“The stakes were no longer staying together or breaking up, but death or litigation, with death as the best-case scenario. I wasn’t suicidal at all, but by establishing death as a promise, the endpoint of the journey, I felt tethered to it”
Photo: J.V. Aranda We are out late. Happy hour at a new wine bar turns into cocktails with dinner turns into daiquiris for dessert at a tiki bar downtown. It is suddenly after midnight, the side street so dark and still that it feels grayscale.“Oh, man,” I reply. “This is really awkward. Did you think this was a date?” I rock back on my heels and wince.
We started this joke around the time we got engaged. He asked when I was free to get my ring finger sized and I made fun of him for having a crush on me. For the first time, poking fun at commitment felt safe, something solid that could withstand a little contact instead of a raw nerve. We’d been together for six years, sharing an apartment for three, and having the big conversations around our future for one marathon training cycle.
He proposed on a bright December Sunday, luring me out of bed with the promise of sunset views on the water and french fries. I cried and a few stoned MIT students took our picture. Everyone kept asking me if I suddenly I felt different. My friends who had gotten married under similar circumstances said that basically everything was the same, that a wedding was just a party and a piece of paper if you were already sharing everything. I couldn’t tell if I felt different.
Anxiety started bleeding into my days, crystallizing into deathscapes. I felt like I was a breath away from having my spine broken by a car while crossing the street, getting sliced in half by a sheet of ice released from a high rise, or being blown off the Mass Ave bridge by a blizzard gust during a run. The ache started to feel more like a pull, gravity stretching my sternum toward the great beyond.
I feel the sensation whenever I feel like death might be on the table. Driving on bridges that stretch across bodies of water, I feel the urge to cut a hard right and careen into the bay. At the top of skyscrapers, I hug the brick at the core of the building, not for fear of heights but because I want to scale the safety rails and drop.
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