She Said I Lived

I'm being transparent: I'm sharing dark corners of my heart. So prepare yourself.

It was last night and I felt empty after the words fell out.

These words.

She said, "You lived. There were lots and lots of days when all I wanted was to know was that you’d be alive at 21."

And I am. But she didn't know for sure that I would be.

She was not afraid of car accidents or heart arrhythmias or fires.

She was afraid of the me alone in night hours and quiet depression.

And she didn't know for sure that there were times when I laid in the bath tub wishing I could fill my lungs with water. But there were. And times when I wished my little Bic razors were bigger and sharper and more dangerous.

I love her more than life, and the fear of what my death could have done to her was the greatest motivation to keep living.

This is heavy; you can stop if you want. But I'll keep going.

I wonder now who else knew how bad it was, if my siblings had any idea, if my friends ever thought they'd get a call from their parents telling them to come home because they'd heard from mine. Or if my teachers thought it.

Could they tell by my face or my tone or my walk that I wanted to die?

It was high school. I thought I was normal. Maybe I was.

Most of us have had seasons of dark days, when it seems that maybe it'd be better to sleep, better to fall, safer or simpler to end the breathing and breaking.

We've had pains and wished for their quick release from our bodies, their cages.

I was sad, and angry, and impossible.

But I was a church kid, a youth group kid. I wrote in the school paper. I played basketball. I ran around with the drama kids for a while.

I wasn't sitting in my room in the dark all the time, watching twisted shows or playing violent games. But I'd play solitaire for hours, and I'd fill up my journals with song lyrics and short lines--not quite poems--and pleas for someone to understand what was happening in my head.

I don't know if anyone did back then, if anybody really understood, because they didn't know.

I hid so much of what I was feeling and the blackness of my thoughts, and I read the liturgy at Mass, and I edited news stories about I-don't-remember-what. And I stayed out all night time or two, and got brought home once for trying. I drank and I cried and I wished that I had some idea of what love should have been.

I slept in the basement in the summer because it was darker.

I went to bookstores waiting for an encounter with some person who would change my life, and I thought he never came.

And really, I haven't stopped. I realize every few months that my frequenting coffee shops and book stores has more to do with a belief in serendipity and moments of perfection than it does with my inability to be productive at home.

But really, I've met him, time and again, just not the right one. And I'm doing okay.

He was down the path, and next door, and he was halfway between me and home, and he was in class, and ahead of me, and in my house, and more than once he was a friend of a friend, and in the right place for me at a moment when we locked eyes and I half smiled and probably blushed and felt something for a moment.

But I never needed them. I thought I did, but I didn't.

I could tell you what it was, but I'd rather you ask me and let me take you to one of those coffee shops and share something real, so you can see my face when I say again, "She said I lived."

Because I did and I am and I do.

Now comes the time when I make a point: I was sad and angry and impossible. And a danger to myself.

And now I'm living, talking about the days of the past, that don't hang over me anymore. Of course I experience bouts of apathy as months pass, and sometimes I fear that depression is in my head again.

But I tell you this: Despite the weighty color and clouds, through the most unstable years of adolescence, I lived.

And it was a choice.

I love my mom more than nearly everything I've ever known, and what I know because of her is that love is indeed enough. To save a person. To recreate a life. To resurrect the damaged, and make it beautiful and blessed.

What I know is that love saved my life, her love for me, and mine for her.

Because she is a saint, because she knows pain, and loss, and searing wounds.

Because she knows me and she loves me and she told me that a hand knit me together in her womb, and when I was old enough to understand, I went searching for proof and I found it, and asked that same hand to pull itself into my chest and to feel the contours of my heart and to know it. To test me and know my anxious thoughts.

And there were many.

But I was lead away.

Away from the anxieties and angers and fears and darkness.

All because of love. All from the truth poured out in screaming tears on my bedroom floor.

My mother showed me what it is to love, and she said I lived.

I lived because she loved.

I love because I live.

"The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love."