Soul Mate: A Definition

The day after my twin sister's wedding I curled up in the corner of my parent's kitchen and fell asleep. At the time I said I was sitting there because the rest of the house was already overtaken by relatives. I said I was sick because my adrenaline had finally run out. As maid of honor, adrenaline was all I had been running on for a long time. But I've had a long time to think about it now.

I was sick for two weeks post-wedding. It wasn't the flu, strep throat, my appendix, or mono. They did blood tests to make sure. I had body aches and a fever of 101. I felt like I was going to vomit twenty-four hours a day, but nothing ever came up. Eventually, there was nothing there. It hurt to sit up. It hurt to be awake. But it also hurt too much to sleep. There were many restless nights on my parents’ couch. I had not recovered the strength to leave their house and return to my own apartment post-festivities. I felt so awful I wanted to die. Even after I returned to my apartment, to my job, to the world of the living, I ate nothing but water and Cheerios for another week. I couldn't trust my stomach for almost a month.

Once I could eat no one thought about my illness again. This is understandable because the year went on to offer up other slightly more recognizable challenges, and slightly more defined illnesses.

The year my sister got married was also the year I tried to kill myself. Some eight months after my sister said, "I do," I tried to say, "I'm done." It wasn't my sister's fault, but I do, and will, blame marriage.

At the very end of the summer of 2017, my boyfriend and I took a trip to Scotland and England. We visited Edinburgh Castle, the café where J.K Rowling wrote part of the Harry Potter series, Buckingham Palace, and the Charles Dickens Museum. All of this had been planned discussed and saved for. As a writer and an avid reader, it was like a storybook, with all the Instagramable photos, and all the artistic inspiration. But there is a reason some things remain in storybooks. There is a reason that movies appear on screen and not in mirrors. What I had not planned for, halfway across the world, was for my boyfriend of not yet a year, whom I had been living with for not even two months, to propose. Forty-eight hours before we were due to leave Scotland, together, he got down on one knee, very publicly, and asked me to marry him. And I, as all the films, and magazines, and weddings had instructed me to do, said yes.

This was the trigger for my second illness. It differed in its symptoms but was certainly no less severe. Rather than pain and fever, I felt only emptiness and chills. I was all but silent on the train from England back to Scotland. It was the same on the nonstop flight back to the United States. I will never know if sitting beside my boyfriend in flight would have been any worse than it was if I had, at the very first, said no. I wonder now how we could have gone on sharing a hotel room for another two days had I been able to say no at the outset.

For over two weeks upon returning home, I did not eat. I was alone in my head, trying to process why I wasn't anywhere close to happy, the way the world said I was supposed to be. I was silent, but I was anything but numb. I cried when I could be alone and not be overheard, usually in the shower. That is also where I began to work at my wrists.

I understand now that, despite what the films say, a proposal should never be a cold call. How it happens should be a surprise. The fact that it happens should not. It is a very brave thing to be able to say no.

It was my twin sister who reached out to my parents, who were out of the country when I returned. She told them I did not sound right when she spoke with me on the phone. It was her call that led my parents to me, in person, and my mom to notice the physical harm I was causing myself. The engagement that never made it to Facebook, and never reached the ears of anyone outside of my family, was called off.

Suicide attempts aren't something anyone likes to talk about. Not even when you're over three years away from having tried. It's almost like AA, it's supposed to be anonymous. There are no trophies or chips for surviving. There aren't sponsors or mentors. There's only a new loneliness because there is only you.

The loneliness is like not scratching a bug bite. Trying to ignore it all the time. Sometimes it's unbearable. All you can think of is scratching and scratching and scratching. Sometimes it is possible to forget it's there, but not always, and not forever.

And maybe that's why no one made a big deal a year out, two years, five, because you can't make a big deal about something that didn't happen. It's hard to make a big deal about something that isn't there. But my life seems to be much more defined by what it doesn't have than by what it does. I have no boyfriend. I have no husband. I have no children. What I do have is an apartment, one that I had to fight very hard for. After a year of living in my parents' basement, because I had to pay off half the lease on an apartment I no longer lived in, I was just, and finally, able to afford my own.

The world makes it seem as if the heart is something so much more fragile than the skin. I have learned from personal experience that in life that doesn't seem true. The tracks I drew beneath my wristwatch illustrated that point. The heart is resilient. I was supposed to feel something, the television always said, when he got down on one knee, but I felt nothing but cold. There was no storybook magic. There was only a story no one had ever told me before. No YA fiction ever prepared me to not want the ring and the kiss. Stories about finding yourself are written for and about teenagers, no one writes them for people who are closer to thirty than they are to high school.

There are no stories about me. No one writes about not getting married.  No one writes about not being institutionalized. No one writes about not having sex. No one writes about heartbreak that has nothing to do with a boy at all. There's no villain here. Not like in the books and the films. It's not exciting or well-plotted. But this has happened before, and it will happen again. What I know now, is that the first relationship, the one with my sister, the first loss, was by far the most painful. I did not adopt suicidal tendencies then, perhaps because that relationship, that love came and comes without the pressure of popular culture and the expectations of a planet. The depression and the self-harm can be explained now, the muscle aches, and nausea, and fever still cannot.

 Have you ever lost something you didn't know it was possible to lose? Something you didn't know was a separate piece of you in the first place? How could it ever fall off? How could it just disappear? The greater loss was my twin sister. When I became less than the most important person in her life the whole world shifted. Perhaps that illness, after her wedding, was the very physical manifestation of her being torn from me, in some esoteric way that also cannot be explained. Can souls tear apart? It's not a question I can answer. I just pay my rent.

While I still mark the anniversary of my not dying, I mark it for me. I mark not the reasons that sent me to the edge, but merely the fact that I did not fall over it. It is completely personal. The only thing I really feared losing then, was myself, and it is the one thing I was able to hold on to. But on my sister's anniversary, which like mine is also in the fall, I think of her. I think of us. That is the relationship that mattered and matters most. That is the only one I ever mourn for, even just a little. 

-Jessica Atkin

Jessie Atkin writes fiction, essays, and plays. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Writing Disorder, Daily Science Fiction, Space and Time Magazine, and elsewhere. Her full-length play, "Generation Pan," was published by Pioneer Drama. She can be found online at jessieatkin.com