Page 118 of Sad Girl Hours
it comes to trust you,
it lets you gather it into your arms
and call it yours.
Epilogue
Saffron
There is a girl in my bed. I can feel her heartbeat thumping against my back as she sleeps, arm slung over my waist.
It took some getting used to, being held like this, but now that I am, I don’t ever intend to reverse the process.
It’s been almost two months since I came back up north and I’ve not looked back.Uphas always been my favourite direction so that’s where I’m trying to focus my attention instead. And right now, when I look up, I see stars.
A few days ago, Nell snuck into the house and stuck hundreds of those silly glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling and set up a projector in the middle of the room that swoops galaxies around the walls.
“What is this?” I’d breathed out when she first showed me, spinning round and round, utterly mesmerised.
“You said you’d always wanted the stars,” Nell had said, shrugging like it was no big deal. “Now you’ve got them.Andyou get to feel like you’re in space and remember that you’re part of a whole universe far bigger than the version in your head. An important part. Plus the lamp thing has another setting. You can set a timer on it to turn the galaxy off and change it to a sunrise for you to wake up to. That way, even in winter, you’re still waking up to the sun. I’ve been reading about how things like that can help with SAD. It’s all about tricking that mean ol’ brain of yours into thinking it’s still summer.”
There was a moment when I’d just stood there, looking at the girl that I call mine with stars sliding over her face.
And then I’d tackled her into a hug. Kenneth – because while I didn’t kidnap Nell that night, I think technically I did dognap Kenneth – leapt in on the fray, licking our faces as we rolled around laughing until our stomachs hurt, and we simply lay on the floor instead, looking up at the stars.
My tutor gave me the details of a counsellor who works in the uni, and I’ve been seeing her once a week. She’s called Briony, and she threatens to spray me with a water pistol every time I apologise for something or say something self-critical. She claims it’s to help me recognise when a thought is my own or when it’s a ‘cognitive distortion’, i.e. my depression and general self-critical nature being a bitch, but mostly I think she just enjoys it.
But either way, it is helping to have someone there whose job it is to be burdened (though Briony would squirt me with the gun if I called it that) with my thoughts. As are the antidepressants the GP put me on when I went to see one. She listened, for a good long while, and then she asked me what I wanted to be different.
I’d never been asked that before really. And I was surprised when I had my answer ready.
“I’d like to be able to cope with things a little better. I want to feel everything but I don’t want to feel like it’s sweeping me away. I don’t want to drown in it,” I said.
She nodded and asked me if I’d ever thought about trying medication.
I squirmed a little. “Yes. But I’m not sure. I don’t want to rely on something … artificial. I feel like I should be able to learn to cope without it.”
“Should is an interesting word,” she said. “If I were to use it, I’d say your brainshouldbe able to produce the chemicals and responses it needs to not make you feel like you’re drowning. But, as it doesn’t, there’s nothing wrong or shameful with sourcing them from elsewhere.”
I took the prescription.
Then, two weeks later, I went to the pharmacy. And that night I held the tiny pill in my hand, Nell on a video call taking her medication as well, took a very deep breath and knocked it back with a slug of water.
I waited for something terrible to happen. Nothing did.
In fact, nothing at all happened for quite some time. I still felt the same.
And so I went back to the doctor. We increased t he dosage.
I waited again.
And, in the waiting, I realised I could hear the birds singing. I would wake up and hear them calling to one another, the amber, gold, burnt-umber light fading up the walls of my room from the lamp Nell bought me.
It was a lovely sound. Especially when I realised I could hear it because I wasn’t waking up with my head already screaming at me.
Don’t get me wrong – it didn’t all vanish. The bad days still happened – happen even. But the talking, the meds, trying not to feel the tugging of shame and not hiding the bad days from the people around me … it all helps them feel like they don’t last quite so long.
I told my parents all of this, in a letter. I sent my parents an actual handwritten letter, in the post. It felt easier to write down what I wanted to say on paper and not have to worry about getting an immediate response.
