The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.

In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.

            Mine’s bigger than yours.

Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.

Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy.  My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”

Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.

My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?

Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.

A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.

A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.

Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.

My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.

A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun.             My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.

Today I have had enough.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.

I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.

My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.

I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.

Thank God I don’t own a gun.

The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.

In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.

            Mine’s bigger than yours.

Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.

Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy.  My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”

Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.

My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?

Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.

A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.

A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.

Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.

My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.

A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun.             My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.

Today I have had enough.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.

I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.

My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.

I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.

Thank God I don’t own a gun.

The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.

In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.

            Mine’s bigger than yours.

Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.

Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy.  My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”

Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.

My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?

Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.

A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.

A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.

Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.

My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.

A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun.             My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.

Today I have had enough.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.

I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.

My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.

I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.

Thank God I don’t own a gun.

The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.

In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.

            Mine’s bigger than yours.

Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.

Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy.  My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”

Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.

My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?

Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.

A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.

A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.

Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.

My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.

A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun.             My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.

Today I have had enough.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.

I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.

My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.

I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.

Thank God I don’t own a gun.

The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.

In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.

            Mine’s bigger than yours.

Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.

Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy.  My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”

Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.

My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?

Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.

A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.

A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.

Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.

My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.

A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun.             My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.

Today I have had enough.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.

I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.

My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.

I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.

Thank God I don’t own a gun.

The month of June from any old calendar in a spider webbed, abandoned garage. A picture of a woman whose breasts spill around two tiny triangles of diaphanous fabric. You know the one I mean. Her nipples punctuate the centers of each. She straddles a Harley-Davidson and ogles the barrel of a gun, its size distorted by the photographer.

In Starbucks a man fumbles for his wallet, pulls back his jacket, and exposes a carved mahogany gun handle. A man in low-riding jeans shops at Walmart, bends over to grab a fifty-pound bag of dog food. His t-shirt pulls up. The handle of a Smith and Wesson beckons from his butt crack.

            Mine’s bigger than yours.

Some people see guns as phallic symbols, some merely as weapons of defense. I carry my own weapon of defense, a silent partner, a barrier that protects me from encroachment by the intolerable. Depression. Religion promises the Savior walks a path with the faithful. My intimate friend, depression, rides within. I slide back the panel to the hidden compartment in my bed’s headboard and sequester my gun there. I want easy access to the tool of my exit strategy.

Although I don’t remember it, I suspect I experienced depression the first year of my life, the year I learned I wasn’t worthy.  My mother told me a story. “You learned to swim in urine because I was too tired to change your diaper. You never cried.”

Not worthy of a clean diaper. Praised for holding back my tears. Learning to survive.

My Mom in post-partum depression, I diagnosed in fifty or so years of retrospect and after forty years a nurse. A gene passed on to a daughter? A mother’s gift?

Days on my bike. Hours away from home. I found a steep hill at the middle school and pushed off. My feet hovered above the brake pedals. I imagined my metallic midnight-blue bike a flying unicorn. With my stringy blond hair whipping in the wind, I sped down the bumpy, stone encrusted hill. My gaping mouth shrieked in glee and fear. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fly and land in a place where if my mother looked at me, she really saw me, and maybe even liked me. A place where I liked me.

A diary of lasts and leasts. The last girl in my class to get her period. The girl with the flattest chest. The girl with the fewest choices for dress shoes to wear to the sixth-grade dance because of her shoe size. Adolescence ravaged my face. Loneliness gutted me, either with, or because of, the distorted world view of an introvert, a label I didn’t understand at the time. I zeroed in on every dead bird in a storm drain after a heavy rain, every daffodil flattened by tornadic winds.

A taste of love. My first true love I lost to miles and time and adversarial politics. I learned people break-up for reasons more powerful than the comfortable familiarity of a friend who fumbles through a first kiss and heated pleasure with no shame. The next love, an insecure adolescent, lost on some now-well-named spectrum, who dropped out of his collegiate rat race, showed up on my doorstep, the date of his last bath unknown, his face familiar through the thick lenses of Lennon-like wire-framed glasses. After I encouraged him to shower, we explored each other. His mouth left a purple bruise on my breast, and he took off. He wrote an acerbic good-bye, rife with blame, on pieces of toilet paper. Thankfully unused.

Then the university. Miles away from home. People with whom I had no connection. I drank until I cried in chest-heaving sobs. My sorrow, so powerful, convinced my roommate I had been raped. Not my body, just my heart. I didn’t sleep. Studied all night. Took a Spanish final exam, answered all the questions in French. Hungover in two foreign tongues. I need a gun.

My career grounded me, then ground me down. A caretaker, a professional nurse. A person in control challenged by the exponential changes occurring in technology and in the role designated as the “handmaiden of the physicians.” Responsibility without rights. Accolades for successes and the demonstration of newly acquired knowledge; blame for failures that meant loss of life. Sleepless nights. What did I do wrong? Could I have done more? Retracing every drug administered, every vital sign documented, every word spoken to the patients, to the families, to the doctors, to the bleary-eyed face in the mirror. I need a gun.

A son. The greatest joy. I promised I would never make him feel unworthy. Even when I went to visit him in jail. On Mother’s Day. On his birthday. I failed. On that day I left before our time was up. I made another promise, loud and honest and unwavering. “If this happens again, I won’t be visiting you in jail when I’m fifty.” I need a gun.             My feet burn constantly. I know I am not walking on hot coals, but occasionally I look down, hoping I am. Because if I am, I can step off them and the pain will stop. One day I touched the outside of my slow cooker. A blister erupted where my skin brushed against the stainless steel. My hands feel like that every day. I worry about pissing myself. When I awaken, vision blurry from sleep, I fear I am going blind. My body attacks itself. I need a gun.

Today I have had enough.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, I considered the pills I collected over the years from various therapists. They half-filled the plastic, amber container with the child-proof cap. It opened with a push and a twist. I re-engaged the cap. It snapped into place. I rolled the container between my palms as if I were shaping clay. The pills skittered, no tickety-ticked, against the plastic and sounded like mice playing, unseen, behind wallboard. I saw myself drifting away dreaming of the perfect life I should have, but not sure what it should be. I knew my heart would slow and become erratic, would struggle to thrust every drop of blood out toward the ends of my body. I knew my breathing would stop, a task forgotten. Then I saw rescuers and intubation and hospitalization and questions and anti-depressants and the guilt-laden faces of my family.

I think of the garage where my pink Peugeot mountain bike hangs on hooks, unused. A battered filing cabinet organizes instruction manuals for the coffee pot, the generator, and the robotic vacuum I named Frisbee. Hand-made Mother’s Day cards with a childish scrawl, pictures from innumerable seasons of sports, and vet records of a favorite cat, long dead, crowd the top of one drawer. How easy it would be to leave surrounded by these bits of history. A bottle of wine, my favorite pillow, the made-in-China blanket with the Grand Canyon on it, iPhone, and ear buds. So easy to start the car, listen to music, take one final trip.

My first job I cared for a girl the EMS brought to the ICU. Cherry red lips, in a perfect application of color, belied the displacement of oxygen by carbon monoxide on the blood. It starved her brain of oxygen and left a robust, young body without a command center. I didn’t know what happened to her after she left ICU, but I knew the consequences of complete immobility.

I thought about a gun. Any gun. I wouldn’t put it in my mouth and pseudo-fellate it. I understood recoil and the chance for a misfire. A bullet pushing through my palate, exploding an eye, ripping through my cheek, or, worst of all, trashing my sanctuary of words. No. I would press the muzzle under my chin just above my Adam’s Apple and I wouldn’t give myself time to think. The move would be swift and smooth and sure and my finger would be poised to pull the trigger. A blast to the brain stem. No more worries about being worthy. The perfect exit strategy.

Thank God I don’t own a gun.