When The Lights Go Down

The thrum of New York City, the uncontainable nature of depression, and how using my body saved me.

From the corner of the bar at Bowery Ballroom, Ted* gazed nervously at me through his black-frame glasses, the kind all hipsters wore in the mid-aughts. I smiled back, hoping to put him at ease, and sipped my whiskey on the rocks. I was put off by nervous men, but Ted was nice. Then he pulled his craft beer to his lips, missed his mouth, and sent fizzing gold dribble down the front of this plaid flannel button-down. His cheeks illuminated like a red light.

I met someone else a few days later. When Ted called to ask me out again, I said, “I know this sounds like an excuse. It sounds like I’m avoiding you, but I’m not. I actually met someone and we’re dating.” I thought, for sure, that he hated me. But eventually that Someone Else and I broke up, I bumped into Ted at a party, and shockingly, he asked me out again.

In the years between my first and second dates with Ted, I’d casually dated a rakishly handsome New York Times reporter with a recovering alcohol and pill addiction; started sleeping with a friend—and then his friend—which landed me into the months-long love triangle that, unsurprisingly, blew up in my face.

By the time I ran into Ted at a mutual friend’s birthday party, I desperately wanted to like him, this polite, monogamous-seeming, stable-job-having person with a basic knowledge of pop culture and objectively good taste. His timidity seemed light-years away that night, and I remembered what I liked about him in the first place: his Clarke Kent sensibility, a bashful smile and neatly coiffed brown hair. I was 26—which is young, but ancient for an unmarried woman, according to middle-aged women in the south—and I could barely tolerate my mother’s roundabout ways of asking when I might open the dating pool to some nice, southern boys. “Mom, he lives in Nashville,” I’d say. “Well they have a great airport!” she’d respond.

Ted took me to a cocktail bar on avenues Third and B, where Edison bulbs and tea candles cast a warm glow across mercury glass mirrors. The hostess led us to a snug, wooden booth, where I sat facing the door, Ted, and the bartender, a stocky guy wearing a full-length server’s apron. He had a small gap in his front teeth and coffee-colored eyes. I studied him making our cocktails. I liked the way he rocked the shaker violently above his shoulder.

Ted and I picked up as though we were right back at Bowery Ballroom. He told me about his work in marketing and I told him about mine as a fashion copywriter. What I didn’t tell him about was the achy numbness that had enveloped me. The Lidocaine river that sectioned off into corridors of my body, tugging my shoulders towards the earth, weighing down the corners of my mouth, and pulling at my eyelids like a shade. That, too, was new since our last date three years ago.

I wasn’t sure how to explain that there was this voice that was always daring me to upend the numbness, to touch the hot, red eye of a stove. Don’t you want to feel alive? it asked me.

I ignored it, because being young in New York City can be like that. Maybe it’s the kinetic energy of all those strangers, the quickly bustling bodies in such close proximity. Like rubbing sticks of wood together. Someone is bound to go up in flames. While The City doesn’t ask or even command, per se, it has a way of facilitating pre-existing desires––of opening the pool of possibility. Prodding, whispering, suggesting that maybe tonight is the night to fuck a stranger. To stay up all night and break the emergency exit on your roof to watch the sun rise. New York City will gladly help you shed your skins. It simply asks you to bring the version of yourself who is no one; a welcoming host, the emptier the better.

I sat upright on my side of the booth, careful to keep my elbows off the table, to laugh an appropriate amount at Ted’s jokes. When he spoke, I scanned his words and gestures. Maybe someday I could fall in love with him, I thought. But all night I found myself floating away on the soft drone of his voice, drifting my gaze toward the bartender and his shaker. That’s when it washed over me. The knowing-it’s-wrong-but-you-do-it-anyway feeling. When you’re just dying for something to happen, anything, to distract you from that Lidocaine river. I felt it the first night I ceremoniously got myself into the love triangle, and each time afterward. Every time I dared to touch the hot, red eye of a stove.

After a drink or two, Ted went to the restroom. I motioned to our server.

“Who’s the bartender?” I asked.

He turned towards the sturdy, handcrafted bar and the guy with the coffee-brown eyes.

“That’s Brandon,” he smiled.

“If I write him a note, can you get it to him?” I asked.

I scribbled my name and number onto a napkin and discreetly slipped it to my server, who then passed it to Brandon. His coffee-colored eyes met mine on my way out the door.

Ted walked me to my apartment a few blocks away. Standing at my door on the corner of 1st Street and 1st Avenue, I wanted him to be anything other than polite, quiet, and gentle. I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him like a rag doll. More than that, I wanted him to shove me against the wall, press his weight on me, smack my hips, curl his fingers in my hair and pull the ends, squeeze the flesh of my arm, bite my ear, sigh into the crook of my neck. I wanted to start a fight without the consequences. Instead we kissed sweetly and he went home.

*

At first I was foggy, out of sorts. Nothing to be alarmed about, I assured myself. Before long I was erupting in tears at my desk. I stopped answering phone calls. I went out with friends to drink excessively, even on Tuesdays, so I was able to pretend, at least for the night, that I wasn’t being pulled into the abyss by unmarked hands.

When sleep was no cure, I joined a fancy gym. Endorphins that will help. Each day after leaving my office in Midtown East, surrounded by all those other stressed-out, overworked heartbeats, I straddled the treadmill and exhaled as I searched for mental fortitude. I’d never run after anything in my life. Except men.

I started with small, attainable goals: Run for 60 seconds and walk for 29 minutes. The next day, I’d run for 90 seconds. And so on. Running hurt my body; my legs were heavy and my feet banged awkwardly against the belt. What do I do with my hands? Is my butt supposed to bounce like that? But there was a hole rapidly forming somewhere inside me, and physical pain, I thought, was the only solution to overshadow this growing ache.

Then came summer. New York City blossomed into a garden of bare shoulders and exposed collarbones, girls with glistening foreheads, laughing in cotton frocks. Heat and sweat were markers of my Mississippi childhood. I used to sit in the grass picking small, white, bulbous weeds and string them into flower crowns; ride my bike until I was breathless; and stretch out on my hot concrete driveway to gaze at a pale sky, sweating all the while, and happily, beneath an oppressive sun. It would be good to get outside, I told myself. So I left my fancy gym and started running along Houston St. to the East River Parkway, below the Manhattan Bridge, and sometimes all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge and back.

One of the things people love about running is that it offers—or forces, depending on how you look at it—a moment of peace to be alone with your thoughts. I didn’t want much to do with my thoughts, but I kept on because the prospect of failure was clipping at my heels in every aspect of my life. I was showing up to work late, scrambling to my cubicle with unwashed hair and smudged eyeliner from the night before. I skirted by in my friendships, holding them together with a salve of alcohol and the camaraderie that comes with mid-20s dysfunction. Aside from Ted, men avoided me; they could smell my sadness from a mile away. I answered only enough phone calls to convince my family and friends that everything was fine. To give up running would cue my descent into submission. 

Since my depression came with no explanation, there was no reason for me to believe it would go away anytime soon. Running was a last-ditch to keep my head above water. So I inhaled through my nose and out my mouth. I jogged to the beat of music in my ear, the thud of basketballs on courts and fences, horns honking on the FDR, the whole cacophony of New York City in time with my breath. I admired the muscular concrete and smooth beams of steel beneath the bridges I passed, the reckless water of the East River sloshing against each base. I spoke with God, or Whoever Is Out There. I didn’t know how to make sense of my sadness, one that sprung headstrong like a weed from concrete, but I felt the need to thank Someone for what I did have—breath, body, brain, limbs. Maybe I could be stronger, at least physically.

*

A few days after I passed my number along to Brandon, he called. He didn’t ask me out. In fact, we never went on a date. He suggested I come into the bar again. I did, at first with a friend. I kept going, and he kept making me drinks until his shift ended. Soon enough, I was sharing a cab to his apartment on Hewes Street, just over the Williamsburg Bridge, where a clear view of the Statue of Liberty never ceases to remind you that anything can happen in New York City.

One night during his shift, I met him downstairs in the wine cellar. Maybe I’d come down to use the restroom, or he asked me to join him. It seemed innocent enough, how we ended up chatting in the cold, dim basement as he looked for dusty bottles to restock. He found them, then set them down. We continued to talk quietly, about what I’ll never remember, but the conversation ended when my back hit the exposed brick wall.

Everything else unraveled in seconds. Pants tugged and unbuttoned, cast down to ankles, icy hands on warm flesh, the heat of him and the cool cellar draft against my thighs. It was quick, unfinished, both of us realizing that we’d been downstairs far longer than  anticipated, and feared getting caught by an antsy co-worker in need of Beaujolais. The moisture in the room dropped as quickly as it had risen. Flushed, we pulled up our pants and went back upstairs to the low-lit bar with its warm candles and tightly packed bodies.

After that, we rolled ourselves into a steady rhythm: Whiskey, sex, see you in a few days, on repeat for weeks. We talked about work, and I don’t know what else. It was all noise. He didn’t know me; I barely knew me. In the darkness of his bedroom, I’d never been so relieved to be no one. When I shut my eyes and lowered myself into our song of breath and lips and skin, I could mute the constant hum of a depression that had grown, now fully oppressive. For the first time all day, sometimes all month, I felt something. Like two sticks rubbed together to make fire.

I learned to live with my depression like the scar of a deep gash visible only to me when naked. I kept jogging. I met my deadlines at work and nothing more. I drank enough to laugh with ease, but not so much that I’d leave the bar with wet cheeks. I even continued to go on dates with Ted.

It may sound cruel that I kept letting Superman’s alter ego buy me tequila drinks, but I was throwing spaghetti at walls in search of why I couldn’t seem to cure this all-encompassing sadness. I’d begun to believe it would be that way from there on out. I had no reason not to.

This is just me now! A sad sack of a human, floating from place to place, feigning smiles, writing copy about distressed denim with contrast stitching by day, and at night, swaying with crowds at concerts as if I belonged there. I’d come to terms with sending a ghost of a person into the world in place of a former, red-blooded American blonde, and no one seemed to notice. At least Ted didn’t ask too many questions.

In addition to living with my well-acquainted depression, I’d begun having panic attacks during rush hour. New York City really likes to kick you while you’re down.

It was something about all those quickly bustling bodies sprinting up and down stairs, weaving through tunnels and trains in a dance that no one knows, but somehow anticipates. My episodes always began the same way: a tight chest, feeling like imaginary hands were stacking thick red bricks on my sternum. My heartbeat would quicken, fast at first, then drum into a heavy pulse, like those invisible hands were rhythmically pressing down on the bricks, threatening to collapse my lungs.

I managed by playing the same Four Tet song on repeat. At the first sign of tightness in my chest—it had grown too familiar—my thumb would finagle the iPod in my pocket, rolling it over the circular pad until it clicked into the steady rhythm that would pipe into my ear buds, and, like an injection, quiet my panic attack. My last episode sent me sprinting up the stairs of the G train station, gasping for air and holding my chest, as if somehow it would breathe air back into my lungs, while tears spewed through my mascara. My train came and went below ground. So I’d breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth as the whole of New York City shuffled around me, this song the only barrier between a nervous breakdown and me.

By August, my mother caught on to me. Perhaps the lethargy in my voice finally cracked open and gave me away, making a sound only a mother can recognize. Like the way only animals hear certain frequencies.

“Will you please go talk to someone?” she begged over the phone. I was standing on a street corner in Midtown after work, clutching the phone to one ear, plugging the other with my finger to block out the hum of Manhattan. “They can give you something.” 

I sat quietly on the other end of the line. I wanted help, but the thought of re-learning how to live like my former self sounded exhausting. Mostly though, I felt attempts to correct it would be futile. Depression is uncontainable.

“I’ll think about it,” I said. 

“What about Lexapro?” she said, “That helps with anxiety and depression.” 

For a moment I caught a glimpse of what it might feel like to be happy again, or more importantly, to feel the absence of this defeating weight. I Googled the drug. One of its primary side effects was a loss of sex drive. No way. 

On a late-summer beach trip with my family to the North Carolina coast, I spent a lot of time walking alone on the thick, wet sand. Mom found me sitting alone in a foldout chair staring at the frothy waves that rolled up to lick the shore and recede again. She set her foldout chair next to mine. A balmy southern breeze blew across our faces, sending the loose ends of my hair dancing across my cheeks and into my mouth.

“I really wish you’d get something,” she said into the wind. “There’s nothing wrong with it. Gosh, it will just help with the balance.” I knew she was waiting for me to say something, to explain why I refused medication, to give her something more to work with. But I didn’t want to  tell her about Brandon, Ted, the love triangle, and any of my other poor decisions, so instead I just told her about the depression.

“It feels like I’m inside a wooden box,” I said. “From the outside it just looks like a box. I can see it, like I’m outside of myself, staring down at it. But I’m inside, screaming at the top of my lungs, banging my fists against all four walls, kicking, and begging to be let out. But no one hears me; my cries stop at the walls.” A couple of fat tears rolled over my lower eye line. “It’s exhausting,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”

Mom sat with me in silence while the wind blew a misty layer of sand along the edge of our toes.

*

I finally ended it with Ted. 

“I know this sounds like a cliché,” I said, wincing at how vapid I must have sounded this second breakup around. “It’s not you,” I said. “It’s me.” He definitely hates me. 

About a month later, when Brandon’s texts became more infrequent, around the time he stopped inviting me back to his place after hours, I let it die. He was only of use to me for one thing.

One summer night, a friend invited me to a concert in Park Slope. It was a rare perfect New York City evening, a setting sun having left warmth in its wake with a breeze so gentle and consistent it could have rocked us to sleep. From the band shell in the park, drums and strings and tremolo rang through a clear blue sky and fell onto the ears of thousands of New Yorkers. We swayed and chattered, our beer cans only having just begun to perspire. 

Early on, the band played a song from their new record, released just days prior. At the chorus, the entire audience lit up like a karaoke bar. They knew all the words already. How it must have felt, I thought, to have only just released your art into the world and have your fans, days later, memorize your work like a daily affirmation. The blue sky began to turn into a mood ring hue, first pink, then purple, and finally to a blue velvet.

The crowd repeated the chorus again and again, growing louder with each refrain, gaining volume inside my ears and then my chest. It was expansive and tangible and it dislodged something in me, swaying amid all those bodies in such close proximity, the whole cacophony of New York City alive and in time with my breath. I looked down at my feet and bit my lip. It was too much to explain to my friend; too much to explain that for the first time in nearly a year, I felt like someone again. For just a moment, I felt like me.

*Some names have been changed.