I can’t stop thinking about Hedy Zimra. I didn’t know her. I’m not even sure what happened to her, but now she’s dead. Hedy wrote beautiful, weird short stories that I bookmarked in online literary journals and read again and again. There was just something that I wanted to keep. Like this and this.
After she died, I read every tweet in her Twitter feed, looking for clues. Where’s the tipping point? I couldn’t parse it.
Her daughter wrote a diary post for Rookie just a couple of days after she died, and it makes me cry every time I read it.
*
Yesterday the doctor who did my preliminary interview at the sleep clinic kept circling back to the psych questions.
“Do you think about harming yourself or others?” he said.
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“How often?” he said.
“Every day.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Mostly others,” I said. “Does that help?”
“Not really,” he said, without even a hint of a smile. “What about thoughts of suicide?”
“What about them?” I said.
“Do you have them?” he said.
“I thought this was a sleep clinic,” I said. “I have a therapist.”
“I’m a psychiatrist,” he said.
“Really?” I said. “How’d you end up here?”
He didn’t want to answer, muttered something about the brain-sleep connection, looked away.
Fair enough, I thought.
*
There’s a big hole in my heart from scooping things out of it: my mother’s ashes gone, finally, from the trunk of my car; a five-year friendship I cherished, scattered to the blowing winds of insecurity and judgment; another, longer relationship I should never have called a friendship in the first place. All gone, wrenched from my body with words sharp as an ice pick, with silence loud as a scream. Last night I stood in my bathroom and hit myself in the face until my knuckles hurt worse than the hole. It’s as bad as it gets, and then hopefully it gets better.
