Surrendering to gravity

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I knew there was something strange about John from the first time I met him, but that’s what drew me to him. The black polish on his nails was chipping off and the ebony liner framing his glacial blue eyes was melting in the crushing humidity of East Tennessee in August. He looked a little like Kurt Cobain — sharp eyes, a strong jaw, yet frail beneath his punky appearance.

It was my first day of classes as a college freshman, and at the time I smoked cigarettes. That’s how I met all of my first college friends — we all smoked. In our minds we were rebels, braving the heat and cold and rain to shave minutes off our lives, one puff at a time. Looking back, smoking was a status symbol of sorts, the way we identified members of our unruly clan.

I was already bewildered by where I fit in this great mass of people. It was a Wednesday evening, my classes were over and I was making my way back to the dorm after having dinner with my roommate. John was sitting on the corner of a brick flowerbed outside the dorm — “the stoop” we called it — a cigarette dangling from his fingers. Other people surrounded John and my gregarious roommate suggested we stop and “make friends.”

I was anorexic and completely neurotic about how people saw me — my mind, my body, the whole package — but I hid behind a smile and extroversion that belied my feelings. Some things never change.

John barely said a word while everyone around him buzzed — sophomores laughing about a friend vomiting from a balcony at a keg party the previous year, freshmen listening intently, laughing at the stories, their need to fit in unmistakable, uncomfortable at times.

Through his silence John smiled and laughed. When he did finally speak, I remember noting that he waited for a break in conversation. He never forced his way in. His remarks were the pithy kind that only come from truly listening.

I can’t remember talking directly to John that first night, but as the weeks passed I would find myself sitting beside him on that stoop, smoking too many cigarettes and talking about our mutual love of Nirvana, Tool and Nine Inch Nails. We loved the same books and movies, and both of us were nearly crippled by self-consciousness, which we hid in order to be a part of the rowdy gang of Stoop Smokers.

John smoked more than any of us. The first and second digits of the pointer and middle fingers of his right hand were yellowed from a constant stream of cigarettes. He was always perched near the ashtray post just outside the front doors of our dorm, pack of Marlboro Reds at his side, staring out into the courtyard as though he were waiting for something.

I would tag along for long rides in John’s truck, toking on skunky pot and listening to the newest A Perfect Circle record, plotting what concert we’d see next, replaying last weekend’s raucous party and, of course, smoking cigarettes. I did most of the talking.

But I always knew, somewhere deep inside, that John’s silence was more than just his personality. Despite the fun we had, despite our shared struggles with selfesteem and depression, there were signs that something powerful lurking just beneath the surface controlled much of my friend’s behavior.

John made it through first semester, but his grade point average placed him on academic probation. He was constantly on the stoop chain smoking, rarely venturing to class, and his ability to interact with people seemed like it was deteriorating.

It was just a few weeks into second semester when John told me he was leaving school. I was upset, but it seemed like the only viable option. He moved out of the dorm and back home with his parents. For a while I would hear from him, a phone call here or a letter there, but communications got fewer and further between until one night I realized it had been many months since I’d spoken with him and I called John during a break at work.

He was terse. He offered little information about his own life and asked almost nothing about mine. He said he was dating someone and I wondered if the relationship was the catalyst for his brusque behavior. The conversation lasted only a few minutes before I said good-bye, asking that he call me soon.

* * * * 

Time passed in that imperceptible way it moves when you’re young. It was more than a year before I heard from John again.

It was the summer of 2007 that fully brought John back into my life. He began calling and emailing me, expressing extreme displeasure with his living situation (at home with his parents) and his job (cooking at a chain restaurant). He said he was sorry for how he treated me the last time we spoke, and while I felt discomfort during our conversation, I chalked the feeling up to John’s unhappiness and told him he could always look to me for help.

And then he called one day and said he wanted to move out of his parents’ home and in with me — just for a while.

I was panicked. I was living with my best friend and three cats, serving banquets at a hotel, working through college and shriveling under the anxiety of a very unhealthy romantic relationship. When I had offered help I hadn’t expected it to involve housing my friend. I could barely keep myself afloat.

But I didn’t want to turn him away. I had offered after all, but I was too young and naive to understand that I couldn’t really help at all.

John had purchased a ticket to attend a music festival with my boyfriend and me and I knew John’s home life was suffocating, to say the least. Within a day or two John showed up with a duffle bag of clothes and a box of CDs and other knick-knacks.

John was anxious and unfocused from day one and he was still smoking like a chimney. When we packed the car to head to the festival the day after he arrived, John spoke little. It was a long drive, just under three hours, and when traffic brought us to a dead stop John hopped out of the car to smoke, lighting one cigarette off another.

We arrived at the festival late in the evening. It had taken the better part of six hours to travel and get through security, park and set up camp. I was exhausted as I cooked dinner for everyone on my old propane stove, and once we’d eaten we agreed to call it a night and make the most of the next day.

But when we woke the next morning, John wasn’t in his tent. His phone was dead. There were tens of thousands of festivalgoers already milling about the grounds, with thousands more piling in every hour.

As my partner and I headed out into the festival late in the morning, we saw John. He looked dazed and pale. Shell-shocked. We asked that he come back with us to the campsite where I dragged out the propane stove and began to make cheese quesadillas for lunch — an endeavor intended more to shift my focus away from my anxiety than to actually feed anyone. My stomach was in knots.

We cracked beers and tried to keep the conversation light, but it was clear John was too agitated and confused. He had wandered the festival grounds all night.

“I met people who told me the whole story. They told me the truth,” John told us. He couldn’t tell us much about these people or about the truth they had shared.

I tried to calm John, but he was inconsolable. He repeated that he knew the truth. He told us he forgave us for lying to him, but couldn’t explain how we’d lied.

My boyfriend thought John had spent the night using drugs — he was anxious, confused and refusing to eat. And we doubted these “truth-speakers” John spoke of were real.

But I never believed it was drugs — at least it wasn’t solely drugs.

After what felt like an eternity of awkward, cyclic conversation, my boyfriend and I stopped trying to reason with John and asked him to seek help from a medical professional or call his family.

John left the campsite and called his family, who drove three hours to pick him up. The following week he came to my home and picked up his things. He apologized for his behavior, and I forgave him.

We didn’t speak for months.

In the early days of 2008 I began receiving strange text messages from John. Sometimes they were little more than word salad, but sometimes they indicated in clear, structured sentences that God had spoken to him, that leaders of an unnamed project had been blocking our line of communication, or that cameras had been set up in my apartment to watch me. I tried to reason with John and explain that his messages weren’t based in reality, but he never responded to reason. I asked him to get help, but he ignored my pleas. His messages came and came at all hours of the day and night. I finally changed my phone number.

I decided to call to the police in his hometown, who told me they could do nothing for me if John had made no physical threats to me, and they could do nothing for John unless he consented to treatment at a facility.

My next call was to John’s mother. In no uncertain terms she told me to mind my own business.

Sometimes months would pass and I’d hear nothing from John, then an onslaught of emails would appear for weeks on end. I went a long time without responding, afraid that any response might exacerbate his delusions. I became angry with John, but I regularly found myself awake at night writing in journals about how angry I was at myself for being mad at him. The cycle was never-ending.

One day I got an email from John’s friend David, whom I’d never met. He said that John’s behavior had been strange, but it was evident that John valued my friendship above all things. David said John spoke of me regularly. David had been so concerned about John that he sought me out to discuss John’s health.

I explained the emails and text messages to David, who told me that John had not revealed such delusions to him, nor had John battered David with a similar blitz of messages. There was little David or I could do, both knowing that John would have to seek help for himself. But there was comfort in knowing that someone else cared so much about John.

For the last seven years I have received messages from John at any account he can find for me. Sometimes the messages involve delusions and paranoia; sometimes they only include his mailing address and phone number. As I was writing this essay I got an email informing me that someone had looked at my LinkedIn profile — it was John.

I try to respond from time to time, particularly when he seems lucid, but I no longer try to reason his delusions away.

This story has no end, no satisfying closure. That’s kind of the way it is with mental illness — it doesn’t just go away. My friend is still out there presumably suffering from something that I can only speculate is schizophrenia, but I’m no doctor. All I know is that my friend is experiencing something I can’t understand, seeing and hearing things that can’t be there, and it holds him back from being the brilliant man I know he is.

I know that John fits the profile of a schizophrenic — the time of onset, the compulsive smoking, the delusions, the ebb and flow of his symptoms, his refusal to address his hallucinations. From what I’ve read, schizophrenics are rarely violent toward others, but they do have a high rate of attempted suicide. This keeps me awake some nights.

I’ve learned to separate my friend from his disorder. I’ve learned that you have to set boundaries and you have to forgive yourself for mistakes you make as you try to cope with mental illness. Sometimes you must put your own needs first.

But I still struggle with feeling like I failed John. I’ll always love my friend. Through my own debilitating depression I have thought of him, his struggle, our good times, and I found strength. I still think of him each time I listen to “Gravity” by A Perfect Circle:

I am surrendering to gravity and the unknown 

Catch me, heal me, lift me back up to the sun 

I choose to live 

Please choose to live, my friend.

Names were changed due to the personal nature of this story. 

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