Chapter 20: September 1, 1980

I don’t know why, but every year I allow this to happen. Summer ends, my birthday comes, and fall begins, and I fall into a deep depression. I thought going and spending time with Melanie would stop it, but it didn’t. If anything, I feel worse.

Labor Day weekend, which coincides with my birthday, is a huge psychological trigger for me. It always signaled going back to school when I was a kid, and then as a young adult, there was a sort of stain on it. I spent—or will spend, depending on how you look at it— Labor Day weekend into the following week, in psych wards, in 2007 and then again the next year.

I’ve struggled with depression since I was thirteen or fourteen years old, and was diagnosed as manic depressive in 2002, after a teacher saw cuts on my wrists. This was my second suicide attempt, but only the first to make enough of an impact to be noticed.

After that, I was in therapy through the end of my teens, and into my twenties. I stopped at some point around twenty one, mostly from lack of insurance, and two years later I was hospitalized for the first time. I didn’t try to kill myself, but I drove around all night looking for an overpass where the concrete support columns didn’t have guard rails blocking them. I figured a direct hit at the right speed would be instant and painless.

I called my Aunt Amy, because my parents were away, and she brought me to UMass Medical in Worcester. I spent about a week before they deemed that this was an isolated incident, and released me under the promise of getting a therapist, which I did.

The following year, I found out a few days before my birthday that a girl, that I had been in love with, broke up with me because I had got her pregnant, and she didn’t want to have kids with me. It took me a few days to unravel, and this time I swallowed as many of my psych pills as I could manage.

I spent another week in the hospital, this time being released with the promise of daily in-patient sessions for 30 days. 

I did my time, and since then my depression has been mostly under control. But something about Labor Day fucks with me, and I can’t figure it out entirely.

I do suppose, this year I have extra psychological stressors. I haven’t been able to see or talk to my grandmother in a while, and my time with Melanie is so precious, but with it looms the sense that it will come crashing down. I expect to get hurt in that process, but the deeper I fall in love with her, the more I dread breaking her heart.

I’ve thought about going to a therapist, but I wonder if I’ll just be furthering my own frustration, in not telling the truth. And obviously, if I tell them the truth, they’ll have me committed. 

I heard Rocket Man by Elton John on the radio this morning, and I can’t help but feeling like he could have been describing time travel. When he talks about “mars aint the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact it’s cold as hell.” It’s not 1980 that’s cold as hell, but I cannot help but feel as if I’m floating in a tin can—Space Oddity played afterwards. They were doing some kind of themed double play. 

If I cannot change the future, if I can’t fix things, I worry that I came here for nothing. Even worse, what if I make things worse?