I can appreciate that

I'd like to offer myself some false reassurances.

I'm twenty. I'm sitting in my parents' office, which is now my bedroom, because being in my old one upstairs reminds me of suicide. I'm crying. Today is my birthday. I'm twenty and I don't want to be alive.

My present self enters.

I think I would be sort of cautious. I don't like fiction or make-believe scenarios, and I'm not sure why I would be coming to this particular moment, or any past moment. But to continue with meeting my past self, I think I would hesitate at the door. Look around. Feel the 95 degree heat of a July afternoon and watch the walls sweat. Who wouldn't be sweating, watching me cry? It's embarrassing. I think of my mom. Who wouldn't? It always comes back around to who touched that part of ourselves that leaves us irreparably broken.

Turning twenty felt like committing to the life I had led up until that moment. It felt like my office-turned-bedroom, where I would watch the yellow wallpaper until I saw things in it that weren't there, all to feel something. I had depression and depression had me. I saw my life unfolding before me and I hated it, all of it. I wanted to die.

I swore to myself: I'll never see thirty. I realize in retrospect: how else was I supposed to get through that moment?

My present self would then put an arm around my past self.

I don't think I'll ever be really, truly happy. But right now, at almost thirty, things are good. I'm stable, relatively. I would doubtlessly, in this scenario in which I'm speaking to my past self, be holding a margarita. I spin it around in my hand, ice sloshing. Thinking: this girl needs a LIFE.

But I wouldn't tell myself that.

I would say: it's hard. It might not be worth it. But you're ALIVE DAMN IT.

And a good yell is all anybody crying really needs. Something louder than the pain.

I would appreciate that at least.