Amanda Stern

She tells me that

If I were crazy, she'd tell me.

Totally don't believe that, but she says it.

Anyway, she doesn't like the way that I sound, so she tells me she's going to call a cab, and I should take it and come over to her house, which is five blocks away.

Now, the only thing that could actually get me out of my apartment would be the promise of being close to my mom.

We're not even, you know, we don't even really get along that well at this point, but the umbilical cord between us has never been cut.

So being near her, I feel, will just be the thing to get me out of my house.

So I raced down the hall and down the stairs and into this cab.

And the second that I shut the door, I look at the lock on the cab, and I put my fingers in a V, and I put them on either side of the lock because I want to be ready for when the cab driver depresses the lock because he's going to kidnap and murder me.

But I'll be fast, and I can flick the lock back up and race out of the cab.

Even in my suicidal despair, I can see how absurd this is, because here I am wanting to kill myself, but I'm afraid this guy is going to do it for me.

Like, wouldn't I want him to kill me?

But the truth is, I don't want to die.

I just don't want to feel like this anymore.

if only I could feel differently, if only I could not be filled with dread all the time, if only I could feel relief.

And in that moment, my body somehow calls up the feeling that I want, and I can feel it across my chest, and it is so delicious, it's so perfectly perfect.

It gives me a third option.

Because the truth is, it's not the absence of feeling that I want, it's the presence of relief that I long for.

And I know that the only way to feel this feeling, to fill my body with it, is to conquer my fear.

And the only way to conquer my fear is to face it.