The Time in Between

My therapist is propped on my windowsill. Her background is blurry and beige, making her a floating head on my screen. She asks if I’m somewhere new. No I’m not, I say, just a different angle of my room. We’ve just started back up again, me and her. She’s got the name of one of my ex-girlfriends. I feel safe and good in her presence. When she talks, it’s with her hands, and I watch her engagement ring bob up and down like I’m a cat with a laser toy. Today there’s nothing pressing to talk about in the present, so we’re talking about the past. Prior to getting sober, I hated these kinds of days. Why puncture a scar and turn it back into a wound? “Masochism,” I’d think to myself through a pulsing hangover; back when I’d either lie to my therapist or skip our sessions entirely. In active addiction, sessions like these would propel me into either mania or depression, resulting in a bender of substances or a bender of self. Today is different. I am almost two years sober and know where the bandages are stored and how to properly dress a wound. Over time, I’ve proved to myself and others that when I go into the dark, I will not overstay my welcome. I’ve promised to be brief and efficient, as I’ve learned lingering does me no good. But still, I go.

Today we are talking about The Time in Between. I look at my reflection in the corner of the screen with my wet hair and bedroom in reverse. The season has turned to the gray in between of fall and winter, and there’s that feeling again in my blood and bones. The ten-year anniversary of my father’s death is approaching, which means the core beliefs I have about myself and the world are getting bolder again. Let me look at you now, I tell them with a voice as coaxing and soft as I can muster. I am no longer Joan with a sword but Joan with a torch.

During The Time in Between, I was in the ensemble of my high school production of Chicago. I wore a black leotard and fishnets and stood in the wings. I often found myself in a room with the adults in charge. The last time I’d seen my father, he was blue on the floor after an intentional overdose, and I’d sworn it was there I’d seen him die. But I was told he was getting better somewhere else. My mother’s side of our extended family gathered for Thanksgiving, and we spoke nothing of the big bad thing. My father signed a lease on an apartment down the street from our home. He told my mother he wanted to come see the show and buy me a new iPhone. I told my mother I never wanted to see him again.

All of these things happened simultaneously at accelerated speed. And then he died, and it was like that time had never happened at all. Because how could it have? It’s the quiet moments of trauma that creep up on you. That lodge themselves in your subconscious and burrow. Insidious and waiting, they find you ten years later when the air smells cold and suddenly you’re so much older than seventeen. They are one of the reasons you drank. They are one of the reasons you got sober. They get caught in your throat when you are seated in a clumsily arranged circle with a cold cup of coffee and you hear the words, “We do not regret the past, nor do we wish to shut the door on it.” Because you do regret the past. They are the reason you know it is possible for a person to feel two things at once, because you do. You hate a seventeen-year-old girl who is you. You hate her for being a teenage girl slamming a door in her father’s face because that is what teenage girls do. Your therapist reminds you of this. You hate when people say, “Recognize the signs of suicide,” because you did and you do. You love a seventeen-year-old girl who is you. You know it wasn’t your fault. You know that with the part of your brain that can intellectualize emotions and gets you through grad school. But there’s a deeper part of you that truly thinks you could have saved the sad man if only you’d have let him buy you a new iPhone and come see you sing. The Time in Between is the reason your life turned out the way it did. The Time in Between is the reason you are who you are.

It sounds like a fable or Schrödinger’s cat or the kind of science fiction Ray Bradbury dances with in Dandelion Wine. It sounds like that because it is like that. After all, how can we ever really be certain of what we can’t see? In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Megan Falley uses the word “allegedly” in speaking of the death of their late spouse Andrea Gibson. And it is true. “Allegedly” we die, and “allegedly” we are born. I suppose the story of life, death, and anyone’s time in between would sound like a fallacy to a creature from any other universe or galaxy plane. I’m getting ahead of myself, which is what I tend to do when talking, writing, or screaming about The Time in Between. My mother and I often jumble our words trying to recount the timeline of events; resorting to describing what it felt like in our bodies. Calling on the memory held in our five senses or maybe even a sneaky secret sixth one. The Time in Between makes for an excellent middle-grade writing exercise. I saw my mother’s pajama pants tucked into her mismatched socks. I smelled dead leaves. I felt cold pavement on my bare feet. I heard my father breathe in a way I’d never heard a person try to breathe. And a few days later, I tasted turkey and gravy and a sip of my cousin’s red wine.

In the simplest of terms, The Time in Between marks a stretch of days between my father’s two deaths. “Allegedly” he only died once, on December 8th, 2015 alone in a newly leased apartment, but that theory has yet to be proven in the core or context of my soul. When I’ve attempted to write about The Time in Between, I’ve been met with copious marks of red pen from professors and editors. “I’m confused… Did your father die in November or December?” or “Make the timeline more clear.” Lots of underlining and question marks that have led ultimately to the same conclusion: “leave this part out.” And I agree. I attempt to make it make sense to my therapist in her little beige box in the same way I’ve attempted with an ambiguous reader; in the same way I’ve attempted with myself.

A few days after therapy, my mother visits me in the city to make an entirely new Thanksgiving tradition just us two. I take her to the now bare tree in Central Park where I’ve spread some of my dad’s ashes. It rests adjacent to The Dakota, where John Lennon was shot on December 8, 1980, thirty-five years to the day of my father’s suicide. The placement was entirely unintentional on my behalf; but perhaps somewhere in the universe it was not on my dad’s. He was and is coincidental that way. I find it remarkable how resilient grief is and how it still lingers between my mother and me, forming a negative space between us where a father should be. I was recently reminded of the song “Three Is a Magic Number” from Schoolhouse Rock and the lyrics, “A man and a woman had a little baby, they had three in the family.” It only takes one birth to make a family and one death to take it away.

Me and my mother eat a prix fixe Thanksgiving meal in the West Village. The server asks us if we’re from New England based on my mother’s pronunciation of the word “scallops.” New Englanders love a traditional Thanksgiving, he remarks. We’re surrounded by three other pairings of mothers alone with their daughters. I wonder whose fathers are absent or dead or were never there to begin with. I sip my non-alcoholic drink and remain right where I am, no longer floating fuzzy above or below the reality of our life. Here comes the writing exercise again. I smell pine. I taste pumpkin soup with pepitas. Later, I’ll feel my mother’s damp cheek against mine and see how time has aged us both. I guess I was convinced we’d stay looking the same forever. Ten years is so far away. Ten years is no time at all.