I cry so hard I wake him up.
***
The past months have been, well, shitty.
I discovered that there's no easy way to tell your friends, your fiance, your doctors, that you've been thinking you'd be better off dead.
No, maybe not so much dead, but wishing that you could magically stop existing. Just, *poof!* be gone from the world and its revolving door of bullshit.
Anyway, it's a hard thing to say.
I didn't tell my friends and fiance because I thought it was a passing thing. I didn't say anything to my therapist because I didn't want to be committed. And it wasn't like I was planning to harm myself. I just wanted to stop.
Being not-quite-suicidal is a weird place to be It was weird when I was isolated, living alone in the North Country, and it's even weirder now that I share my daily life with another person I love deeply. Try to imagine spending 3/4 of every day thinking "I would rather not be than be what I am right now." and then spending the remaining 1/4 of the day thinking "I can't wait to meet my new niece" or "Gosh, our first dance at our wedding is going to be great." Mix in having obsessive-compulsive disorder and a total inability to deal with conflict in any capacity and you're off to the races.
Eventually I say it out loud to to the fiance and the best friend. They send me off to the shrink with directions to be honest. I didn't end up institutionalized. Instead I got a lot of cheery "You're doing great! Everything will be okay! Everyone loves you and you're well supported!" I know it's her job, but Jesus Christ, lady. I'm drowning here, I don't need compliments on how well I'm doing the dead man's float. I need a fucking life preserver. The doctor is more helpful, she changes my medication, promises me that this time we've probably zeroed in on a better combination of of benzos, SSRIs, and sleeping pills. And God bless her, she does it without puking rainbows.
More helpful than therapists puking rainbows or doctors with prescription pads, the fiance is there at the end of every day. He's the one who sits and holds my hand during panic attacks and helps me slow down my breathing. He makes me dinner and takes me to my therapy appointments and snuggles me to sleep.
I love him so much, but right now it's hard to tell him. Trying to muster the the energy to get into the shower is more than I can handle most days , being an empathetic, loving partner sometimes feels impossible. So I do what I can. I schedule massages for him. I meet him at the door with a glass of whiskey when he gets home from work. I do my best to get up off the couch and have an actual conversation.
And I hope that it's enough.
***
Sometime during the winter I sit with he the fiance while he plays my favorite videogame. It's a narrative RPG about a relationship. The main character's wife has a mental illness and has a hard time talking to her husband. She loves him deeply, but because of her mental illness she doesn't know how to tell him. Because she can't figure out how to tell him that she loves him, she folds him hundreds of origami rabbits over the course of their complicated relationship to say "I love you."
He doesn't understand.
The fiance and I play the ending together (me couch co-oping) and when I burst into tears at the end, he wraps his arms around me and lets me cry. I want to say that I wanted him to play the game not only because it's beautiful but because I feel like the woman in the story, and I need him to know that I love him, even when I don't know how to say it.
But even over the winter, things are bumpy. There are panic attacks and depression. I'm still making it to the shower, but sleep most of the time I'm not at work. And I discover that I can't tell him what I'm feeling even when the moment is exactly what I've been waiting for.
When I wake to find the white origami rabbit next to our bed somewhere outside of Madison. Wisconsin, I realize that I don't have to say it. He learned to understand my own white rabbits a long time ago
