Before the Dawn

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3

I’m like a time bomb these days. I really am. Like I can feel the next crash creeping up on me centimeter by deadly centimeter. I look back and think about those days when I was happy, those days when Chris and I would stay up until one or two in the morning, working on the school paper, laughing at our stupid typos, talking about all our plans for college and beyond. That’s the worst of it. I can remember when I actually felt like a person. A person with a life to live. A reason to exist.

At least the suicidal side of it is gone. I know it’s no reason to boast, but I never actually made an attempt, even when things were at their worst. Through it all, I’ve maintained a shred of my dignity. The irony is the only reason I didn’t try to kill myself was because I was too tired to form any sort of cohesive plan. But I did think about it.

A lot.

You don’t need all the details, I’m sure. Even now, I can’t believe how much I’m already telling you. I spent two full months in bed. I didn’t technically sleep that entire time, but I was about as mentally useful as a coma patient. I still remember the way it felt. Heaviness. Brain smog. That thick, pea-soup mental fog. It doesn’t just sap your strength. It feeds on your exhaustion. You’re so sluggish, which is exactly how it wants you. So your thoughts aren’t your own, because you don’t even think anymore in words or pictures, just in primitive sensations. Sensations of tiredness. Of nothing. Of death.

I was still a mess when I returned to Orchard Grove. It was Christmas break my sophomore year of college. Daddy was a saint. Got me audiobook after audiobook, and he’d sit by my bedside listening with me so I wouldn’t feel lonely. Mom thought I had mono. It was easier to explain it that way. Explain why I didn’t just refuse to get out of bed, I literally couldn’t lift my legs off the mattress.

She clucked and fretted. Mom’s like that, you know. Chiding me in English, then muttering to herself in Cantonese. You want to know about my relationship with my mother? I swear all you’ve got to do is read an Amy Tan book. It doesn’t even matter which one. In Mom’s professional opinion, mental illness isn’t illness at all. It’s not caused by a germ, and therefore it doesn’t exist. And on top of all her quintessential Chinese-American mothering tactics, she goes to Orchard Grove Bible Church, so she’s got theology on her side backing her up.

Because of course, God helps those who help themselves. She quotes it so many times she actually believes it’s written right there in red letters. Hers is that old-school, bootstrap sort of Christianity, where you take a little bit of the Bible, a heavy dose of puritanical ideals, and pour out the American Protestant work ethic on top. So you’re constantly pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, quoting Philippians 4:13 to yourself like you’re some heavyweight champion wrestler, and you conquer anything and everything that stands between you and your goal, which is a mix between a traditional family, a comfortable retirement, and eternal security.

That’s why it was so much easier to tell her I was recovering from mono.

Which didn’t keep Chris from stopping by to see me, even though I’d broken up with him over a year earlier.

And then the fog lifted. Gloriously. Miraculously. I was myself again. So much so that I started to wonder if maybe I did catch a virus, and it just took my immune system longer than expected to fight it off. Of course, reconnecting with Chris didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt that we were talking about the future, even mentioning the word engagement. It was like I’d been asleep for the past year and a half and was just now waking up.

I mean seriously, I looked at the way I was at the start of my first year of college, and I had no idea who that girl was. The girl who called her long-time boyfriend one week after freshman orientation, begging him through tears to understand why she was dumping him. The girl who tossed all his old love letters — five whole years’ worth — into the recycling bin because she was certain that it was in both of their best interests to move on.

The girl who couldn’t get out of bed until Prince Charming swept in and woke up her exhausted soul with his kiss.

That girl was gone, and good riddance to her. Once again the future was promising and glorious and everything Chris and I had hoped it would be when we celebrated our high-school graduation.

He forgave me for breaking up with him. He even said it was good, said that our year and a half experiment of living apart from each other helped us to grow and mature, so now our love was destined to be even stronger.

I wish to God he’d been right.