Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 16

Leave Me Alone

Rehab doesn’t happen to you. You happen to rehab.

That’s something I kept thinking when, at night, I wept myself to sleep in the tastefully appointed room where I could not keep any sharp objects, not even tweezers, and did not have a lock on my door.

I realized it the moment I walked in and they demanded I remove my Marni booties, in keeping with their no-shoes policy, and I began to argue, muttering something about how I was self-conscious about my feet (a lie).

I realized it when they asked me what sorts of things I liked to eat, and I considered it briefly, then said “goat yogurt” like it was normal.

I realized it when the woman who was tasked with watching me pee into a cup through a cracked door looked like I was giving her much more anxiety than she was giving me.

I was so dazed from the days, weeks, months—perhaps even years—prior that I had a good deal of trouble understanding what had gotten me there, what twist of fate had delivered me to this small stone manor house in the woods of the Berkshires.

I didn’t tell very many people I was going, but to the select few who knew, I said I was going to a “trauma treatment program.” I wasn’t fooling anyone, but those who loved me allowed me the dignity of not calling a spade a spade.

When we arrived, my father gave them the name I was using on my files: Rose O’Neill, after the inventor of Kewpie dolls, America’s first self-made female millionaire. I related, I felt, to the tragedy of her life—she had made something people didn’t know they needed, had made a shocking fortune on her illustrations of impish cupids, but had stayed too long at the party, and by her midforties her wealth had been drained by hangers-on, and an inability to duplicate her first success (which seemed to me like where I was headed, considering I hadn’t had a coherent idea since the day that we finished shooting Girls ). So Rose is what they called me in rehab, until finally I gave them permission to say my name, and even then, they did it with trepidation.

We walked through the doors into a sea of beige with a grand staircase. A sweet guy with an iPad made my parents check in and show ID, which they had to retrieve from the car. I was asked to take the aforementioned shoes off and was hurried upstairs for that urine test. After that, my parents were allowed to come see my room. It was a lot like the first day at camp, or college, except many of the people here had a problem with IV heroin.

It was hard to tell the difference between the patients and the orderlies, because nobody wore uniforms. Who would have guessed that the massive tattooed man in the Harley-Davidson shirt was a sober companion and the petite grandmother knitting in house slippers had a crippling Benadryl addiction that had caused her to destroy her own daughter’s wedding? This was the first lesson of rehab, and the simplest: Never judge a drug addict by their Patagonia half-zip fleece.

This was also the moment that I realized that chaos wasn’t happening to me. I hadn’t landed here because of some sudden natural disaster, as mysteriously seismic and strange as it all felt. I had responded to events. I had swallowed the medicine. I had made choices. And I was the chaos.

I would come to realize, after much resistance—after asking to skip the group therapy sessions aimed at drug cravings because I didn’t feel they applied to me, after telling anyone who would listen that I was there because of medical trauma, after retreating to my room night after night instead of socializing, to “work”—there is no good addict, no right addict, no better addict than any other. We had all tortured and terrified our families and friends. We all lost things that we once thought we couldn’t live without. And, in our own very different and special ways, and for our own very different and special reasons, we all fucking loved drugs.

There was Walter, the middle-aged father who knew the component parts to every antidepressant and how to order them on the dark web. There was Jackson, the shy beautiful boy with the piano who spoke so movingly about immigrating but wasn’t sure he could experience love. There was Gaylen, who was only a teenager but could have beat all our asses and gotten us to thank her. Shirley, a grandma and wife who knit baby booties in her free time and was getting used to not having a bottle of chardonnay by eight a.m. along with her Benadryl. There was Livia, who was seventy-six and whose necklaces jangled as she rode her mobility scooter to the yoga hut. [*]

Some of us loved to party. Some of us loved to jack cocaine into our veins and give long lectures about capitalism. Some of us loved to take Benadryl in the morning, despite not being allergic to anything. The fact that I had taken drugs, at first, in order to be able to show up to work, in order to meet my responsibilities, the fact that I was sick, didn’t make me less of a problem than anyone else. It just made me harder to see coming.

Soon I started to feel endless empathy. Messy empathy. Empathy for PCP users and men who hit their wives, for lions and oil spills, for quicksand and all the hot messes of the natural world.

But back to the shoes. You couldn’t wear any. You also couldn’t wear crop tops or leggings, shirts that exposed too much boob, or skirts that flew up in the wind. Nothing that could tempt people who were desperately looking for a high—any high—and I learned the hard way, getting cautioned for yoga pants, tank tops, a T-shirt that said Fuck , and for walking through the common area toward the indoor pool in a bathing suit that was deemed “too cheeky.” (Was the Frisbee bro who wrote up my warning referring to my attitude or to the amount of butt exposed? I’ll always wonder.)

On my second morning, I sat across from my new therapist, Dr. Mark, a kindly man in khakis who could have been anywhere from five to twenty-five years older than me. He reminded me of a children’s entertainer, the type of guy who would play banjo for kindergarteners. I told him how oddly anxiety-producing I found the no-shoes policy.

“Do you have…a big attachment to your shoes?” he asked.

I considered. No, I posited, but I had an attachment to being treated like an adult. I had come here of my own accord. I wasn’t fighting, cursing, hissing. So why did I have to be treated as if I were hiding contraband in my sneakers?

“It’s really just about keeping the rugs clean,” he said, nodding.

Dr. Mark asked me to explain to him, in my own words, what I thought had gotten me here.

Well, I told him, it started with me being sick. Or maybe it started with me being stressed. Sick, physically and mentally, and stressed in the way you can only get stressed when your wildest dreams start rolling out the welcome mat—and with them come the wildest obligations. I was supporting a family, someone else’s family—multiple families, in fact—and my failure would be their failure. I disappointed people while also filling their pantries with fancy bread.

At the same time, my period crippled me, and when I didn’t have my period, the pain could be just as bad but with no clear cause. I was in love with the idea of my boyfriend, and he was never home, and when he was, the disappointment was palpable. My little sister had become my little brother. My parents didn’t recognize me, but I could see them looking, hopefully, as if for signs of memory in an amnesia patient.

When my uterus was taken out, I started to go through menopause, and nobody explained what was happening, so I howled like a wolf in bed at night, not sure where the sound was coming from. Meanwhile, my oldest dream—of carrying a child, of being a mother, the one from back before there were other dreams—slithered away. Because my body couldn’t do it. My body couldn’t do anything. And look at me, just look at me.

In the months after the surgery, I kept remembering how many hands had been inside me, pressing and prodding. I told Dr. Mark that I’d been raped once and sexually abused on a few occasions. This had felt like that. It wasn’t that—but it sure felt like it.

“Is that it?” he asked.

No, that wasn’t it. I started acting up and acting out. I didn’t know why. It felt, suddenly, like my intuition—once as noisy as a metal detector on a beach after a frat party—had just broken. I couldn’t tell what was right or wrong, what would make people laugh or make them sneer. I did things just to do them. Nobody made me, but it sure felt like they had.

“And that’s what you’ve been feeling lately?”

Well, there was the medication—the blessing and the curse of it. Klonopin for anxiety, Percocet for pain, and that exquisite, fluffy cotton-candy high as the drug moved through me, weighing down my anxiety like three quilts in winter. Bed became a wonderland. Sex became tolerable. At first, it let me keep it all together, patched me up with strings and glue, and sent me back onto the field.

The minute I had my first dose of IV pain medication, I wished in some ways I hadn’t. The shiver through my whole body—better than any orgasm—followed by the alleviation of all of it, all the lows and, I realized later, all the highs, too. Just a blank euphoria, all possibility and no immediate action. I was tethered there with a needle in my arm. It’s not for everyone—nurses like to warn you it can feel strange, that some people may cry or vomit—but for someone like me, whose thoughts, negative or positive, have always been so aggressive they can hijack a whole day, it felt like a pause button—available anywhere that accepts your insurance, available anywhere that doesn’t.

Now my pain had a solution, and that solution was waiting in ERs across America, making hospital beds as appealing as sunny brunches with friends in Union Square once were. The relief started as soon as the nurse began to screw the IV together, pump it with saline that ran cold in my arm and left a metallic taste in my mouth. I wasn’t eating much or drinking, either, so it was often hard for them to find a vein, but when they did, we all sighed with relief. I was thin, too—everyone said it—and when I sat down, my fat no longer followed with a kicky bounce a second later.

“Is that it?” he asked again.

I wasn’t ready to tell him about what had happened after the hysterectomy—what Jenni and I had done that morning of November 17, what it had felt like when I realized I had to leave the apartment where Jack and I lived, how it felt to lie next to Nick while he kicked and gasped.

“Yes, I think that’s it,” I cried.

“That’s not just a three-car pileup. It’s not just a five-car pileup. It’s a fifty-car pileup,” he said, folding his hands in the lap of his Dockers.

And I cried into my stupid caftan, because it felt so fucking good to be heard. I cried for myself, and I cried for my parents. I cried for my sister, who was now my brother. I cried for the time I’d lost and the time I was losing, and I cried because I couldn’t think of anything but the past, and because I couldn’t imagine the future.

Walter hated me. I had tried hard with him the first day, prodding him with questions about his job as a private equity trader and his toddler daughter who was named after a top ten emo song and his apartment near mine and his coke addiction. I was sweet and pliant. He was cold and removed. I figured he was getting off cocaine and probably pretty tired.

But the next day, Dr. Mark called me into his office right before group therapy. “I’m sorry to have to say this, but your confidentiality has been breached. We learned that Walter told his wife and several friends at home that you’re here.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “I mean, that sucks…I guess.”

“Well, it’s against policy. We have to send Walter home. He’s currently in the billiards room, waiting for his car. We will have to share this in group, since some people have been healing alongside Walter for a while. Would you like to share it, or would you like me to?”

Dr. Mark was the gentlest man I had ever met. I cried again, thanking him in advance for sharing. I didn’t want the job. I was new around here. Walter was their friend. Who would win in a fight?

The group was divided. Some were mad at Walter; others said they could relate to “just saying something, not really thinking about it.” Most felt the punishment was a bit strong. I jumped in only to make it clear that I had not come up with said punishment. “It’s policy,” I stammered, like an anxious branch manager talking to an angry customer.

Shirley said that I deserved safety just like the rest of them. Livia said that Walter didn’t mean any harm. Jackson said he would really miss Walter, but that he also liked me and was glad I was here.

“Walter says Lena is a man-hater, he read her blog, and he doesn’t feel safe being in group with a man-hater,” Gaylen said.

All I could stutter was, “I don’t have a blog.”

Gaylen came down from her bedroom in a rotten mood. As we stood at the breakfast buffet, she cursed at people who blocked her way, at serving utensils that didn’t make it easy to grab the sausage, at the woman who reminded her about the one-espresso-a-day limit. She had wandered in just before nine a.m. , pink sweats low on her hips, rubbing her eyes sleepily like a baby in a cartoon. Usually she ate a big meal, eggs and oatmeal and fistfuls of bacon, but today she took her coffee into the living room and lay across the couch on her stomach, displaying dominance over the jigsaw puzzle area so that Shirley couldn’t come and add her customary few pieces to the sky.

Gaylen missed intention setting at nine. She slept through her session with the family therapist at ten. She had her headphones on and scrolled Instagram absentmindedly. Her hair was matted in complex ways—she had a weave, a mix of blond and pink and black, like Christina Aguilera in 2002. I’d never seen her without her winged eyeliner, a full face of powder and blush, door-knocker hoop earrings that grazed her pale shoulder blades (and which she had once asked me to hold so she could “fight a bitch”).

“What are you listening to?” I asked her.

She held her phone up. It was a song Jack had written when he didn’t come back from the studio with Pink to see me at the hospital, one about hating someone but staying with them anyway. Gaylen hummed along, tears falling down her face.

After we were high and the love dope died, it was you.

I thought about telling her that my ex had written it, but she’d already looked suspicious when I told her I was an actor, like sure, okay, you’re an actor. She also felt strongly that the song was by an addict about addiction; it felt cruel to tell her its producer was actually scared that MDMA would drain his spinal fluid.

Gaylen had told me the first day I arrived that she had been there for the longest of anyone. Nine weeks. She was also the youngest, at nineteen. When she told her story on that first day in group—the introduction round, where everyone gave the newcomer a sense of their life before—she rattled it off with the eerie calm of someone who had rehearsed it many times in many different places: “I was bullied in high school. The other girls would take me behind the school and take turns beating me. I started hanging out with the boys, and that made them even angrier. Some of those boys took advantage of me. I started taking Xanax, then OxyContin, and then crack and heroin. I never thought it would get that far. My dad is rich—I’ve been to eight of these places. He just wants to be rid of me so he can hang out with his new wife and kids.”

“What does your dad do?” I had asked her, later that day as we stood in the medication line. “Like, what’s he…so rich about?”

She glared at me, her raccoon-ish makeup underlining just how absurd my question was. Perhaps my social graces weren’t very good as I withdrew from Klonopin. I did often freeze in terror for a good minute or two before daring to start a conversation in the few days after they took my dose down, half a milligram every three days.

“I don’t really know,” she said. “I think he, like, owns the Internet?”

Every Sunday night, the group went out for “exposure dinner,” a chance to experiment with going to a meal without ordering alcohol. I explained to my therapist that A) I was not at risk of relapse unless the restaurant was serving IV Dilaudid, and B) some people know who I am, and I would prefer not to be spotted at a table full of rehab residents ordering platters of bad Asian fusion.

But finally, on my third week there, Gaylen wore me down. “You can sit with me! I make it so fun,” she cooed. By this time, she had googled me and decided that I wasn’t lying and might, in fact, be able to assist her in her life’s dream of meeting Robert Pattinson. After that, I was her favorite.

She dressed up for the occasion, in white jeans and a low-cut hippie-ish top—which seemed deserving of a write-up if my tunic had been, but I wasn’t going to try and right that wrong. She had long beaded earrings and her hair feathered across her clavicle. I could see a tattoo peeking up from her left breast, tickling her armpit—the serenity prayer in a swirling gothic font, which she informed me had been inked between rehab stays two and three. On her feet were big, ungainly platforms that made it impossible to walk to the van that would be shuttling us to a “modern American bistro with Asian influences” two towns over.

At the restaurant, they put us at a long table, the kind you’d celebrate an office birthday at. What kind of office were we, and what were our job titles? Jackson looked like the HR guy he really was. Ally could have been a midlevel manager, though in reality, she was just a stay-at-home mom who loved whiskey. Tony actually was a midlevel sales manager, albeit one who once crushed up his antidepressants and shot them in his arm just to try it. My hair was in a messy Cabbage Patch topknot, and I was wearing a neon tartan jumpsuit. Intern. Definite intern.

As soon as we sat down, I realized I was starving. In fact, I’d been starving since the day the drugs started to leave my body, and now, most nights, I padded down to the kitchen and made myself an array of quite frankly shocking snacks. Fiber One cereal with goat yogurt and dried prunes. (I never want to feel the way I did on opiates again, and that’s all I’m going to say here about taking a shit.) Pretzel sticks dipped in honey. Butter sandwiches—wheat bread slathered in the room temp stuff that the kitchen staff left out all night in a flowered dish. Sometimes I’d have to bring the food up to my room in multiple trips, cradling the various cups and plates in the skirt of my nightgown as I bounded up the stairs with my secret stash (no food allowed above the ground floor). In bed, I ate using my chest as a tray until my eyelids grew heavy.

At the restaurant, we perused the convoluted menu and ordered two different dishes with duck—one crispy, and one stewed into a gummy risotto—and I made a fuss about not having enough to share. I could drink an ocean of Coca-Cola. I could eat a bathtub of fat. I would never be full enough, and I was also sad that being temporarily waiflike hadn’t held more meaning for me at the time it was happening. If I’d known I’d only be thin and high so briefly, I would have appreciated both a lot more.

Gaylen was being noisy and showy. “I want a double EXpresso!” she shouted again and again.

Her sullen sidekick corrected her, the one with the black bob and low-hanging cargo pants: “ES-presso.”

“That’s what I said. EXpresso. Lena wants one, too!”

I resisted but actually, maybe that would be fun. At least it would be something. When it came, I stirred in two packets of Equal and downed it like a shot.

Giggly and manic on caffeine, Gaylen grabbed my hand—“Come to the bathroom with meee.” There was something about her—she reminded me of the kind of girls I would have followed anywhere in high school. While she didn’t have the transatlantic glamour of Jemima, she had her swagger. I’d always loved a bad girl, the kind I was told my mother had been, when my grandmother remarked, “Your mom—we wanted to send her to reform school, but reform school wouldn’t take her.”

A bad girl was the kind of girl who cried about her boyfriend Danny when she heard a Pink song called “Beautiful Trauma.” The kind of girl who was nineteen and at her eighth rehab. The kind of girl who threatened to punch someone for looking at her funny across the group therapy room, even though they just had a lazy eye.

Whatever I was, I was definitely not a bad girl. In high school, I’d printed sheafs of information on the dangers of ecstasy for my friends who tried the drug. I kept free condoms in my room to give out to people who might need them, but didn’t need them myself. Even now, if Gaylen didn’t get her way, she would look at the person in charge with a terrifying malice and growl “don’t fuuuck with me,” whereas I—even shaking in withdrawal, my words barely linking together—waited my turn, said “thank you” even when the person I’d asked for help had been no help at all.

I must have forgotten, in all her bad girl magic, that Gaylen was not an authority here: One of our chaperones knocked on the door to remind us that we weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom in pairs (this was known as fraternizing), and we giggled out a little apology; outside in the gravel parking lot, Gaylen offered me a cigarette, and I smoked it down to its nub, fingers shaking, watching the sun set behind the pine trees. It was time to go, we loaded into the van, and Gaylen demanded they put on Britney Spears, and soon we were all singing, at the top of our lungs, in the dark: “She’s so lucky, she’s a star…”

When we parked in the dark driveway of the rehab facility, Gaylen said, “You know we’re going to be written up for the bathroom thing,” and her eyes seemed to glitter as she bounded into the house, her platforms dangling in her hand.

The next day, I sat across from Dr. Mark and told him that before we started, I was very sorry about the bathroom thing. “I didn’t know the rules,” I said. “At home, I always pee with my friends. I mean, we weren’t even in the same stall.”

I had assumed he wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about, that he’d be flummoxed, laugh at my neuroses. “That?” he’d say. “Women use the bathroom in pairs! I mean, I know my wife always does!” I thought he’d say, “Don’t be crazy, what fucking bathroom thing?”

But instead, he nodded appreciatively. “Thank you for saying that. It’s very helpful for us to know where you’re coming from as we consider the incident.”

Ultimately, Gaylen’s and my behavior was “logged,” but we received no warning. I was almost a little disappointed—if you were going to fuck up, I’d learned in recent years, why not take it all the way? Make it legendary.

One afternoon, Gaylen was inconsolable. Tracks of eyeliner ran down her neck, and she clawed at her hair extensions like they were spiders crawling on her scalp. We all gathered around her: First Shirley, because she was an actual grandmother and equipped with that voice. Then Ally, who believed in boosting girls’ self-esteem through positive action and had minored in social work. Then Derek, even though he himself was just coming out of an episode so dark, he had slept for five days with his door open to the hallway so everyone could see him, tucked in wearing a wool beanie, his dirty feet sticking out the end of the duvet. Derek was the reason I demanded a lock on my door, but I misjudged him. He was just a sweet acid lover with a passion for juggling, who had been following Phish since he was fifteen.

“You’re so brave to face what’s happened to you,” Shirley said, even though Gaylen had been a total cunt to her about the puzzle that morning, slapping pieces out of her hand.

“You’ll help so many women if you can just make it through this,” Ally said.

“You’re…like, a super great person,” Derek was trying.

“It’s just too much pain,” Gaylen wailed. “I feel like I’m drowning in it. I feel like I can’t breathe. And ALL I WANT IS ONE LOUSY FUCKING XANAX AND THEY WON’T EVEN FUCKING GIVE ME THAT.”

“Well, that’s sort of the whole point,” I said. “Like, you’re trying to quit that…” At which point Gaylen’s eyes fixed on me, fiery with rage, and I began to backtrack: “But isn’t there something she can take?” I called out to one of the orderlies. “Like, she can’t just lay here like this. I mean, her stomach hurts.”

But they didn’t bring her anything. They offered her ginger ale. A cool towel. A nap. Everything but what she wanted, until she had wept herself to sleep on the sofa and lay, face down and snoring, at five p.m.

“Bless her,” Shirley said, nodding at her like she was a sweet little baby and not a feral teen whose entire studded thong was sticking out the back of her Juicy Couture sweats.

Later, when I was six or seven months sober, Gaylen called me at my new apartment, high in the city, crying, looking for a place to stay. I gave her my address—“Come, I’ll give you a cozy bed and some tea—slumber party,” I said, still high on one thing and one thing only, which was my savior complex—but she never showed, and she never answered her texts when I asked her where she’d gone. I started silencing my phone at night after that.

One day, in group therapy, Dr. Mark asked us to fill out a “values spreadsheet.” It involved listing our primary values, along with the primary values of the people we surrounded ourselves with in active addiction. We were then meant to create a Venn diagram to see where they overlapped.

Used to being the A student in therapeutic language, I stuck my hand up: He had me stumped.

“What do you mean by values ? Like, what are we…worth, as people?”

Values, he explained, are one’s sense of what is important in life, what matters to them.

Still stumped. It took me twenty minutes to fill out the three spaces:

ART

FAMILY

MAKING PEOPLE FEEL SEEN

I then started in on the values of the people I’d been hanging around. This one was easier. I remembered Jenni toasting a project: “Let’s get that private jet money, girl.” I remembered being pressured to come out, even when sick as a dog, by pseudo-friends so I could show up at events where nobody really gave a fuck about me or anything I was making, just because they were excited to be my plus-one. I remembered meeting someone at a party and asking them about their kids. “They’re adorable,” they said. “Super fun.” Then they continued to pitch me a sitcom starring them.

I had a few scheduled leaves. The first weekend of treatment, I went home to be fitted for my Met Gala dress. The stylist met me in the country at my parents’ house, and I tried on a canvas approximation of the gown—stiff white ruffles around my neck, a straw crown. She took a photo of me in the backyard, the dress blowing as if I were Glinda the Good Witch.

The next weekend, I went to my parents’ again for a night. Nick met me there. I jumped on him, and my body shivered in recognition. We had sex at five p.m. , and I fell asleep by six. I wondered why I was always anxious around him and decided that it must be my fault. I wore the engagement ring he had knotted for me around my neck on a chain.

The week after that, I went to the actual Met Gala. They had let me go, though not without some hesitation—there were long talks about whether it would be “safe,” whether I could handle the chaos of it. I spent the night before in the apartment upstairs from my parents’ place, the one my mother had chosen for Nick and me to rent. It was still cold and gray, with a fold-out metal bed frame, and the Mongolian fur pillows seemed to laugh at us from the corner of the room where Nick had thrown them. At least he had finally unpacked his sweatshirts, but that also filled me with dis-ease.

I was seeing Jenni for the first time since I had left, and my stomach knotted with fear. I didn’t know why I kept fearing everyone I was meant to love; I figured it could only be shame—fear of their rightful anger. Jenni had been tending to our show alone when we had been meant to do it as a pair. It was always meant to be us as a pair. She hadn’t been communicating much, and when I wrote her a long letter of apology, she had simply responded, “I appreciate this.”

We met at her hotel at eleven for breakfast. She didn’t ask me much about where I’d been or want to hear any stories about Gaylen or Shirley. “I’m sure it’s very funny, but you’re not meant to be getting funny stories out of this.”

We drank tea, and my hands shook under the table. I wanted us to say something that might give the whole thing perspective, but she just talked about her kids and her schedule. She asked if I’d broken up with Nick, and I lied and said, “Basically,” because I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t remember ever lying to her before. She was texting with a newer friend, and her eyes lit up when the messages came in—the glittering pleasure of a fun and uncomplicated bond. I didn’t feel I was allowed to say how scared I was.

I also didn’t feel I was allowed to tell the makeup artist—who did me up like the OG Queen Elizabeth, with a powdered face and heart-shaped burgundy lips—that I looked like I was trying to conceal syphilitic sores; or the hairstylist that I hated the crown; or the designer that the dress was so stiff, I could only shuffle. On the red carpet, I looked wan and haunted. The whole event felt like a fever dream—cameras flashing, people shouting names that weren’t mine, champagne I couldn’t drink circulating like a joke I wasn’t in on.

I told Jenni I was probably the only person there who had come just for the night—from rehab.

“You’re probably not,” she said.

At midnight, I climbed into a black SUV and drove back to Massachusetts—Cinderella in her pumpkin. They made me drop my dress at the door to my room so they could search it for contraband.

The next day, Gaylen tried it on and larked around. She looked beautiful.

A week before I was due to leave rehab, Nick got permission to check me out and take me to a local inn for the night. My mother lent him her car (she can be oddly trusting for someone who doesn’t trust), and we booked a room with a sweet porch, dinner in a romantic candlelit dining room. The idea was that spending time with the people who we’ll emerge to, while still able to come back and process the experience, would help us prepare for life on the outside.

Upon arrival, I had changed into civilian gear—dress and heels, not cardigan and sweats—and we ate pear salad and steak near another girl from my treatment center and her visiting fiancée, whose big day was three weeks away despite the fact that she was here to handle a pretty major coke addiction. Every time I passed her on the way to the exercise center, she would cheerily announce, “shedding for the wedding!”

Our room was pretty and old-fashioned, with two flowery twin beds, and we fucked on one, then took a dip in the Jacuzzi. Nick had told me he was quitting weed, but once we’d dried off, he went to the porch to smoke in the rain, then came back inside and laid on the other bed and fell asleep. I used my new colored pencils to draw him, focusing on his mouth, which was the part of his body I’d always loved most. Even as a child, before he presented himself to me as an erotic concept, I had admired it—the pillowy lower lip contrasted with the sharp peak of his cupid’s bow.

I finished my drawing, creatively titling it “Nick Sleeping.” He woke up. We had sex again, on the other bed, like we were on the briefest honeymoon in history and trying to cram it all in, and at dawn I was jolted awake to the sound of him choking, rasping, seizing harder than I’d ever seen him seize. He bolted upright, like Frankenstein’s monster, and then he was standing, knocking antique vases off of tables and kicking the walls; he tried to speak, but only spit and guttural nonsense came out. I stood up to grab him, trying to guide him back to the safety of bed, but he elbowed me in the jaw, his pupils so wide that his eyes were black. And as I reached for the phone to call for help, I felt something warm and wet. It took me many moments too long to realize that his left hand was tugging on his soft cock, and he was pissing on me, a stream arcing up and onto my chest. He finished and fell back onto the floor, and I sank to my knees to meet him. After a moment, I saw consciousness begin to reemerge.

“What?” he asked.

“It’s me,” I said. “Lena. We’re at the inn. It’s okay. You came to visit me, and we’re at the inn. You had a seizure.”

“No. I didn’t,” he said. “No, I didn’t.”

“You did, but you’re okay.”

He began to cry, his lower lip trembling.

“I don’t know where I am,” he sobbed. “Please tell me where I am.”

I put him back to bed and called his mother, who knew what a seizure meant—he’d been drinking, and he’d been lying, and this was what came on the other side of that. His parents arrived two hours later, having sped from the city, and we made small talk in the lobby before his mother, exhausted, put her head in her hands. “When will he understand?” she asked, and I could see that she just wanted this to end, some way or another.

During the last week of treatment, I identified as a drug addict for the first time, and so it was the first time Dr. Mark asked me, “And do you want to be sober?”

Before treatment, I must have understood that Nick was not present. But I was so absent that it didn’t behoove me to question it. Now I understood what his brother meant when he said, “Nick isn’t telling you everything.”

The seizures always seemed to happen on our first night back together after a few days apart. I finally understood that this meant he had been drinking, and the seizures were his body withdrawing from alcohol. It was one of these seizures that had caused his head injury and dismissal from the Army, and not the other way around. It was the seizures that caused the migraines, the traumatic brain symptoms. And they were caused by the one thing he refused to stop doing—drinking. Actually, they were caused by what happened when a body so used to alcohol was denied it.

Without drugs in my system, without the haze that allowed me to block out this essential information, he didn’t seem like a knight in shining armor. He seemed like someone who had sensed an opportunity. I did best when I was focusing all of my love and need in one direction, and he was an addict without a home. This doesn’t mean he didn’t love me, and it doesn’t mean I didn’t love him—but we loved each other as the selves we had been in other decades, perhaps not even the same ones as each other. He always told me that he remembered me best as the tiny blonde sitting on my porch with a journal. I wanted the version of him that had refused to fuck me in college and then disappeared for ten years. The two of us had found each other in some other place altogether. And if I stayed in this place, I wouldn’t survive. I wanted to think that I was cutting him loose to get well, too, but the fact is, I couldn’t do anything about that.

It was a bit like the great Titanic debate—was there only room for Rose on that floating door, or could she have made room for him on there, too? Who knows—neither of them could think. They were too fucking cold.

The day before I left rehab, Gaylen and I sat outside on the steps for hours in the sun. I sketched her, and she read her book about healing crystals. It was the first time in a long time that I could remember noticing anything about the world around me. The sun was so bright. The sky was so vast. Later, on my way to therapy, I took off running. I couldn’t believe it. All I could think was And my legs run on their own.

When I got back, Gaylen and Jackson called to me. Gaylen shouted “LENA! LENA!” She was pointing to a robin’s egg nestled in the grass, so blue it looked like it had been dyed.

“Who put it there?” I asked.

“Nobody put it there!” Gaylen said, laughing at me, her hair pink and blond and black in the sun. “It just is.”

Skip Notes

* Everyone’s names and identifying details have been changed in the spirit of recovery.