even turn it down. Sleep is my only true reprieve, so that’s how I spend most of my days. When the kids are home, I’m on life support. Those little humans are my lifesavers. Every single time I think I can’t do it, can’t dance to this torturous song another day, I think of them and I choose to live. The worst part about that is kids should never hold that much responsibility upon their shoulders. They shouldn’t be my lifeline; I should be theirs.

The water cascades down my back and the weight of the day slowly climbs up onto my shoulders, and I begin to cry. Everyone’s gone for the day, and this house is now my tomb. I want the sadness to go away. I want the daily dread and despair to stop. Every task at hand is like looking at Mount Everest and being told to climb it. No matter how much I want to climb it, something I can’t explain won’t allow me to. Others see depressed people as weak, and all I want to tell them is they can never imagine the amount of strength it takes for us to do something as simple as getting out of bed in the mornings. Each day when I open my eyes, my heart breaks because it’s still here, this terrifying sadness. And with every new day there are new bouts of guilt and moments of feeling inadequate. When all of the other moms and wives are out volunteering at the schools, or off to their important jobs, I’m here in hiding, wishing I could fit into their world. Once this sickness has leeched from you for so long, you lose all ability to find happiness in anything. Even the most exciting of things garner no interest from you. All of my flaws have become magnified. They have manifested in ways that distort the truth. Where I once saw a little extra weight, I now see fat, fat, and more fat. Where I once preferred to have a smoother complexion, I now see the ugliest skin. Where I felt I needed to improve as a mom and wife or friend, I now can only see a massive failure who will never be good enough.

I slide to the shower floor, pull my knees in to my chest, and let the tears flow freely. No matter how much I cry or how much I pray for relief from this Hell on Earth, it doesn’t come, and I don’t know how much longer I can live like this. It’s not fair to my family, and it’s becoming too heavy of a burden to continue carrying.

Water swirls around the drain while dark thoughts swirl around in my head. Suicide doesn’t happen all at once. It starts small. Those early seductive whispers of nagging self-talk, worthlessness, self-hate, fear, or sadness curl into your ears subtly at first. Eventually it mutates into a relentless roar. You really don’t see death coming until suddenly, in one deeply dark moment, you’re face to face with it. Then, being worn down, exhausted from swimming in an ocean of despair, you drop at Death’s feet and surrender. Like a sander, it wears you down until there’s nothing left to fight it off. Soon your once strong oak exterior is worn down into a meager pile of sawdust.

I wish my husband knew how many times he’s held the dust of me in the palms of his hands, slipping through his fingers. If he only understood how badly I need his understanding, love, and support during these dark times, things might be different. It’s not that I need him to fix me. I don’t want his pity or sympathy. I just want the man I love to see me, hear me. When I’m hanging by a thread, being heard, seen, and loved is a life preserver. The simplicity of what I need is never simple though. I’m hanging from that thread now. I’m dangling at Death’s door, and I’m tired of holding on.

Nervous energy pulsates through my body, causing me to want to claw my skin off of its bones. My first instinct is to stand up and pull my hair and yell as loud as I can. I want to scream back at the bullshit things running through my head. It’s not voices I hear. Well, it is, but it isn’t. It’s a voice, my voice. The things I tell myself every single day drive me to the brink of madness. I thought I’d learned to shut these thoughts off long ago, but here they are, louder than ever. With a vengeance they snarl while creeping into every fissure of my life, poisoning everything they touch. It’s destroying my marriage. It’s poisoned motherhood for me. The one thing every woman covets and holds most dear has been turned into my own personal Hell.

The day I became a mom, I found myself on the edge of a rocky cliff. The mountain I had worked so hard to climb became a plank. I walked it on wobbly feet. The moment I stepped off, I fell, hard and fast. The worst part is the falling. I keep waiting for the excruciating landing. I’m almost to the point of begging for rock bottom because the place I find myself in now is vexing and purely exhausting.

I want to rewind my life back to my pregnancy, when there was nothing but joy and happiness. We were so incredibly excited about the new journey we were about to start. Now, here I am, feeling like an outsider to my own family, my own life. Looking back on memories of how excited I was about starting a family is almost too much to handle because of the reality I’m living here and now. I was so incredibly hopeful then. Our life was just beginning as a family, and for the first time, I felt contentment like I’d never known before. The emptiness I had endured from a certain trauma in my childhood was finally filling up. Little did I know, as soon as it was full, it would overflow and drown me.

“Once depression unpacks its bags and moves in,

you lose all capacity to trust yourself

or others.”

THE DAY I married Grayson, we promised each other for better or worse. I just never realized worse would visit us so soon. Thinking back to our wedding day, my heart swells with love. A tinge of pain threatens to infiltrate it. I can’t help but wonder if I solidified a life of too much
worse
for him. He deserves so much more than that. That’s why I’ve lied to him for so long. Each day when the door would open, I’d instantly model a smile on my face just for him. I can’t even manage that anymore. I was once a smiling liar. I just can’t do it anymore, and my resolve is wearing paper-thin.

Now, I’m just the ugly truth.

Another night, another fight, that’s how it seems to go for us lately. He mentions I’ve lost a lot of weight in a very short period of time, and when he points it out, things quickly go south.

“Are you eating? Because your clothes are just hanging on you and you look sickly, Riah. Please consider seeing your doctor again. This isn’t healthy.”

I know I’ve all but stopped eating for the most part. My ability to do even the most basic of things for survival, such as eating, has waned. When I think about eating, all that crosses my mind is the cooking of the food and how hard that will be, the cutting up of the food, the chewing, the swallowing, and as ridiculous as it may seem to anyone else who hasn’t ever experienced depression, to me, these things feel so substantial that I can’t even manage the motivation to do it.

The melancholy isn’t even the worst of what I feel most days. It’s the anxiety. The anxiety is crippling to the point of no return. I’m afraid all the time, yet I have no idea what exactly it is that I fear so much. My thoughts are all over the place and about everything. There’s always this existential dread present, and nothing I do makes it go away. But everything makes it worse. I used to be a little overweight, and I obsessed and worried about my appearance because of it. Now, I’ve lost a lot of weight, and apparently that’s a bad thing too.

Looking down at myself in shame, I say, “Make up your mind, Grayson. Before you made comments about my being overweight and how it was unhealthy. Now being skinnier is unhealthy?”

He throws his hands up in defeat rather than sparring with me any longer.

“You know what? I’ll just shut up because nothing I ever say is the right thing. You take offense to every word that comes out of my mouth.”

“No, Grayson, I take offense to every word that doesn’t come out of your mouth.”

His brows furrow. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Never mind. It doesn’t even matter at this point.”

The argument ends just as quickly as it started, and with the kids already in bed I again opt to sleep in the guest room.

Standing in front of the mirror, I look at myself.

Riah Winter.

I don’t even know her anymore. I’m a stranger to myself. These are the empty moments of my days. They were once few; now they are many. Being alone with myself only solidifies that I hate my own company. When I’m alone, I can feel so strongly all of the places within myself that have hardened or rotted away at the hands of this sickness. Any semblance of vitality has slowly shattered, and all I hear in my head are shrill cries of desperation for a pardon of any kind. I think about my brother, and I wish so badly he were still here so I could talk to him. He would understand. He is the only person I could ever turn to. You would think Grayson would have some kind of perspective on what this illness can do to a person after seeing how it ruined my brother’s life when his wife committed suicide. He was my best friend, and at times like this, when I’m at my lowest, I just wish I could call him up and hear him tell me it will all be okay and to be strong. He was one of the most positive and understanding people I’ve ever known. He loved unconditionally, and that’s really all I want from my husband.