Tracie Adams

October 2020

That phone call really broke me. Even though the engraved message on the front of this leather journal tells me “You’re not broken, you’re wounded, and God can heal wounds.” No, I am definitely broken. I heard her voice on the other end, droning in soulless monotone about how I will always live on the outside, just out of reach of the inside jokes and family gatherings. I mean, I think that’s what she said. At least that’s what I heard. Then I felt something snap, something in my head went BOOM, went fuzzy, went limp. All I wanted to do was cry die. I’m still alive, but I’m more dead numb than anything, shuffling my monstrous heavy feet, swinging lifeless arms, my words grotesquely slurred. I hope this isn’t contagious. Maybe I should tell my husband, my children, my best friend. Someone no one needs to know I’m walking around dead. 

December 2020 

My brain is rotting. I can feel it shriveling decomposing while I lie in bed all day, refusing to eat, unable to talk laugh care live. I’m afraid I will infect my family with this sadness grief despair. I don’t want to ruin do Christmas. No nativity scenes or sparkly mantles this year. The only way to end this living nightmare is to permanently disconnect my brain from my body, to kill the thoughts the memories the depression that causes the rot. I thought about my options: shooting, stabbing, pills. But then I will still be dead, not here and not there. Belonging nowhere, a nomad, an animated corpse. I tried to explain this to that therapist who says I overreacted catastrophized the phone call from my sister. I am having a major depressive episode, nihilistic thoughts, a perfect storm she says, because I tried to slay the eating disorder that had once saved my life. Maybe she’s right, maybe I tried to change too much too soon by bringing up all the trauma memories in our EMDR sessions and removing my coping mechanisms eating solid food at the same time. Or maybe this is what it means to live among the dead die among the living. 

January 2021

I’m still dead, but now it’s worse. The eating was not helpful possible, so I stopped. I have starved myself for so long that I can barely walk think straight carry on a conversation. It doesn’t matter though, because everyone knows dead people don’t eat, and they certainly don’t talk. My family has mostly given up on me, except for my youngest daughter who is clearly terrified. Each time she comes to take away the trays of uneaten food, she lingers over my shriveled body, like she can use the power of her mind to make me move. I wish she would could perform that kind of magic. Last week, she spent her sweet sixteen with no celebration. Zombies don’t wrap gifts bake cakes sing happy birthday. My husband is scared too, although he shows it by laughing in my face when I start screaming that the house is going to burn. The transformer across the street blew and caught on fire. I was convinced it was the apocalypse after all. No matter how many times I tell him how to help me through a panic attack, he just cannot will not figure it out. So he laughs and tells me the house the dogs our life won’t burn. We have been without power for a week, my freezing bones rattling under heavy blankets in the spare bedroom, where I have slept all week since we all came down with COVID. In between trips outside to check on the generator, he pops his head in my door to see if I’m sleeping breathing. My body, weakened by depression the eating disorder grief, has nothing to fight the virus with, nothing to fight the demons the memories.

April 2022 

It has been a while since I’ve journaled here. Reading the past entries is a little terrifying, it reads like bad fiction a low budget horror film an episode of Fear Factor Survivor. Spoiler alert: no one dies in the end. I fired the therapist and hired a new good one. I remembered how to pray. I remembered my free will. My husband figured out how to talk me off the ledge. I’m eating food, every day. The brain inflammation I suffered from COVID has resolved. I know now that it was not my sister’s phone call that tried to kill me, it was someone else something worse. It was me. Today my daughter and I are getting lunch going shopping for a prom dress getting pedicures celebrating. No more freight trains in my head panic attacks walking dead. Turns out there is more than one way to recover from Anorexia beat depression kill a zombie. 

Tracie Adams is a writer and teacher in rural Virginia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Does It Have Pockets, Cleaver Magazine, Bodega, Anodyne, Discretionary Love, The Write Launch, Bright Flash Literary Review, and others. Read her work at www.tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on Twitter @1funnyfarmAdams.