The Grand Untethering

I know the silence of the Anglerfish

I am taking my usual walking route around a sizeable NYC block. It takes me around 40 minutes to an hour to walk outside my mother's Bushwick home, up the equivalent of about three city blocks into that barely visible boundary between Brooklyn and Queens into Ridgewood. I go around the track-like perimeter, first turning left onto the cemetery side off Woodward Avenue. The Linden Hill Cemetery has two sides like Frank Ocean on "Chanel."

One large, seemingly well-maintained lush cemetery. Gargantuan tombs and mausoleums are in the back towards the back entrance, labeled "Jewish Cemetery" on the back. Smaller individual headstones in tidy rows on the other side labeled "Methodist ."I often pretend my grandma is buried here, not at Cypress Hills - another nearby cemetery. I pretend she already has a headstone, and it's not still "in process," as my mom replies when I ask. Hell, sometimes I set her up in those big house-like crypts on the Jewish side. I don't know how much those cost - I'm assuming a pretty penny. I visit her with every loop, sometimes pausing whatever long-form true crime podcast I consume fervently.

I'm sure I look pretty normal, maybe even healthy, as I loop around on my speedwalk. My large over-ear headphones shield me partially from the world. I am deeply dissociated and floating to the tune of some well-marketed, highly researched, and curated years-long investigation on some horrendous miscarriage of justice, a senseless murder of a very normal, mostly unknown woman, likely indigenous, living in obscure parts of Alaska and Canada. Right now, we're in season 2 of Bone Valley. Murder a-la Florida this time!

I have been lectured on intake vs outtake. I have pondered why I can't watch "real" TV like White Lotus. Why I can't sit down to binge a show like The Bear. I have not yet seen Sinners. Yet, I have easily consumed hours-long audio-based podcasts on destruction, grief, and pain. I want to hear it; if a singular action can destroy someone's world, should we not at least sit with it? In some ways, it gently forces me down to earth - reignites my awareness that I am part of this messy web of humanity. Exploring all these stories has been a very dark and macabre way of practicing optimism. I rate five stars and hold these stories, these people, with me like they hold me on this surrealist walks.

For many weeks now, I have added a new symptom to my rotation. Intrusive fear-based thinking whenever outdoors. I feel a spotlight-like focus on the top back part of my skull. I fear that, at any moment, someone will hit me in the head with a cartoon anvil falling from a skyscraper. Some contractor returning from a Home Depot trip will impale me with a large metallic stick poking out from the back of their truck bed! Picture scenes of a large juicy watermelon being crushed in different ways with different crunchy sounds. I have anxiety over crossing the street. An argument on the street makes me grab my phone, type in 911, and wait at the ready. Groups of loud, boisterous NYC teens usher me into the next subway cart.

No, this will escalate, and I want to be nowhere near it when it does. I'm aware of this new fragility. I feel it when I walk outside and when I avert my eyes from yet another violent action-filled flick my mom is watching. I dare not mention it too much. "You can be sad and anxious, but now you're over the cuckoo's nest," I can imagine someone saying.

I have dealt with a feeling of not belonging and an inability to understand myself throughout my life. Now, back in the city I grew up in, I think of all the times I quietly peered over the edge on raised subway platforms. I fantasized about ending my life as a teen on these high perches, these ledges, these heights. I didn't - a common New Yorker hates someone who throws themselves onto the tracks, delaying a morning commute on the 5 and 6 lines. When home, I wrote sad journal entries on my burner blog, The Fortified Bell Jar. Each degree conferred upon me was one earned amidst crying spells and loneliness. At the same time, I've always been told in some way that if I grow another layer of spine, I can finally stop making a big deal of this.

I am not necessarily suffering from my depression. It's all relative - I spend less time than you'd think crying - and more time feeling behind 10 layers of cellophane and wondering if my misery will catch onto others. I wonder if I can connect or relate to others anymore. Will I want to fuck a guy again? Can I make a friend and keep them? I feel uncomfortable within my body. I wonder if they can see what's behind it and if they are brave enough to bring it open like the woman I met in Costa Rica who told me I'd "given up" after being around me for no more than 2 hours.

I am untethered. A solo astronaut floating in deep space, semi-connected to humanity but acutely alone and islanded in the dark. Sometimes, I call it the cave. In my book, it's being lost in the deep ocean without land to wave to. Things happen in this space. Things you cannot explain. Hot flash-like symptoms break me out regularly into sweat, a pervasive exhaustion I first became acquainted with in undergrad despite abundant sleep. Intrusive thoughts, catatonia, desolation. Depression is the surface. Isolation is the river. Desolation is the river bed. I am an anglerfish in the deep Pacific - cold and dark.

Later today, I will go to an appointment at Mt Sinai. I hope to look at my brain and see the darkness, the lack of activity, and the lack of conversation between region and code. It is icy and dark, like where I live. I fantasize about a scene where a doctor puts a film onto the lightbox and states, "Yes, this is real and very bad."

I will stand on the street with my white sign like the white guy in memes throughout the pandemic, bearing the sobering words "my pain is real" and "the pain of my sisters rings loud." The many black women who did die from pain not deemed real and the continued denial that we are uncared for in the deepest of ways, including that of the heart, mind, and spirit.

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