That older girl I’d known in Japan, though, Taylor Stevens, was writing a book, a thriller. And she asked me to look at it. We kept talking. And she kept telling me I should write. I kept telling her I do write. She said I should write about my life. I said she was crazy. No one knows about that.

I bought her book when it came out. And there, on the back of it, “raised in the Children of God.” You’d have thought I was a closet case buying lesbian erotica the way I carried that book through the Crystal City Barnes & Noble. I had to buy three other books just so it wouldn’t stand out. Someone might see it and think, You know, I bet that there is a cult member too. Thank god I was a smoker.

I was also a fucking closet case, just not about the lesbian thing. Like I said, you’d think I’d have known. And like any closet case, I was just swimming in the putrid shame of it. Seeing someone live openly, god, I was so fucking envious. There were plenty of others who were out, so to speak. Many never bothered with the closeted stage, didn’t give a shit who knew, showed up for interviews, participated in documentaries, wrote essays and books. I admired the hell out of them. I was fucking in awe. And as sure as a closet case evangelical miserably married to a beard she fucks once a year watching the Dykes on Bikes ride by in the Pride parade, I was fucking disgusted. I mean, god. If you guys could just act normal for one goddamn minute. I’ll stay in my closet, thank you very much.

   I was going to be normal. I had a head start; I got out of the Family earlier than most of those weirdos. I could be a Systemite. Goddamnit.

* * *

—

By the time I was thirty-five, I’d scraped and saved and used my veteran’s loan to buy a fixer-upper in one of the suburbs of D.C. that Realtors refer to as “up-and-coming,” and my neighbors described as “might want to stay away from windows on New Year’s Eve.” I rescued dogs and friends who fought for space on my couch. I made friends with the first people who were nice to me. I tried like hell to care about football and video games and zombie movies. I watched football. And zombie movies. I mean I had friends who were motherfucking Republicans who prayed before meals. One of them was a goddamn cop. I held onto a job I hated. I even got promoted a couple times because that’s what a good Systemite does.

Turning off my mind turned out to be a useful skill as an adult out in the world. A more useful thing would have been to live a life I didn’t want to shut off. I was still struggling in that department. It was fine. I could live in my head. I could read books about the lives I wasn’t living. I always had. I would be happy. I would be normal. I’d been blotting out my past, clinging to anything else to define me—jobs, hobbies, friends and relationships. It’ll work all right for a while, until you lose something. I mean your identity is glued together with scraps of meaningless pop culture, and your supposed friends only like you when you’re funny at parties, and you’re so fucking broken inside you’re a fucking Jell-O mold held together with duct tape. One leak and it’s all coming out.

   The leak in this case was a shitty breakup. She was hot and loved books and hated scary movies and loved Patty Griffin and wanted to buy a house with me and have a baby and make a family. And it was all a lie. It’s not a great story, really. You’re missing nothing here. She’s the same as me. She does what she needs to survive. So she agreed with me on everything. We both disappeared. And by the time it ended six months later (lesbians do move fast), there really wasn’t much left of me.

Jay showed up one day to find me sitting in the dark, gnawing on a raw zucchini from the garden I’d so carefully planted that spring, now overgrown with weeds. The only reason I was eating anything at all was some deep-seated lizard instinct to survive. The lizard was fucking exhausted.

The fundamental misunderstanding of depression is the idea that the suicidal want to die. I didn’t want to die. But some misfire in my brain treats existential pain like a dog reacts to vomiting: Fuck it. I’m gonna dig a hole to die in. Even on a good day, my brain will point out a few easy ways out: Take a hard left in front of that truck. It’ll be over before you feel it. But when it’s dark, when I’m hopeless, I’m just white-knuckling my way through the nights for no reason but instinct.

   Jay opened the curtains and started collecting the bottles and cans off the coffee table, muttering something like, “Girl. Smells like a dang Wu-Tang Clan concert in here.” I might’ve been going a little heavy on the weed. I told my dog to bite him. My dog refused to bite his favorite uncle.

We brought my dog to the park and sat on a bench smoking while the dogs checked that every dog did indeed have a butt hole. I told Jay I wanted to die. Then I told him I didn’t, not really. I wanted to live. I just couldn’t find a reason.

Jay said, “Honey, you just need to get laid.” (He’s a lot better at making me laugh than he is at advice.) But he started telling me about a trip he and his boyfriend were taking. And I thought, I could go back to Europe. I must’ve said it out loud because Jay lit up. I tried to crush the idea with, “I can’t afford it.” And he said, “Put it on a credit card. So what. You’re gonna die anyway, right?” He had a point.

I bought tickets to Europe as a bargain with myself: Go back, and if you still want to die afterwards…I figured I could mitigate the damage if I slept at campgrounds and hostels. Then I thought, holy shit, I actually know people in Europe.