My mind is fucking racing. I lay here in thick, suffocating silence, stranded in the gulf between nausea and despair. Curled in the fetal position I stare. I stare at the poster haphazardly hung on the wall outside my door. It’s unframed, the corners curling at the edges. I used to love this risograph print of Margot from The Royal Tenenbaums, sitting in her bathtub, hands draped over the edges as she stares at something I can’t see. But now the scene just plays over and over in my mind until my eyes glaze over.

Margot sits in the bathtub, eyes deadpan, staring at the TV she’s tied to the radiator. It looks precarious, the way it’s perching over the water in the bath, in that small space between life and death. Her mother sits on the stool next to the tub, hands clasped on top of tightly crossed legs.

Ralli says you’ve been locked in here for six hours a day, watching television and soaking in the tub. She looks concerned; Margot is unphased, unflinching.

I doubt that, she replies, still deadpan.

I relate.

I don’t soak in a tub; I burrow under a blanket. I watch hours of New Girl. I am hypnotized by the drumbeat of the twenty-minute episodes and my own words just one more, just one more, just one more. At the end of every episode, I watch the gray bar, it loads, it declares that I will “Watch Next Episode.” And I do, again and again, more and more, even as I tell myself I won’t. I move when the pain in my bladder becomes sharp, an alert. Other times it’s the cracking from the corners of my lips; thirst. It must be insufferable though; I have to feel desperate to muster the energy to emerge. This is the loop, day after day, night after night. I felt guilty at first, haunted by the empty take-out boxes, the neglected work, the concerned friends, but it faded away pretty quickly. I am good at drowning out the voices, those kinder ones that beg me to get up, to walk, to talk, to do something. Those voices are a nuisance, the fly buzzing in my ear. And so, I curl the blanket tighter, and turn the volume up louder, and sink deeper. Hours roll by. I check my watch just for fun. Four hours, Five hours, Margot with her six hours. Sometimes I beat her with seven.

The nights creep in.

Every year I am surprised by how endless winter nights are, full of their pregnant darkness. I’m jumpy in the shadows, from the corner of my eyes I see things that scuttle, creeping, visions of cockroaches crawling all over the walls, air thick and infested with flies. Flashes of memory, dancing figures from my past, old loves, old losses, embarrassing encounters, moments that sting with shame. I become manic about all the dirt and the dust and the pieces of me scattered in the wind. I scrub floors and dishes, I scrub dishes and floors, I wipe surfaces and rearrange the furniture, I refold my clothes, I scrape at corners and grime. Then I collapse. I let the dust gather. I ignore the coffee rings on my bedside table. I throw my clothes into a pile on the floor at the end of every day. Things slow down.

I think autumn is the season of death.

A beautiful, radiant, manifestation of death. The last of the light. Trees glowing with their final goodbye, yellow, orange, red leaves aflame against bright October skies. Underneath a canopy, I tilt my face toward the light, twirling in awe as I stare up and watch them fall, detaching from knobbly branches to float toward the earth. I imagine being engulfed by fallen leaves; I imagine them gathering around me and forming a cocoon. I imagine burning in primary colors before fading to gray. I imagine laying my body on the ground and slowly wilting, melting into the dirt. I imagine a death without suffocation. I wonder what it must feel like to be a phoenix without any ashes.

I bury myself.

Before I open the front door, I make sure the noise-canceling function is on. I drown the noise from my eardrum, I let music carry me somewhere, while my legs do the walking. I see the bright lights of empty New York skyscrapers in the distance, the ghost of the Empire State Building looming behind the BQE. I walk and I walk, ignoring signs and streetlights. I feel the harsh gust of a narrowly missed car. I realize this happens with alarming frequency and I realize how little I care. For a moment I see myself standing in front of the car and I feel nothing. Nothing except fear that I may survive.

I always return to my bed.

I pull the covers over my body and pile pillows over my head. I hold my breath and see how long I can hold it. I stare at my phone for hours and scroll through the lives of others. I see my friends and their babies and their homes and their artsy stories and I go deeper into the hole, finding myself in pictures from 2014 of someone who dated my ex, the one who dumped me eight years ago. I have no idea how I got here, but I will go deeper. The happiness of others is incredulous to me, this marvelous, mystical experience. I cannot grasp it.

I’ve started to find comfort in the gray of 5 a.m., in the cold crisp sheets.

This comfort fades quickly and 

snow falls all winter

it falls it falls it falls

I fall too

I spend hours sitting, staring out the window, but the snow never settles

wet and ruddy tires leave engravings in the slush

endless, continuous, the snow falls and

there comes an April afternoon and I am sitting on the floor and I cannot breathe my throat is so tight I gasp I am gasping my hands are shaking I tremble I shake the pills they rattle in the bottle some fall on the floor shaking hands pick them up what am I doing I don’t know but I stuff them into my mouth and then I stuff some more and I look around for my bottle of water dry swallowing the first few and then washing the rest down with whatever saliva I can find that taste is bitter and I feel bitter bitter bitter but breath is stuck somewhere in my closing airway help me breathe If only I can breathe everything will be okay will everything be okay?

a haze settles in

there’s a body curled up beside me on the floor

the two of us have been here before

arms wrapped. tightly. She protects me.

as long as you need, we can lay here. And we do.

Later she rummages around for a notebook and pulls out a pen. In it she writes:

I am worthy, I am significant, I am filled with light, my pain is valid.

Spring takes her time. The blossoms are shy, uncertain of how to open toward the light. Some fall, unable to withstand this brightness, these vast open skies. Regeneration is a meandering process, between movements and moments, going a little bit forward, a little bit backwards. I find myself in the twisted vines and in the cupped green leaves. Sometimes I am ready to accept the light, some light, the light I can create.

It’s July when I am walking through the aisles of the supermarket, unimpressed with the limp sandwiches and the sloppy beige mayonnaise pasta bowls. It’s morning, too early for candy and snacks. I wander over to a fridge with some sad-looking salads. I pick them up one by one, examining the ingredients, flipping the boxes over to check how wilted the vegetables look. I sense a shuffling from behind and a man walks up to me. He stops, stooped in a shabby brown overcoat, holding a worn briefcase at his side. We look at each other for a moment, and I feel guarded, uncertain of what he wants. He takes a breath. He smiles.

Isn’t it a beautiful day to be alive?

I pause surprised by the question, overwhelmed by the question.

Yes, I hear myself saying. It is a beautiful day to be alive.

-Nicole Drakopoulos

Nicole Drakopoulos is a Gemini-sun, Sagittarius-moon, day-dreamer, idealist, writer and poet, currently in the midst of an expansive Saturn Return. She feels most at home in the spaces she can be a stranger—on a park bench, in a crowd, walking on a city street. Nicole survives daily life by drinking black coffee, reading first-person creative nonfiction, and taking care of her plants. In the past she worked as the Managing Editor and contributing writer for Eternal Remedy, a Brooklyn-based literary arts collective. She is currently working on a collection of essays and completing an MA at the Graduate Centre in New York.