One Sunday night I finally hit the end of myself. I was numb, emptied out, and convinced there was no future left for me. Rowan was safe. My kids didn’t need me. My parents didn’t care. I felt like a ghost still walking around in my own body.
I decided I’d go for a swim in the canal the next day—my birthday—and let that be the last thing I ever did. It felt clean, simple, final. I texted one of the few friends I had left a quick goodbye. No details. Just enough.
He didn’t panic. He just asked me for one favor: stop at a crisis center first, then do whatever I felt I needed to do. It sounded like a small thing, and I was already on the way, so I went.
I walked in like a zombie. No hope, no desire to keep trying, no energy left to fight. A counselor came into the conference room and sat down across from me. My story poured out of me in one long, flood. I told her everything, thinking it would be the last time I ever had to say any of it out loud.
When I finished, I thanked her and started to stand, but she asked me to wait a minute. She stepped out and locked the door behind her. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going anywhere.
A few minutes later she came back with two EMTs and a stretcher. I remember thinking, WTF? Do they really think locking me up is going to fix this? But I had no fight left. The counselor explained gently that I was being transferred to a hospital and that everything was going to be okay. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t argue. It didn’t matter. In my mind, this was only delaying the plan by a week.
I don’t remember the ambulance ride. I don’t remember being admitted. I don’t remember most of the psych ward at all. It was all fog.
Inside, though, I felt a strange sense of safety. No one trying to get me. No one asking for money I didn’t have. No one dragging me back through the wreckage of my past. For the first time in months, I wasn’t being hunted.
Somewhere in that quiet, a tiny spark of fight came back. Maybe hurting myself would only give her the win—and that went against everything in me. When they finally deemed me “safe” and discharged me, I laughed. Safe was not the word I’d use. I was a force of pure stubbornness, and I’d see her in hell before I gave up.
I was excited to get back to my car. I’d been living in it for a month, and it showed. Piles of mail—mostly bills—covered the seats. Notebooks, prescription bottles, and the few belongings I had left were stacked everywhere. I couldn’t throw anything out. When you have almost nothing, even trash feels like something.
It had been brutally hot all week, and in the state I’d been in, I’d forgotten about the food I left inside. The smell hit me first—sweet, rotten, suffocating. Then the fruit flies. Hundreds of them, swarming the container of fruit I’d abandoned on the seat. Half a roast beef sub sat next to it, decomposing into something unholy.
I opened every window and the sunroof, trying not to gag, and drove straight to the car wash. I scrubbed the car until it was habitable again, evicted the bugs, and tried to reclaim the tiny space that had become my home.
When it was finally clean, I parked in one of my usual parking lot, grabbed my blanket and pillow, curled up on the front seat, and slept. It was the only thing I had control over. And for that night, it was enough.
K.
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I'm Still Here. Somehow... 