A month or so ago, I finally got angry. Not incandescent fury, or boiled-over frustration. Not smouldering rage, or righteous indignation, just... angry...
about the paths I've been blocked from taking...
at the way things turned out...
and the cruelty of it all.
But I'll get to that later, because apparently I have one of those.
I have no desire to write ever again right now, but if I'm going to fill the gaps in the story of the knife-edge I tripped and slid along I should really do it before the memories fade like bloodstains on concrete after the rain, so let's just add this to the tally of the many things I didn't want to have to do and read on, although...
Mother Dear, you probably want to skip this one, yeah?
Between August 27th and September 14th, when not burning hours cycling through phone numbers in my address book and drugging myself to sleep I tapped my vestigial survival instinct to paint the target most likely to ensure its own continuance, and with fuck-all registering in my motivation-spectrum it designated "get a fucking job" and locked on hard. My phone had rung with an unknown number, and the pimp on the line when I answered dangled A Job I Really Wanted in front of me, so I pulled the plug on everything I could convince my limbic system was 'non-critical' at the wall, bypassed the fuse on the fuel warning light, pinned the throttle open, called in favours from Occam's Canadian Amy and Scott which I barely needed to ask for, and went for it with the sort of focus which only existential desperation and the very last of the fumes in a very empty tank can deliver. After crafting the best job application a team of seasoned professionals could generate, I waited... only to find out at 10AM the day applications were due that the pimp had bumped me from her short-list because she'd had 3 others who had direct experience with that particular Department.
"It's not too late," she said in a confidentially conciliatory tone, "I shouldn't tell you this, but [this], [that], and [the other] agencies are also on the panel, so you might be able to get in through one of them?"
I Google-fu'd like a master, dialled numbers on full-auto, silver-tongued like a drunken Irish poet, and by 2:30PM I'd received confirmation that [that] agency had bumped one of their own candidates (with her agreement, he assured me) in my favour.
I didn't get it, but that wasn't history at this point.
What I did get was a peer-reviewed, committee-collaborated, better-than-I'd-got-near-before template I could iterate and reuse, which I proceeded to do again and again and again.
By the time Virgo handed over to Libra the tank I'd been throwing anything I could find that would burn into was empty, I'd lost another 2kg, and the phone numbers I was calling were starting to go to voicemail. It isn't that people stop caring, it's just... it had been a month for most of them, and I was still wriggling on the end of my rope, so the crisis had to over... or at least over ENOUGH, right?
"I can skip this one, Pete's 'getting help and talking to friends' and he's got other numbers to call."
The thing is (and I'm looking at you, without judgement, here Deanne) that "you can call me any time," only works once. The promise itself isn't false, because it's sincere, but it's not true either because it can't survive the cold hard light reflecting off the edge of a razor which offers none of the answers you find yourself looking for at 3AM but does promise an end to the questions you can't get an answer to. It's a promise we've all made, but which few of us know we can never keep; there will always be that day we're busy, or ill, or just not in the fucking mood to answer the phone when it rings, no matter who's name pops up on the screen when it does, and when the crisis just doesn't seem to end no one wants to keep being anyone's grief toilet forever.
Still, I cycled through my call and message lists, and went to my counselling sessions, kept my flat clean and kept my body fed, went for walks each afternoon for exercise, and drugged myself the 6-8 nights each week I couldn't sleep. As the days got longer and the sun stabbed me in the eyeballs earlier and earlier I made a nest for myself out of couch cushions in the store room because it was furthest from the windows - it wasn't longer than I am tall, but I'd taken to sleeping in the foetal position anyway so that didn't bother me any. I even went looking for new friends; Rabeh had made a lot of noise about recapturing the things which sparked joy and making them my own, and I'd learned that the carpark near the Dairy Farmer's Hill Lookout at the Arboretum was a popular biker hangout, so I'd go there on my way home from our sessions on a Wednesday afternoon, and on Sundays at times I calculated were 'safe'. I'd roll up and park comfortably away from any other bikes I saw, then sit there playing with my phone for a while; I wouldn't impose myself on anyone, but if someone came up and said "hi," I'd engage and have a chat. The Hayabusa has the sort of presence which captures attention, and plenty of people wanted to talk about it, so this worked pretty well, and occasionally contact details even got exchanged. I knew that Instagram was the mechanism de rigueur, so I set up an account which I gradually populated with bike-relevant photos and content. I rode, and I rode hard, pushing myself and my tyres until they were scrubbed all the way to the edge, and if some nutjob on a Ducati were to say "I'm heading out The Cotter, wanna come?" I'd be someone worth riding with a second time. Sandra gave me excuses to chase the sunset and the redline - I spent an afternoon shovelling dirt and compost one afternoon for the the exercise, and slept for 7 hours straight that night as my reward.
Meanwhile, September was draining away, and the fragile momentum I'd drained my tank to build was dying along with it, so with nothing left to burn I set myself on fire and after another day that was so inconsequential I now can't remember what I did, I found myself on the eve of my 45th birthday with nothing to do, and with no way I wanted to spend it beyond that I didn't want to spend it alone. "You can't always get what you want," Mick Jagger must have said several thousand times by now, but with the only card I had in my hand being the Ten of Swords instead of the Ace of Spades, I thought "fuck this," and as I sat on my balcony staring at my laptop I started mentally assembling the kit I'd prepared a month before when I learned that my boxcutter blade wasn't going to cut it. I left it all stashed away in the end because Luke, the first friend I'd made from The Job Which Brought Me Back To Canberra, and the last friend I had left from that dumpster fire of a place, had just got his bike back on the road and invited me along for a ride to Braidwood with him and his friend Damo. I'd said I would go, and a promise is a promise, so I put myself to bed and got what sleep I could.
I was a fun ride - Luke's a fast rider on his Honda CBR600RR Mini-Blade, and Damo's a loose-fucking-unit on a Husqvarna Nordern 901, and there was good conversation over pies and iced coffee when we got there. Riding in a pack with the pace set by an underpowered Adventure Tourer was constrictive tho, and left my brain far too much free overhead to think, so I broke from the pack on the way back at Bungendore to unleash my right wrist and go visit Sandra again. It took me 19min to get there.
On the way back I beat the PB I'd set the day I wrote
Chase the sunset by 2min, and in the razer-sharp focus that required I found peace for 16min.
That night I was sitting on my balcony again, and went back to that itemised list I had in my head, thinking about the smudged forehead-print on my bathroom mirror that hovered over my heart when standing at the basin. How many times I'd slumped forwards whilst standing there only the mirror knew, but I had the first appointment with a chiropractor I'd been recommended and some calls to make the next day, so decided I'd go to that instead.
The following night I'd got as far as laying all the pieces out on the balcony coffee table next to the coffee jar I'd converted into an ashtray when I started writing Noteworthy thinking about being stuck cycling between numbness and pain, and how the joy I remembered was getting harder and harder to hold onto, when Signal pinged with a message from Mikee. I met him years ago when he was Sharpy's housemate, and ever since we've had a casual-but-warm friendship which started with him owning a pair of Australian-made Aaron Speakers, and carried through mutual membership of the IT profession, being indirectly responsible for my now owning a Renault, shared interest in solar power, and his having known Jenna from before she moved to Perth. He was checking in on my job hunt, and shared some of his recent adventures in solar-powering his countryside cabin. I'd been downsizing my stockpiles of junk and 'useful' spares as part of my efforts to keep my flat tidy, and it occurred to me that he could make good use of the box of solar paraphernalia I'd not managed to find a home for, so asked if he wanted it. He accepted the (estimated) couple of hundred dollars' worth of pro-sumer grade solar controller and accessories with shocked gratitude, I promised to ship it out the next day, and I packed the kit away.
The next night I'd sent Mikee the AusPost tracking link, and he'd kindly reimbursed me twice what it cost me to send, I had my kit laid out again and I sat there thinking about how nothing was working, nothing was getting better, and nothing I did made me FEEL better. I had a blog post I'd been compiling full of random thoughts and screams in Drafts with a week-long timed delay programmed ready to hit Publish on, but the chiropractor had booked me a full-body x-ray for the next day, so I decided I'd go do that instead, and once again I packed the kit away.
The night after that I was sitting on my balcony again feeding more and more fading embers into my ashtray with my kit laid out on the coffee table thinking about the screaming in my head that had been getting louder and louder for a week now. How I wasn't allowed to let it out of my mouth because that would make people upset, how I'd been told I have to exercise some self control, so I'd been chewing on my bottom lip until there was a line of hardened mucous membrane running from one side to the other instead. How it came and went, but it never really went away, and I couldn't let it out. How I didn't want to open my mouth to talk to anyone any more, had to be careful when I did, because it felt like it would escape, and when it did I didn't think I'd be able to stop screaming. I thought about how I had nothing I'd promised to do the next day.
I clicked Publish on the blog post, and shut down my laptop.
I wrapped the elastic resistance band I had set out around my right bicep and pulled it tight, squeezing my fist until the vein in my elbow popped up, picked up the brand-new knife I'd spent all of $10 on at Big W, identical to the one I'd bought all that time ago to cut up cheese and fresh apples for the Art Project Presentation, held my arm over the bucket I had sitting on the seat next to me, and pushed Knife A into Blood Vessel B until I felt a *pop*. I felt a moment of panic when the blood started gushing like a warm red waterfall, followed immediately by a sense of calm stillness as vestigial survival instinct gave way to relief. I sat here, knife still in hand, watching it flow until the bottom of my bucket was covered - about 500ml, or so I estimated based on the test I'd done days beforehand with a my half-litre beer mug full of water. It flowed steadily, warm on my skin in the cool night air of early October, and gushed reassuringly when I gave my fist a squeeze. I considered sitting there and just watching it drain, but that wouldn't do - New Friend Lou had my spare keycard and was checking in on me regularly, and I really didn't want her to have to live with being the person who found me. It was time to flip my coin and see where it landed.
I picked up the old tea towel I had laid out to my left and wrapped it tightly around my elbow to staunch the flow, disabled the fingerprint reader on my phone and rebooted it so it couldn't make calls but would display the details of my Emergency Contact if prompted, then stashed it and my laptop in my Go Bag alongside my Kobo and ID, checked that the Will I'd prepared and had Sandra and Timo witness for me after shovelling 1.5m3 of dirt for them was positioned prominently on my desk, turned the lights out in my flat and took the elevator downstairs. Having made it to the road without making a mess of the carpet or the tiles in the lobby, the tea towel came off my arm and got stashed in a pocket. Giving my right fist a couple of squeezes to get things moving again, and with my coin spinning in the air I turned right trying to decide where might be a nice place to wait and see where it landed. I needed somewhere I might be spotted, but might not be. The memory of the day I was nearly beaten to death on the streets of Carlisle came to mind, and how the car drivers refused to intervene; sitting on the side of the road alongside Northbourne Ave or Haig Park risked tilting my probability curve and I needed it to be as close to 50:50 as I could manage, so I started walking, pumping my first occasionally. I decided to light up one last cigarette to enjoy as I walked; awkward fumbling ensued with my left hand reaching into the right-side pocket of my hoodie to avoid getting blood all over my clothes, but once it was lit the burning in my lungs balanced the warmth trickling down my arm as I turned onto Girrawheen St, then onto Lonsdale St, leaving a trail of red spatter on the pavement as I went. By the time I got to Greasy's I wasn't really thinking much at all, so I turned right again at Elourea St because that way seemed nice, and before I knew it I was back where the trail started. Without any better ideas emerging from my gently draining mind, I just kept walking and pumping and walking.
Just before turning right onto Girrawheen St again I remember a woman stopping as I walked past to ask
"Hey! Are you OK?"
"No," I replied, politely, "but thanks for asking," and kept walking.
I walked around someone out front of the Cellarbrations staring intently at the pavement in the light of their phone torch who looked at me in shock as I passed, but didn't think too much of it because by that point things were getting a bit blurry and thoughts were something that happened to other people. There was a small group of people barring my way when I went to go right past Greasy's again tho, so I had to break my stride and stood there thinking about how cold everything felt, and how the world had gone a bit grey. One of them was on their phone and seemed to be describing someone who looked a lot like me to whoever they were talking to, and they politely asked me to stop, so I complied.
Questions were asked.
"Just out for a walk," I replied, giving my fist a pump.
More questions followed.
"No, I don't remember," I replied, giving my fist another pump.
They asked me to sit down at one of the tables and wrap a cloth around my arm.
"Oh. OK. If you say so," as I sat down and laid my head on my backpack.
"DON'T GO TO SLEEP!"
"Oh. OK. Sleep sounds nice tho. I'm so tired..."
"You're going to be OK. The ambulance is on its way," said the person with the phone to their ear.
"Oh," another pump, "OK," and another, "that's nice I guess?"
"God, he's bleeding through that cloth," some other person said in the distance, "take it off and give him another one."
"But... I don't want to get any of his blood on me!"
"Sensible," I responded from my semi-prone position on the bench, "you don't know where I've been."
"You're going to be OK," I heard the person with the phone say from even further away as if that was information I'd find valuable, "the ambulance will be here soon, see? You can hear the siren already."
"S'alright," another pump, "no rush, I'll just be here..."
I found being slumped across my bench was strangely comfortable; my back wasn't hurting like it usually would, and I'd stopped feeling the cold. I'd stopped feeling anything much at all, and everything had gone pleasantly dark. I had, in fact, finally become comfortably numb. It was all very... peaceful. Like I could finally rest. I was wondering whether the reason the acronym gets chiselled onto tombstones was really so that the guests attending funerals would know what they had to look forward to when they finally got what the host is having when a blinding light appeared above me, and a voice called down from on high, introducing himself as Matt.
"Hi Matt," I greeted him. I tried to wave, but I suspect it was more of a flop.
Matt asked what had happened, and I replied with The Story I figured would hold up no matter how many times I was going to have to tell it "I stabbed myself in the arm because I want to die but I couldn't quite commit to it so I put myself where someone could find me so maybe I wouldn't don't remember."
"Did someone do this to you?"
"Yes, me I don't remember."
"What DO you remember?"
"I was at home having a rum&coke, and I hadn't eaten so I came up with a convenient fiction went for a walk to get some food."
"So you were drinking?"
"I'd only had the one pint."
"Where were you going to go for dinner?"
"Was thinking it wouldn't fucking matter Tikka Truck? They should still be open, right?"
"... I wouldn't worry about that now," discussions were had off in the distance, blood-soaked rags were removed then replaced after arms were inspected, "do you think you can get yourself onto the stretcher here behind you?"
I couldn't tell you whether I could or not, but a short time later I was on said stretcher, clutching my Go Bag, then in the back of an ambulance repeating bits of The Story to a pair of Police-people, then rolling down the road whilst Matt failed to place a cannula in my left hand, then wrist, then forearm. Eventually he asked Hayley to pull over so there'd be less rocking on the suspension, and apologised for the repeated stabbing.
"s'OK Matt, you do what you gotta do, I can't feel a thing."
Eventually there was a plastic tube hanging out of my arm, and we were underway. The light was horribly bright, so I pulled my beanie down over my eyes, then lay back to enjoyed the rocking of the ambulance's suspension the rest of the way to the hospital.
In triage, Matt handed me over to a Doctor who's name I now can't remember.
"Thanks Matt. Hi [Doctor who's name I now can't remember]."
My arm was inspected, and I gave my right fist another pump for old time's sake, then repeated The Story when asked.
Hours or minutes later I was wheeled into a booth in ED, where I gradually became aware of the people moving purposefully in the immediate vicinity, the Middle-Aged White Men complaining about the sorts of things Middle-Aged White Men complain about, that I was highly unlikely to be dying any time soon, and that peaceful had given way to boredom, so I pushed my beanie back up and felt through my Go Bag for my book so I could pass the time reading. Some time later I decided I was getting uncomfortable lying there, so I rearranged myself so I could sit cross-legged. I'd been told the Doctor would be coming to look at stitching up the hole in my arm, which had been unwrapped and cleaned, but she seemed to be involved in one of the Code Blue's I'd overheard. Eventually I found myself needing to pee, and had overheard one of the M-AWM's being given directions, so I lowered the guard rail and carefully eased off my gurney to go and relieve myself.
I'd got half a dozen steps cautious across the ED when the world did a fade-to-grey, there was a sinking sensation, and my perspective shifted from looking across the room at the Toilet sign to up at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling and a basketball-team's worth of faces staring down at me.
"Shit, I'm sorry, was just going to the loo..."
A hand appeared in front of me, attached to an arm which disappeared into a set of teal-green scrubs. I reached up and it helped me back on my feet, and as I steadied myself on the rail around the central observation station I noticed that there was quite a lot of blood on the linoleum floor.
"Shit, I'm sorry, I went and made a mess..."
I felt like I should help clean it up because that's what you do when you make a mess, but there was a sudden fade-to-black and a feeling that reminded me of falling headfirst all the way down to 40m on a night-dive compressed into the space of a heartbeat, and the next thing I knew the multi-sports team had switched to soccer and they were all pitching in to lift me back off the floor again. My arm was warm again, there were more voices speaking than I could keep track of, there was an impressive amount of blood on the floor which I knew, logically, used to be mine, and in disoriented panic all I could think of was how much mess I was making.
"Shit, I'm sorry, do you have a rag..."
The goalie politely ignored me, whilst binding my arm to prevent more of me from leaking out, the guard rail was locked back in place which prevented me getting out, then Some Time later I passed out. When I woke up I was somewhere else.
A nurse named Genevieve ("Hi Genevieve.") noticed that I was awake and reading my book again, and came over to take my blood pressure (which was incredibly low), tell me that I'd been moved to one of the less-Intensive Care wards and that a doctor would be around shortly to stitch up the hole in my arm, and asked me if I'd like something to eat. The water which materialised seemed to evaporate before it reached my throat, and I was making the sandwiches disappear the same way when Dr Madison ("Hi Dr. Madison.") and her Trainee George ("Hi Dr. George.") arrived with a needle and thread. I told them The Story when asked, then lay back in my front-row seat to watch an experienced ED Doctor with a breathtakingly lovely smile perform a superlative demonstration of Socratic mentoring-in-action. When they were done, Belle the Orderly ("Hi, Belle.") was waiting to take me for another scan, and I got to quietly call out a "thanks George," as I was wheeled past. There had been tests and scans the night before - a CT scan of my head I had to be lifted onto the platform for, presumably to assess my apparent memory loss, an X-Ray of my arm to make sure there was nothing foreign lodged in there, blood tests for everything and then some, and blood pressure check after blood pressure check. This one, I was told as we made our way through the corridors, was an X-Ray of my chest to check out a possible bleed in one of my lungs which had shown up in one of the blood tests.
Back in the less-Intensive Care ward this shift's Doctor who's name I now can't remember introduced himself to interrogate me, so I faithfully repeated The Story. He gave me a look which told me he believed none of this, brought up that my records showed the previous psych-ward admission, and asked if this had been a repeat performance. I looked him in the eye and told him
"No."
After another word-for-word repeat of The Story he gave up, announced that he was going to send some saline down the cannula, and left with a "hmph." It took two bags before my blood pressure started showing improvement and I could finally go to the toilet unaided. The second one was still disappearing into my arm when Belle the Orderly was back ("Good to see you again, Belle.") to take me for another CT scan because the X-Ray had been inconclusive, so off we went through the now far-more active corridors for another dose of ionising radiation.
Back in my booth I was chewing through another of the least-popular sandwiches they had in stock, washed down with another litre of water, when I decided to pull my phone out and take it out of hibernation. I had a couple of messages, none of which warranted a response, and I logged into my blog to un-publish the Swansong post I'd put up the night before. I had just pulled my book out again when a Pulmonologist appeared with questions. He didn't care about The Story, in fact he seemed surprised that I was there because of extreme blood loss; he wanted to know if I'd been overseas recently, or been in contact with anyone with tuberculosis; I had not, to the best of my knowledge, been either of those things. Urgent IV antibiotics were ordered, a prescription for more promised, and a half-dozen other instructions provided which I promptly forgot - they'd get written down somewhere, I was sure, but I was getting to the point where my blood pressure wasn't making this shift's nurse Madeline freak out, and my thoughts were increasingly focused on getting the fuck out of that place before someone tried putting me in psych-ward again. Whilst I was waiting, I messaged Sandra
"Put myself in hospital again... Looks like ill be getting out shortly."
"I am glad you went to get help. Very brave and smart thinking"
"Oh, no, not like that.
"Massive blood loss."
For some reason the messages were delayed, so the yelling didn't arrive until the next day. I should have noticed how mild her reaction was, but... I didn't really expect anyone else would care any more than I did, so it fit with my world-view at the time.
An hour or so later I was home, showered, in a change of clothes, cleaning the congealed blood off the knife, and out of my bucket. I ate something that wasn't an unpopular sandwich, watched an episode of something, and passed out for the next 15 hours.
I didn't want to spend the first day of the life I'd been condemned to continue living alone, so whilst drinking my morning coffee the next day I pinged Scott to see if he was up for coming to visit. Whilst waiting for him to arrive I looked over the railing and found that the pavement had been scrubbed, but you could still clearly see the blood spatter I'd left from 30m up, so I snapped a photo as proof. Marcia messaged to see what I was up to that evening, and whether I'd like to come round for dinner and a movie.
Of course I said "yes".
Scott and I went for a walk to get cigarettes, and I took us along the same path I'd walked 27 hours earlier and found that the bench I'd bled all over had been pressure-washed, but was cordoned off with CAUTION tape. Later we sat on the balcony drinking tea talking about nothing in particular. After he left I pottered around and cleaned my flat, then headed over to Marcia's... then back up to the flat to grab something to contribute to the evening, then back towards Marcia's. I'd just arrived and was chatting with Rick when my phone rang with Mother Dear on the screen, so I stepped out to take it,
"Hello Mother Dear," I answered as usual, and the yelling started with her saying she'd received a call from Sandra.
I'd just talked her down from hopping on the next flight, or hiring a snatch-squad to bundle me onto a plane to Perth, and gone back inside when it rang again, this time from Sandra.
"I just just got off the phone with my Mother. Didn't realise you had her number... "
"It took some finding, but I got there.
"Who've you spoken to?"
"Just you," I replied, "and her now. I haven't had it in me yet."
"Right. Well I'm going to, starting with Scott and Marcia."
"No... nonono. Marcia, fine, that explains the invite for tonight, but leave Scott out. I need to have SOMEONE who doesn't make hanging out about That. We hung out this afternoon and it was so nice to just... not, y'know?"
"Too bad, Mister. You're being Interventioned. Anyway, I told him this morning whilst you were asleep."
Checkmate.
"... Oh."
"And did he say anything?"
"... no."
"Well there you go."
Well played Sandra, well played.
She explained how the world was going to be for the next little while; she was going to keep a select group of people in the loop, and that loop would be all around me, and watching. She knew I was Done, and I was out of Continue, and that I'd run out of the energy to keep talking to people, so she was going to; I just needed to keep talking to her. I didn't have the strength to fight a toddler, let alone Sandra, even if I'd wanted to, so I agreed.
What else was I going to do?
Skipping past the bit where, as Henry Rollins once once said to me and Scott (and at least 298 other people) "your choice is fish," Sandra had nailed what I said 900-or-so days beforehand:
"humans have come to thrive specifically because we form communities; a community of one can survive, but for all that I may be singularly competent even I am not so arrogant to believe that I, alone, can thrive."
You can clean up the mess you find yourself in the middle of, but how do you clean it up when you were the mess all along? She knew the simple truth, which is that even when you're a singularly competent as I am, you can't. She's also known me long enough to know that, like her training in the NSW Rural Fire Service, starving me of information is the only way to beat me, and that the only way I'll let anyone anyone help me is if they prove that they can. Even more tho, she proved something I'd come to suspect for a while:
When someone's struggling, the people who care about them gather around to hold them up and help them get through...
.. but when they're actually shattered, the moment the support-team lets go, everything crumbles...
... so what you really need is a girl with sandy-blond curls tucked under the hard-hat they gave her in her Civil Construction Project Management course to climb on top of the scaffold she built around you and coordinate it all...
... because you can't when you're in the middle of it, she knows me well enough to know which of those I was, and cares enough to make damn-fucking sure.
"OK... guess I can't argue with that."
"You could, but you'd lose."
"Too late for that," I replied without any trace of a smile on my face or voice, "just let me know what I need to know."
Marcia had just got home when I came back inside, so I pulled the bottle I'd excavated from the dark recesses of the pantry out of my Go Bag - the last of the Very Old wine I'd been cellaring since last millennium which I'd bought on a Margaret River trip we'd been on whilst still studying for our undergrad degrees. We enjoyed it with some cheese and cold cuts they had in the fridge, then we put on Everything Everywhere All At Once, and when Ke Huy Quan turned to Michelle Yeoh in the alley behind the cinema and said
"So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you"
they were polite enough not to say anything when I sat there and wept.
I was still a bit shaky on my feet on Saturday when I got a call from one of the rando's I'd met sitting at the Arbo lookout inviting me to the pub for beers with him and some mates, but I'd been hanging out there on and off for weeks hoping to make new friends so I hopped on the 'busa and went.
The following Wednesday I had my regular session with Rabeh, so I went and told him about my Coin Toss, and how it had come up Heads. It took some extraordinary body-swerving to avoid getting Sectioned on the spot, and I agreed to book in with a GP to get a Mental Health Care Plan THE NEXT DAY; I'd wondered why that had taken so long, so it was easy to agree to. I called the GP they suggested and booked it in.
The GP was at the far-end of town, but in Canberra that means a half-hour drive so that didn't bother me any. What did was that after taking the stitches out he DID try to Section me, and told me that if I didn't wait for the ambulance to take me away he'd call the Police.
"Look, can I just go to hospital? That way I don't have to come all the way back down here to collect my car?"
He was more interested in his "duty of care" than my logistics, whereas I was quite uninterested in being chased by the cops, so I shrugged and went to have a cigarette whilst I waited. An hour and a half later the day was ticking away and the ambo's were nowhere to be seen.
"Look, I'm just going to go."
"Well I'll be forced to call the Police."
"OK, not going to argue, but... run me through this:
"I leave, you call the cops..."
"Then they'll find you and take you to the hospital."
"But I take MYSELF to hospital... what then?"
"Then... they'll call the Police off, I guess."
"Well you want me to go there so that I'll receive urgent attention, fine, but the day's ticking away and if I wait around here much longer I won't get it until tomorrow at least, so..."
I offered my hand, which he shook, "I'm off. You do what you gotta do."
At ED I checked in, was triaged, and read my book whilst I waited. An hour or so later I heard my name called, and when I approached the young Doctor looked strangely familiar.
"I'm really sorry, but did you have something to do with treating me about a week ago?"
"Yeah, I was the one who stitched up your arm."
"AW SHIT, GEORGE! Sorry! I'd lost a lot of blood, memory's a bit foggy. It's actually enormously cool to get to see you again - what are the chances?"
"Actually, we saw your name on the list and bags'd you because we thought the same thing..."
"By 'we'..." I started as he ushered me through the door to a consultation room, to be greeted by that lovely smile which existed disembodied, Cheshire Cat-style, floating in my memory of the darkened ED 8 days beforehand, "you mean Dr Madison. So good to see again also."
"Likewise Peter, please take a seat."
I apologised to them both for lying through my teeth the week before, acknowledged that they HAD to have known there was no way my injury had been accidental, and explained that I REALLY hadn't wanted to get sentenced to psych-ward again. Then I told them The Real Story.
"I get this guy felt he had a 'duty of care', but... look, I've been to 12B - it's not going to help me move forward. It's a facility for urgent intervention for acute cases, not for actual treatment of underlying problems. If anything it's going to put me back; at best it's just going to be a day or more where I get drugged-numb, and I have to wait until I make enough of the right noises so I can get out again.
"And I will absolutely say anything and everything I need to so I can get out of there.
"And once I've said that, they'll let me go because they want to free the bed up for someone who actually needs it."
"Pretty much," Madison agreed, "the fact that you went for a MHCP shows you're actively trying to make progress. You're calm, and coherent, and I really appreciate that you were up-front with us. It sounds like you've been through hell, but 12B isn't what you need.
"George has been taking notes whilst you were talking, and I think we've got enough to write up a report so you won't get sent back here again. If you DO feel you need to tho..." she started rattling off a list of services I should avail myself of, then saw the blank look in my eyes and rounded off with, "acutally, we'll just add those to the report."
"Thanks.
"But also... thank you for grabbing me off the list. You guys were really nice, and I felt shitty about lying to you last time I was here. It means a lot to get to tell you that; it's a nice little bit of closure to your part in that narrative, y'know?"
"Same - it's not often we get to get that sort of closure either.
"Plus it's George's last day as my Trainee, so this has been a nice way to end it."
"Jeez... seems like we both get to close this off with a couple of neat little stitches," I mused, giving George a wink, "and Gratz, man. Glad I could be part of that for you."
What Madison and George understood. but Rabeh and the GP he sent me to couldn't, was that when I tossed my coin to decide whether I lived or died, it came with a Promise to accept the outcome whichever way it landed.
Heads, I survived and everyone else got what they wanted.
Tails, I didn't and we all lose.
I didn't want either, but I couldn't choose which I wanted less, so rather than having my agency ripped away from me I took the tiny piece of it I had left and chose to give up what remained willingly.
The moment Matt loaded me in the back of the ambulance it landed on Heads, and now it's stuck there, written in scar-tissue in the crook of my elbow; the dot which has turned the line running down my arm into an Exclamation Mark ! when I look at it from my perspective, or a lower-case i from everyone else's. I don't get to toss it again.
Because I made a PROMISE.
And MOTHERFUCKER am I PISSED OFF about that because even now I STILL don't want to fucking be here.
Doing this.
I DO NOT WANT TO KEEP ENDURING THIS.
But I have to, no matter how cruel.
Because I made a fucking Promise to accept it, and remaining Me means I have to.
So I will.
Phase 4 Closing Credits Theme: Bring Me The Horizon - LosT
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