Next Time Will Be Better

I tried to kill myself at a party.

Everyone thought it was because my boyfriend left me.

I didn’t bother to correct them.

The party was full of the type of people you know without really knowing. Friends who are more like acquaintances; united in our shared experience of smoking weed and graduating from the same public high school. I wandered from room to room, looking for alcohol, weed, anything. People waved, “Hey Sloan, how was your first year of college?” “Sloan – your shoes are so cute!” “Oh my god, it’s Sloan!”

And in my wake trailed whispers, side glances.

“Sloan got dumped, did you hear?”
“I heard it’s because she’s crazy.”
“She begged him to take her back.”
“God, she’s pathetic.”

“What happened to her…”

“Do you see how thin she looks?”

I tuned out the whispers into a fine white noise and concentrated on playing my part: the cool girl. I was there with him, the guy who wasn’t my boyfriend anymore, even though we continued to sleep together. He promised me we would get back together. He promised me it would happen if I just behaved better. So I tried. To behave the way a girl he desired would behave, someone who was worthy of being with him. I played it cool, behaved, and watched him ignore me until he’d had a few drinks in him. That was the point when he seemed to forget we’d broken up.

“Wanna be my beer pong partner?”

Yes.

I proceeded to play a terrible game. He laughed, it was so cute how bad I was. Skunked, I was forced under the table to play the troll, handed drink after drunk until the next loser took my place. I pretended like this was fine. I concentrated hard on laughing when I thought the others would expect me to laugh. This is natural.

I hadn’t eaten dinner or lunch, so a few drinks were enough to get me past tipsy. I knew this, so when I was under the table I drank slowly, pretending to finish drinks while actually hiding them in the corner. I managed to keep from getting actually drunk. I couldn’t afford to lose that control. It took so much effort to hold myself together and alcohol allowed the cracks to appear.

After crawling out from under the table, flashing at least one person on my way up, I sat next to his friends. They used to be mine, too, but he didn’t like me hanging out with them and we stopped seeing each other. After a year of letting myself drift from their lives, I found it hard to bridge the divide.

“Hey, Tom, how’s it going?”
Tom responded with a few meaningless phrases, it’s fine and yeah, I’m good, how’s your drink?

The conversation petered out after we’d gotten as far as small talk could take us, at the line before anything real begins. We awkwardly tried to hold onto the thread of conversation until it was clear we had repeated the same stock questions and answers more than once.

He came over and sat next to me, then made a show of talking over me to Tom. They joked about other girls, trying to sound cool. They pumped their party personas, trying to appear hardcore, even though the most they’d done at this point was along the lines of drinking too much Natty Light or getting so blazed they ate all the food in their parents’ kitchen. They didn’t even smoke cigarettes, although some smoked hookah and felt this made them sophisticated. One had tried shrooms, but he had been designated the “pothead” of the group and doing shrooms only fueled their idea of his personality. I sat there, smiling and laughing when everyone else smiled and laughed.

Being the person I wanted to be that night was both difficult and easy. There’s a certain science to creating her: sip your drink but pretend to be more drunk than you are, wear a sexy dress but still be down for anything – streaking, beer pong, wrestling – you don’t mind getting dirty. The juxtaposition drives them wild. Be unafraid to talk about “guy” things, like sex positions, masturbation, how hot that girl is over there. Oh my god, everything is so hilarious you just can’t stop laughing. You laugh, smile, reach out and touch the person who was funny. Just a gentle touch, on the shoulder, lingering just half a second, long enough for them to imagine you touching them somewhere else with those fingers. Touch everyone so they all feel jealous. Shots! Shots! Shots! You love this song, can’t help swaying your hips, slowly. Make eye contact then quickly look away, smile to yourself like you’re thinking of them.

You’re so fun! Somehow they’d all forgotten how fun you are but this made them remember. Not only are you fun, but you’re hot, too. You’re thin, wearing the right bra and a dress that’s sexy without looking like you tried. You’re wearing makeup, shaping your red lips to words about giving head and how much you like to get it.

Checking each item off the list was easy. I maneuvered my way through the conversation, flitting my attention from guy to guy so they all thought I liked them, touching their arms and laughing the right laugh at the right time. You have to put your whole body into it like you’ve never heard anything funny before, throwing your head back and opening your mouth. But I was exhausted. It took so much energy to be this girl that I saved her exclusively for occasions like this. I longed to be by myself so I could peel her off with my dress, crumple her into a corner as I collapsed into the numb, unsmiling self at the bottom of all the paint.

For an hour or two I held it together nicely. The whispers had changed.

“Can you believe she got dumped?”

“Sloan’s so confident.”
“She’s clearly over him.”
“That dress is so hot.”
“Why would he dump her?”
“Bet he’s regretting that decision now!”

Even his friends, my old friends, were starting to warm up to me again. Remembering that I was a person outside of being his girlfriend and that I was no longer “off-limits.”

The night and drinks progressed and the room became more and more fake. I felt as though we were all two-dimensional characters sitting on a stage, that if you went around the corner you would see nothing behind the wall but lights and a camera crew. If I kicked the wall, it would be revealed as a set prop, held up by cheap two-by-fours and wood glue. The fabric of the couch underneath me felt increasingly strange, foreign. The more I touched it the less familiar it felt. I was sitting on it but it was like I wasn’t actually touching it. I started rubbing my fingers along the couch, trying to remind myself what “real” feels like. Here, Sloan, this is a real thing. You can touch it. I rubbed my fingers against themselves to remind myself that they were real, too. That I had a body. If I can touch it, it must be real.

Then why did I feel the only real part of me were my eyes, trapped and staring from this alien body?

I heard a girl talking about how she loved her college, how it was so fun and she’d made so many new friends, and felt the façade cracking. There’s a moment when you can feel it, the sudden realization that you can’t be a person anymore. The trick is getting away from everyone else before the tipping point. After the tipping point, you embarrass yourself.

I made excuses and found my way to the bathroom in the basement, praying that it had a lock on the door. Although that practice is standard in most homes, my parents had removed our bathroom locks after my sister and I managed to lock ourselves into one when we were toddlers, so I never assumed. I reached the door, a peeling white painted slab of wood set in bare concrete block walls. So far, so lucky. No one was here and the door locked. I slipped in and locked the door behind me, barely remembering to flip the light on before everything went dark.

The tipping point had come, I’d just barely made it. Unable to stand on two legs, I folded to the floor, knees hugged to my chest. After a few moments, I slid sideways so that I was laying in a fetal position. My cheek rested on the cool floor tiles and the only thing in my line of sight was the base of the sink, a white porcelain tower. I lay there as the panic spread. It started at my toes and slowly, slowly flooded its way through the rest of my body until I was drowning in it. I tried hard to get control of it once it reached my shoulder blades, but I couldn’t manage it and soon it had spread over my lips and up to the top of my head.

I started to cry.

I tried to sob quietly so as not to alert anyone, because although I just wanted to be held at that moment, I also didn’t want anyone to see me like this. I was supposed to be strong. I was supposed to be happy. I was supposed to be successful. I was not supposed to be a sobbing mess lying on the bathroom floor of an acquaintance’s house during a party.

And yet here I was, a sobbing mess lying on the bathroom floor of an acquaintance’s house during a party.

Thoughts started running through my head as a lay there alone. Please, I begged silently to whoever was listening, Please I just want to disappear. Please can you kill me? Please. Everything inside me hurt with an ache so deep I was sure it would never go away. My body felt wrong, it didn’t feel like it was part of me. I felt trapped inside it. I imagined myself cutting deeply and neatly down my left arm, from my wrist to my elbow. I imagined myself taking a knife and slicing a deep line between my breasts, from my collar bone to my stomach. I would take my hands to either side of that line and pull as hard as I could until I had ripped all the skin from my body and freed myself from it. I wished more than anything that I could shed my body like a snake sheds skin, floating up up and away from it and everything else. I started shaking involuntarily, clawing at my wrists with my fingernails. I dug them in as deeply as I could, breathing into the pain, and although it helped me feel more calm, it wasn’t enough. Nothing would be enough.

I knew right then and there that I just had to die. I had to. I couldn’t imagine spending another second alive, living my life trapped in this body, trapped in my mind. I had to get out. The idea of ceasing to exist felt delicious in my brain. It felt like the only right thing in a sea of wrongs.

My nails weren’t going to cut it, though, and they were all I had. My bag was upstairs, and there was nothing sharp in it anyway. Then I remembered I was in a bathroom, and I took a few deep breaths to calm myself enough to stand. Slowly, I pushed myself to my feet and, using the wall as support, stumbled my way towards the cabinet above the toilet.

Inside were a few rolls of toilet paper, some cleaning products, a hairbrush. Nothing useful. I started to panic, worried that even this would not work out for me. My hands searched the wicker baskets on the bottom shelf, sifting through hair binders and bobby pins, a random toothbrush, until I found it. A cheap disposable razor. The edges were sharp enough that I knew they would cut me. I didn’t know where it had been and for a brief moment I worried about infection, but then reminded myself that infection wouldn’t matter to me anymore.

I stumbled back to my corner opposite the sink and sunk to the tiled ground, clutching the razor tightly in both hands. I steeled myself for pain and pushed it deeply into my left wrist, not on the vein just yet, I was practicing. I slide it lightly and felt the blades scratch my skin. When I removed the razor, there were three thin raised lines on my wrist, raised and extending a few inches towards my elbow. But I hadn’t even managed to break the skin. It would take far more than this.

I started to cry again, knowing in that moment that I was too scared of pain to follow through. I tried again, pushing harder this time, hard enough to draw a little blood, but still not hard enough. My tears were making it hard to see, and my hand shook as I panicked, worried I wouldn’t be able to see this through.

And then, someone knocked on the door. I froze, and wondered whether I should turn off the light and pretend I was alone.

He spoke softly through the door: “Sloan, I know you are in there.”
I said nothing.
“Sloan, you’ve been in the bathroom for 45 minutes. What is going on?”

I said nothing.

I heard a soft thud as he sat down on the floor, back leaning against the bathroom door.

“Look, I just want to make sure everything is okay. I can hear you crying. I know something is wrong. Please tell me what’s going on.”

I didn’t know what to say, except hello. So I said that, trying to keep my voice from quavering.

“Sloan just open the door.” At that moment there was a pounding of footsteps heading down the stairs and I heard Tom’s voice, asking him what was going on.

“She’s locked herself in the bathroom, I don’t know what’s up, but she won’t unlock the door,” he said, worry punctuating each word.

“Hey!” Tom said loudly through the door. “Please open up! You’re worrying everyone. Come on Sloan.”

This last bit scared me. Everyone? I asked. Who is everyone?

Tom realized he had made a mistake and stumbled through his clarification, “I mean me, and Nate, obviously, and we have told Matt. But only the three of us. I didn’t mean everyone everyone, you know?”

The panic was growing. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it with two people just outside the door. I knew then that I wasn’t going to kill myself that night, but I couldn’t unlock the door and let them see me in here. Involuntarily, a keening noise escaped my throat. I put both hands over my mouth but it was too late.

“Please Sloan!” He begged. “Please just open the door. It will be fine. Everything is going to be fine.”

I whispered to him, I can’t.

“Yes you can,” he replied. Then, a moment later, “Come on, Sloan, we can’t be down here all night.”

I knew he was right, I knew that. I knew that it was over now, and that I would have to open the door and face the consequences. I knew that. So why couldn’t I get my hand to move towards the door, to turn the lock? I was frozen, unable to move my limbs outside of a limited area around my body, stuck in fetal position.

A few more moments passed, with continued pleading from outside the door. I tried once more, futilely, with the razor, before pushing it away across the floor. With all the courage I could muster, I started talking myself into turning the lock. It was as though I were in the last miles of a marathon, convincing myself that yes, I could make it to the end. Come on, Sloan, I told myself sternly. You can do this. Just lift your right hand up, just like that, and crawl it along the wall. Good, good job. Now bring it to the lock, and twist. Twist a little harder. There you go. You’ve done it. You’re done now, you’re okay. The lock turned with a gentle thunk.

It took a moment, but Tom and Nate realized the door had been opened. Nate pushed his way in, saw me in the corner, and got down on the floor right next to me, cradling me in his arms, pulling my head towards his chest. I turned away.