I spent the better parts of the wee hours of this morning re-reading an email thread, dated from 2019, wherein me and my friends were doing a 31 day challenge about comic books. I mentioned this challenge in yesterday's post, and after re-reading the thread I had to revisit some of S's picks - especially the works of Raymond Briggs, Scott McCloud and Tom Hart. I had to do a little bit of research beforehand, and I actually found out that Hart had illustrated a book called 'Daddy Lightning', and as a prelude for my readings, I thought it would be a good idea to begin with this one. And maybe I thought that thematically this book would have been similar in tone to 'Rosalie Lightning', I found myself not feeling entirely captivated by the whimsy of the story. It has its merits, but it was certainly not a work that really moved me.
And then I moved on to 'Rosalie Lightning', and... well. It's a devastating read. I found myself thinking about the same fears I faced when my son was an infant. Thinking of nights spent wide awake, paying attention to the cadence of his breath. Thinking about how I felt that that half second between inhaling and exhaling, when his wee chest would stay absolutely still, was completely terrifying. The most morbid part of me has always entertained that terrible thought - a thought that lasts unto this very day - of one day getting a call, or a message, with news that something awful had happened. I've always tried to imagine how broken I'd be, and the truth is that I could never see me as a person, but rather as a shapeless blob, not unlike Hart illustrates himself as in the book.
I know the pain, the sorrow, the loss I have felt and harboured all these many years is something that cannot be equated. Ending a relationship cannot be compared to the loss of a child, or a loved one. And I have never been one to deal well with loss - everything becomes overwhelmingly dramatic and heavy. Back when I was going through the darkest period of my life, I had to go to a psychiatric hospital to get some therapy - which was mainly being prescribed a cocktail of chemicals to numb my brain. The depths of the despair I felt in my soul back then were unfathomable. Just a few months prior, I dreamt of a future that seemed all but guaranteed, and just like that I found myself out of a job, penniless, and my relationship didn't exist anymore. My son truly helped me get through some of the darkness, but he saw that I existed in the depths of an unending abyss. I was broken, at the time, and I never recovered from it fully. That's why I've given up on the notion of ever being with someone else again - for as much as I miss some things, the truth is that it's not fair for someone to be with like this, shattered, a puzzle whose pieces don't fit and will always be missing. All of my recent past is testament to this fact, and maybe that explains why I elected to destroy myself slowly for so, so long.
When I went to the psych ward, I'd always leave there feeling worse than I felt coming in. It's never an easy place to find yourself in, there's an oppressive heaviness in the air - and their policy of giving freedom for the patients to roam about, though not without its merits, always left me deeply affected. I think it may have contributed to worsening the anxiety I already felt, and the fact that I had to find myself amidst people with deeply incapacitating issues made me underestimate mine own issues. The person that was responsible for my therapy basically only upped the amount of medication I was taking. There never was a deeper analysis of what I was going through, and I reasoned that it was because I was just not worthy of such an effort, that there were people with far more serious issues than me.
For some reason, there was a day when I was waiting for my appointment in the waiting room - a summer's day, immensely hot, and the waiting room had no air conditioning - and everything about it mande me think of Meursault's trip to attend his late mother's funeral. All I knew is that this had to be the last time. I could not ever come back. All I knew was that there was less and less of me. Sometime later, in early September, I ran into my friend S - and he broke the good news : he'd just gotten married. That was the day I decided not to go back to the psych ward. Having this brief moment of light and happiness for someone whom I love so dearly was what I needed. Little did I know that the worst was still to come for me. I went into a downward spiral in the months that followed, there grew in me an increasing feeling of despair, I was still unemployed and I didn't feel any form of motivation to find one, and I ended having to sell my then record collection. I got to December that year without a penny to my name, and for the first time in my life I found myself unable to get my son something for his birthday and for christmas. I realize - I've always realized - that there are people out there who have it much worse than me, and that this form of despair is known to many parents the world over, none of us want to not to be able to provide their children with what they deserve. That December was particularly cruel and hard, so much so that I looked forward to new year's eve, where I'd wade into the sea, and let the undertow carry me away. That way, I deemed, I wouldn't be a weight to anyone anymore. Even as recently as a couple of years ago, I found myself sitting by a steep cliff that fell sheer to raging sea below, and as the sun set on the horizon, I wondered just how easy it would be for me to let myself fall and be embraced by the waves.
I have told the story of myself far too many times, to too many people. I've already told the same stories many, many times. One of the reasons I think why people opt not to have me in their lives is because they think I'm still clinging onto something from my past. I would not disavow them of that notion. But maybe I never managed to explain myself correctly. There are people who've been in my life that would think that I miss someone from my past, that I miss Silvia, or that I miss Sofia, or whomever. I miss me. And how do you explain that to someone? How do you explain - and make sure you're understood - to someone that there are bits of you missing, yet you can remember how you were, when you were more, when you were complete? When you were fully capable, when you had it in you to fight for anything - ANYTHING!, when you sacrificed what you logically shouldn't be able to sacrifice to travel abroad just to provide a loved one with a moment of respite from the pain they were going through, when you gave up on the most basic things just so you could give them to the one you loved, and that all those bits are now shattered or completely absent? I learned, in time, that you don't. You don't explain. No one really cares. No one really can relate.
I didn't endure the loss that Hart did, of course. It's beyond comparison. What he went through is my number one nightmare. And yet, there were times where I could see myself there, in that book. In how divorced one feels from what's real. In how hollow one feels. How many times did I find myself wandering aimlessly about without a care in the world, without care for my personal safety, and secretly hoping that a bus or a runaway truck would hit me? The book, and its companion piece 'PTSD : The wound that never heals', written and illustrated by Hart's wife, Leela Corman, are works of art I'll always treasure. They are works of art that make me think. They make me think about how there are some things that you never ask about, or at least are never easily asked. Even between friends. All of us have that more reserved and intimate side to us that we rarely show someone else. No one teaches us how to be vulnerable. No one really prepares us for the demands of adult life, and no one ever tells us that sometimes we find ourselves keeping the ones we love out of the loop, just to not feel like we are dead weight to them.
There was a semblance of me in this book. And just like Mount Eerie's 'A Crow Looked At Me', this is something I can't often return to. It's too much, too heavy. Too beautiful. In a very sad sense, it's beautiful, but a beauty that cuts deep down to the soul. It touched me greatly, and changed me, and made me grow as a person.
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