I Am Curious (Thirty)

June 15

I woke up this morning.

I generally do, but I guess I wasn’t supposed to this time. Last night I drank wine and slipped deeper and deeper into depression and ultimately wrote that last entry. At least I assume I did. It’s in my handwriting, and it’s consistent with the mood I was in. I do remember having some of those thoughts, whatever they might have meant at the time. I just don’t remember writing them down.

Nor do I remember taking the pills, but it’s evident that I did. I suppose I must have thought I was taking sleeping pills. I don’t own any sleeping pills, and after last night I think it might be a good idea never to own any sleeping pills. I had never considered myself as potentially suicidal before. I thought about suicide the way anyone with a sense of reality is apt to think about it, but it was like Mark Twain and the weather, I thought about it but never did anything about it. (Like Mark Twain and the weather, Gracie?) But last night I was not only stupid enough to try to kill myself but stupid enough to go about it wrong. Judging from the empty bottles on the bathroom floor, I must have swallowed about fifty aspirins and a dozen antidepressants. I have no idea what the cumulative effect of antidepressants might be — I suppose they could just sort of lift you off into euphoria or something. Except they aren’t exhilarants (if there is such a word, I bet that’s not how you spell it) but just antidepressants that neutralize a bad mood.

Well, none of this matters. Judging from the little pill-studded pool of vomit by the side of the bed, which I will have to feel much better than I do now before I can bring myself to clean up, I might as well have taken sleeping pills or even cyanide for the amount of time it stayed with me.

So you have to call it a bona fide suicide attempt, but whether or not you call it a close shave I do not know.

I haven’t been writing in this book much lately. I haven’t even been thinking much lately. I see Eric, I see Susan, I see the two of them together.

I think I’m coming unglued. I can be flip here today, I have to be flip here today, if I am less than flip here today I might try walking out the fucking window (or fucking out the walking window? Heh-heh, heh-heh), but I do not feel flip. What I feel is sick, awfully sick, sicker than I remember ever having felt before. Sick in mind and body. A sick mind in a sick body.

I have to go out and have something to eat. I absolutely have to eat. And the thought of food turns my stomach. Absolutely turns my stomach. There’s a word for this but I don’t remember what it is. A medically recognized condition in which the poor schmuck gets nauseous at the thought of food and simply doesn’t eat, getting thinner and thinner until he or she either recovers or dies, I think.

Those would seem to be the two logical alternatives.

I wonder if I have it, whatever the hell it’s called. I don’t suppose I can get very much thinner without dying. Except that’s not exactly true. Maybe it’s all in my mind, the way I perceive myself. I don’t think I’m really as scrawny as I think I am.

I will go out now and have a big plate of spaghetti (ugh!) and somehow eat it all. Well, maybe not spaghetti, now that I think about it. But something, somewhere.

Everything will be all right, she said bravely.