Content warning: suicide and self-harm
In French, there is a saying: l’appel du vide, the call of the void. Traditionally, it refers to the edges of cliffs or the wrought iron fences of balconies, the reflected beam of oncoming headlights scintillating in the swerve of the solid asphalt line, the vertigo of uninhabited space between the particles that separate you from the world. I wonder, too, if it refers to other empty calls, from drugs and cuts and cigarettes, to the spaces between my cells that make me, me. These spaces are voids within me I have tried to fill. The spaces between me and the world were never an issue like the ones inside my body. I sense the void in the emptiness within.
What traumas still linger in my cells after scars have healed?
At her daughter’s wedding, my great-aunt spoke about trying to fall in love with San Francisco, a city she had always hated, for the sake of her daughter. About her attempts to navigate the geography of hills, the ups and downs she undertook knowing they would be in vain. She said her daughter made her reevaluate assumptions. Not every little girl wants a pink room. Not all pain can be prevented. Some children won’t stay close to home. Not all wounds can be healed.
In my mind’s eye, I trace the pathways that neurons ignite when they fire. In doing so, I dispatch another flash of synaptic signal along the trail, reinforcing it. Each return reverberates more habitually. These passages are physical, located in real space diminished somewhere behind my eyes. I picture them like a system of interlocking highways, not abandoned but empty. I am the only vessel who navigates here.
The roads most repeatedly traveled are regularly repaved. When turnoffs become less frequented, they crumble into disrepair. The space in my brain somewhere behind my eyes diminishes. I wonder about patterns of thinking, about how they manifest physically in these passages in my brain. Are the self-destructive passages wider because they were more recurrently travelled? Do they take up more space?
My grandparents’ divorce initiated a split that ricocheted around the Great Lakes. My mother and her siblings set off like billiard balls, stillness turned to mobilized inertia. My mother never speaks about the rupture.
I used to say who would want to die unscarred and I meant it about cigarettes but I didn’t consider the cellular level. I didn’t know I would face the repercussions of a body scarred from the inside out. I meant it about the surface of my lungs, but I did not think about the folds of my brain. Are there scars etched there, transferred after fading from my skin?
Once suicide has been an option, the passages in your brain where neurons fire never fully close on that destination, they just narrow, no longer the preferred route but forever the first exit sign.
My cousins and I collect the pieces of our mothers’ lives. We feel the rupture. Sometimes these things skip a generation. My mother told me she was afraid I would turn out like my father’s sister, her mother, her grandfather—these ups and downs an all-too-familiar, jolted pattern. Are the spaces inside me spiraled into my DNA?
I put things down my throat because other passages were closed off to me. Deep-throating blunts that scorched the length of my larynx, swallowing blood, spitting out my own insides, chunks of skin, dry-heaving, vomiting again, raw like the walls of muscle you scraped against without warning, fingers grating against parts of me I avoided, virgin skin hoarse for years afterward. I penetrated my skin instead, blood seeped through seething vinegar lacerations, sizzling. There is no visible evidence of the event, but the echoes are housed somewhere, traced in neural geographies.
In Montana, at another wedding, my great-uncle spoke about his daughter as a child, adventurous and glowing. I didn’t recognize her in Montana, but I recognized her in his stories, swimming in the Great Lakes at my grandfather’s cottage. The girl in my great-uncle’s stories was the same girl I remembered splashing by the docks in a wide brimmed sunhat. What moved me were his memories of her, carefully preserved. Ones her husband did not know. What moved me was seeing her dance with childhood friends under stars, under string lights on the mountain. What moved me was Montana, a landscape that meant nothing to me but everything to these distant relatives.
My brain’s pathways are well-versed in suicidal ideation, like I was carving more than just my skin, I was carving pathways in my grey matter as well. Invested but volatile, I still don’t trust myself not to jump, cut away from the world at the nearest exit sign, gearshift on autopilot into death drive. The skin heals but the spaces inside don’t stay full, you have to keep filling them. L’appel du vide still sizzles somewhere behind my eyes.
At my step-grandpa’s third wedding, he told me stories about my parents. I had known about the Massachusetts rain at their wedding, guests sheltered under the tent in the field, water pooling at their feet. I had not known about the fireflies. The fireflies, according to my step-grandfather, were unlike anything he had ever seen before—or since. The whole field flooded with them, a sea of light, pinpointed.
How could I risk children inheriting these spaces between my cells where something should be? Could I ever forgive myself if they did? Could I ever forgive myself if I didn’t? Sometimes these things skip a generation.
I can’t unwind the empty highways from my DNA, but I wonder: could I run power lines alongside them? Coil in string lights for my children to dance under? Not all pain can be prevented. Not all wounds can be healed. But I will try in vain to navigate the geography of these hills, these ups and downs for my children, to gift them with a landscape of illuminated pathways spiralling around them, anchoring us in a constellation of pulsating particles.
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