Everything around her was so beautiful. Her porch swing swayed in the May breeze. The smell of mint wafted from the garden her and her young daughter had built. The creek was running with last night’s spring rain. And her two dogs were zooming with joy across the yard, zipping through unmowed dandelion puffs. It was all perfect, exactly how she had begged for it to be. Begged to a god she didn’t believe in, and begged to ancestors and spirit guides she wanted to believe in.
Her two dogs were now chaotically wrestling next to her, bouncing all around, occasionally bumping into her where she sat on the porch steps, staring out at the woods. Her only reaction was to slowly but precisely move her cup of coffee out of harm’s way when they tumbled a little too close to it. This action was more of a reflex, because she wasn’t drinking the coffee. She had just habitually poured it, going through the motions of the morning, trying to mimic the actions she used to do.
Lottie could remember when she felt happy, hopeful, and even hungry. But she couldn’t remember what it felt like. It wasn’t like a switch had flipped and her disposition changed. It was like she had been slowly slipping on an icy pond, almost catching herself time and time again, and once she believed she was stable, the ice cracked and splash! She was drowning.
The porch steps where Lottie sat were where she had fought so hard to be. They were just about one million miles away from the sad and lonely home, deep in the Bible Belt, where she had grown up. And these steps, and the home attached to it, were all she wanted in the divorce, besides her daughter. She had let her ex walk away with what he loved most, his 401k and stocks, and she wanted what she loved most, her daughter, and the only real home she had ever had.
She was so tired. She had been fighting for most of her life. Fighting for her survival, her well-being, her space in the world, a world where she still didn’t know how to fit into.
But battle fatigue had crept in, and the realization of what it all meant had hit her square in the chest. And she didn’t know if she was ever going to be able to come back.
The thought crept into her mind - what if she couldn’t come back, and didn’t have to. What if what she was feeling was a death of her old self and she needed to be born into something new.
Lottie began to heavily sob, adding more tear stains to the pajamas she hadn’t changed out of since her daughter left to spend the weekend with her dad. She called upon god and the ghosts once again, this time to take away the pain. She was no stranger to falling through the ice into the cold waters of depression, and she knew all too well how hard it was to come back out.
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Lottie took a deep breath and straightened her back. She vowed to go back inside and do something today, do anything, but she was too tired to think.
The First Time the Ice Broke
When she was seventeen, Lottie walked out of the house she had grown up in for what would be one of the last times. She would visit a handful of times throughout the years, but it would never be her home again. It never really was. She was five-years-old her first night there. The springs on the pull out couch dug into her back but she didn’t complain. She just laid there, under the polyester blanket, listening to the plans her grandparents and mother were making in the next room. “You’ll move in with us…let the church make the funeral arrangements…sell the house.” She had watched her father being taken away that morning. His 6’ 7” body, too large for the gurney and the white sheet. No one had said the words “your dad has died”. But still, she knew. And that was the first time the ice broke and she fell into the drowning of hopelessness.
Twelve years later, when she was seventeen, her grandfather kicked her out of the house. She can’t even remember why. Everyone in that house, her grandparents and her mother, hated so many things about her, it would be impossible, and impossibly painful to try and measure which one was the final straw. By the time she was seventeen, she had grown into a tall, insolent young woman who questioned everything the Bible Belt tried to spoon feed her, and refused to back down from any would-be-bully, including the people responsible for raising her. But still, her heart broke from the loneliness that came from not being wanted by your own family. That was the second time the ice broke and she fell.
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