Loneliness feels like Scotland, the same way heartbreak aches like England, betrayal tastes like France, denial drinks like Ireland, and no place feels quite like home.
I wonder, over and over, where I’d be now if I hadn’t tried to quit.
Maybe I would have followed the game plan. Gone from Dublin to England to Paris, then down into rural France until the French was thick with Spanish accents. Then across the border to Madrid, Barcelona, trailing down to Andalucia with its flowing white hills, its fifteen-course meals, its twelve-time reconstructed walls. From there to Portugal, with a ferry to Morocco, a train ride back to Lisbon, and a plane ride back home. Maybe I would have been back in Utah in July, back in her arms, back with the girl I called my Harte, my brilliant Harte.
Maybe the plan would have changed beautifully. Maybe I would have hopped trains and planes to other European highlights. Maybe I would have eaten pasta in Italy, seen the summer snow in Sweden, taken a tent to Germany’s Hurricane festival, gone on a pilgrimage to Napoleon’s birthplace in Corsica, or made my way to the ancient heart of Greece, returning only in the nick of time for my classes.
Maybe it all would have happened the same, only I would have felt sane through it all. Maybe I wouldn’t have broken down and felt the need to come flying home, just to be with someone, anyone who knew my name. Maybe I would still be on the other side of the ocean.
Maybe if I hadn’t tried to quit, the sense of disconnection, isolation, wouldn’t have grown to be so big. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt trapped by my emotional maelstrom. Maybe she wouldn’t have lied. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt the need to find comfort in someone else’s kiss. Maybe.
But whatever “may be” I spin, the reality the “must be,” is what I actually have. This “must be” was a breakdown followed by a break like a fracture in my psyche followed by a retreat back into these fire-seed pills. Post-relapse, the world was a swirl of color I couldn’t quite swallow. It was a happy like you think of happy in a memory, feeling, Yeah, I was smiling then, right? Only in the present tense.
How can I talk about this story without talking about Harte? How can I talk about Harte without making this story about her?
She had been all my poetry since nearly the moment I met her. She entered my bloodstream fast. I could feel her igniting in my spine by week three, the back of my skull engulfed in a blissful blaze by week nine, my world’s colors taking on her hue, and she was running all my cylinders. Then peeling away, the hunger striking me with the thunderous hollow of barrel drums.
I drank her words. Her smile, her legs, her faery face, the trickle of her hands down the contours of my back—they would have been enough to hold me. But her words were poetry. Her words kept me there.
She was a blur, a high-gravity star spinning, a cosmic wind radiating through me. I kept trying to understand why I couldn’t seem to get over her, why I couldn’t return to “normal,” how she’d worked her way under my skin so quickly, so dangerously deeply.
When I first critiqued Harte’s poetry, I told her, “The things you say sound stunning, but some of these words feel like they’re only here because they’re beautiful. Really, do these words mean anything? Really, do these words mean anything at all?”
That, in a nutshell, was our love story.
I cut my pills into quarters, carefully dividing them, running the flat sharpness of the camping knife across them at a borrowed table in Scotland. Cold turkey hadn’t worked. Maybe if I lowered myself down slowly, my brain’s base-level could recover. In Galway, Ireland, it was a pill and a half. In Derry, Northern Ireland, a pill and a quarter. In Glasgow, Scotland, a single pill. Then to Edinburgh, where it was three-quarters of a pill, a half. Counting down, counting my quartered seedlings, honestly believing what I was experiencing was an extended flu—over weeks, months, the insistent ache against the craving for perpetual sleep or another god damned pill.
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