The Sophy Chronicles

Dispatch From the Abyss

I feel dead, she recalls ...

It is a bad night for me. New Years. Part of me is thinking of that Barry Manilow song. "It’s just another New Year’s Eve/It’s just a night like all the rest…"

Part of me is feeling sad. Depressed. Wanting to put a gun to my head and pull the trigger. I realized yesterday, when I was eating Chinese with a friend of mine, that I just found out I was conceived on New Years Eve by a 12-year-old girl who had too much to drink. Can my earliest memory of consciousness be that of my conception between a drunken egg and a drunken sperm?

After all, drunken conception is nothing new, its been happening as long as primal man slithered out of the primal ooze that was the river Charybdis and became genus Homo. John Lennon once made a comment about half the people in the world being conceived by too much alcohol on a Saturday night. I shouldn’t be teasing these Saturday night specials, after all, it made my father's side of the family multi-multi-millionaires. Is it like the Bible says, "the sins of the parents are passed down to their children?"

I am lonely. I feel lonely. Thinking about conception has made me horny. But I don’t want to get laid. I don’t know what I want. I have an urge to fly; I want to have one of those flying dreams I use to have when I was a child, but don’t have anymore. But I do not know where I would fly. There is no where I want to go, other than my bed. I want to sleep. I never want to wake up again. This horrible thing is depression, its got me in its sharp talons and it is not letting me go. I am screaming, and no one is listening, no one can hear my soul’s pain.

I had my last drink September 26, 1996. I remember it. Sometimes I can still taste it. September 25, 1996 I had a bottle of red wine, adding grain alcohol to it so I could get buzzed faster. I passed out. I woke up the next day, no cottonmouth but thirsty. I went to an AA meeting where I was so thirsty and had a glass of water. Had the shakes. Got so drunk again from that water. Got the DT's. I have not had a drink since then. Every time the urge hits me, I remember the drink, the DT’s: being strapped down to a bed and shaking so badly that the bed was moving, and it passes. At the time I was drinking, I was hell bent on destroying myself. I was in pain, felt my life had no meaning, and it was just easier to stay drunk than to live.

A month in a state loony bin after detox gave me the desire to pull myself up by my bootstraps, to change my whole life around and start living again. My problems were not as bad as other people's were. True, before I was drinking, I had moved back home with my parents because a roommate I had stolen my life savings from me and blew it up her nose. Things got so bad that one night my mother called the police because my father was choking me and I stopped breathing. Apparently he could not forgive me for losing several thousand dollars. I thought parents should love their children unconditionally, I had broken no laws, I just made the misfortune to room with a person with a very expensive cocaine habit. I was very naïve at the time, and had never met anyone who had done drugs. I was living out of my car for a while.

To this day, we do not talk about this incident, it's our families dirty little secret. And to this day I no longer respect him, which breaks my heart. Even now, all these years later, my parents have disinherited and disowned me. We call each other on the phone, but it is stilted, and formal. I have spent the last six years working, holding down a respectable job and making money for the first time in my life. I have gone to Europe, which was a dream come true for me, and I did it all by myself. I have learned I cannot rely on a single person, which is the saddest thing. I know I am like the Virginia Slims advert, I HAVE come a long way. I still have a long way to go.

Now I have tonight.

I want to drink tonight. I want to take a bottle of vodka and take a long hot bath in my pajamas. Drink the bottle in the bath tub. Toast the new years. And when the bottle is empty, crash it against the bathtub, shattering it. And taking the shards and slitting my wrists, my ankles, my throat. Watching the blood ebb out. I want the pain to stop. I want the loneliness to stop. I feel all alone. I feel empty. I feel worthless. I feel like I should have been born dead. I don’t know why I was conceived in the first place.

I feel hollow. I do not feel alive anymore. I feel like a Basilisk. I feel dead.

I cannot sleep. I just took a handful of sleeping pills. I am tired. I will sleep. If I die before I wake, I have said my prayers. If I wake before I die, then maybe the feeling will pass by then. If it doesn’t perhaps I may get a bottle anyway and die. If I do not drink, maybe I can still die. I can through myself under the train. I can die. I can crawl into the car and die that way.

I am not afraid of dying. That is easy. It is living that is hard and living sucks. I feel the loneliness, the despair and its choking me. I do not know who to ask for help. I don’t think I want help. I want to curl up and never wake up again.

Please God, grant me that one wish. Let the sleeping pills work tonight. Please. Because I am afraid of tomorrow. I feel as if I have been lied to, it does not get better. All the hard work I have done, back breaking work when I hit bottom to be where I am now, was it worth it? I do not mind being alone. I mind being lonely. I feel so lonely I want to die.

All that hard work, and just now, when I feel the most vulnerable, the most wounded, the one time I need someone more than anything, I am alone. Like Tennyson’s Percival, this quest is not for me and I am alone, thirsty unto death in the valley of sand and thorns. Like Percival, if I were to see the Holy Grail, I would know that this quest is not for me. Like Percival, the purest of all Arthur’s knights, but still not pure enough to touch the Grail. I am not a knight in shining armor. The only dragons I have slain are of my own making.

And I just don’t see this fairy tale ending happily. Being psychic I can see how other people will die in this lifetime. I have always seen my death, and know it will be by my own hand, within the next two, 2 ½ years. And this prophecy I want to change. I just want not to be alone right now. I just need someone to hold me, until this feeling passes. Is that asking so much? But as always, I am alone. You come into this world alone, you die alone, but I never thought the middle part called life, would find me alone as well.

Published early 2000s, reviewed Feb 14, 2008