Academic Papers

          The first time I realized I had depression, I was nine years old. I spent my days hiding with my mom’s old photo album. The page with my grandfather’s suicide note was always where I stopped as I read the letter over and over again. I would wonder why he killed himself, wonder if I would ever feel the hopelessness that he had and then I realized that, secretly, I did. I never knew my grandfather but his suicide several years before I was born shaped me in many ways that I didn’t even realize.

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          I found myself trying to find ways to end my life, but I didn’t want anyone to know. I would pay less attention; do things that should have resulted in a tragic end. I often say that I made my guardian angel work overtime when I was younger.

 

          From those early days came my early teens where I would lock myself in the bathroom, a blade dancing next to my skin as I debated on whether I should cut myself. I started cutting when I was twelve and focused mostly on burning my skin. If I look hard enough, I can still see the scars that are there. By fourteen, the school marked me as an at risk after two of my friends had killed themselves and another three had been admitted for attempting. It was a dark time for all of us, but I hid all of it from my family. I didn't want anyone to know that I was hurting.

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          But they should have been worried for other reasons. Before I was even thirteen, I realized that I wasn’t capable of taking my own life, so I went back to doing things that put me at risk. At twelve, I climbed into the car of a twenty-four-year-old man. He drove off with me, no one knew where I was and when we parked in the dark, he turned to me and said, “You know why I brought you here.”

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          “I know, but you won’t.” He watched me as I sat staring at him, waiting for him to make the decision with his conscious.

 

          “How old are you?”

 

          “Twelve.”

 

          The sigh was heavy as he turned back to the steering wheel, “I thought you were sixteen.”

 

          “I know.”

 

          Maybe it was the lack of emotion in my voice or the way that I wasn’t panicking or maybe it was something in me that others felt the need to protect, something I wasn’t expecting from people, but he just leaned back, putting as much space between us as the small car allowed and said, “Maybe we can just talk.”

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          And then he laid at my feet all his hopes, his dreams, the highs and lows, the feelings of being less of a man that felt he could only seduce sixteen-year-old girls. I listened and, two hours later, he dropped me off at the youth center where he had picked me up. He looked deep into my eyes and said, “Don’t ride with strange men anymore.”

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          “I won’t,” I said but we both knew I was lying. I spent the rest of the night fighting with my friend, who had wanted to be the one who drove away with him earlier. Then I went home, thought about his sadness and burned my arm to remind myself that I also hurt.

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          And that became my teen years. Person after person who kept picking me up in their strange cars and telling me all their lows, their sadness; I realized that, for a few brief hours, I was their salvation and they returned it by keeping me safe from those who would hurt me, each time making me promise that I wouldn’t climb into a car or go off with strangers who had the desire to do me harm.

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          When I was fifteen, I began hitchhiking to avoid taking the bus to school. I was bullied and I didn’t want to climb onto the bus while everyone watched me. So instead, I would head out a good hour before the bus was due and walk the hour to school down a lonely highway. My thumb would wave in the cool air at each passing car, and I knew, one day, I would be picked up and that would be the last anyone would see me.

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          The first time, when the large, grizzled bear of a man picked me up, I looked around at the trees crowding the road – making our meeting a secret. His black muscle car with the tinted windows was as ominous as his dark beard and darker eyes. I slid into his car, hesitating only slightly; sure that he was my doom. But instead, I spent the ten-minute drive into town with him lecturing me on hitchhiking. Then he pulled up to the curb by the school and I slipped out. He looked at me, sighed and said, “Same time tomorrow.”

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          I simply nodded but it became the same time several times a week. And I learnt so much from him and from the old woman who picked me up on days when he wasn’t there and from the old man who would tell me all the things that had put him where he was. And the stories were sad. I often think that they would head out in the morning searching for me. I was their connection to their thoughts; the silent traveler who would let them lay their worries at her feet before she collected them as she got out of the car.

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          The bear of a man was extremely gentle. He preferred solitude to people because he had been hurt so many times. He worked but he kept away from everyone. The only joy he had was the muscle car that he worked on during his free time. He had had children, had had a wife but she left him and took the kids with her. The divorce hadn’t been pretty and the kids were angry with him; refused to see him. Maybe he saw his daughter in me as he would drive towards town, talking about them, about his regrets.

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          The old woman was sharp and extremely intelligent, but you could see in the lines around her eyes that she had spent a lot of her life worrying. Her kids were grown and were living in the lower mainland – too busy to come home and visit her so she kept herself busy with her work and her garden. And she liked to drive; she would simply point the car in a direction and drive until she felt like she should turn around. But after the first time she picked me up on the side of the road, the first time I felt a tremor of fear as a lone semi truck was waiting 10 feet up the road for me to climb into the cab, she made a habit of turning her car towards my route whenever she felt the need to drive.

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          And finally, there was the old man. A part of me loved him, and his brown, flea bitten cur that sat in the back seat wagging her ragged tail, the most. The car was disgusting; garbage piled on every seat but after he had picked me up that first day, he would carefully keep my seat free of garbage and dirt. The only clean spot in his car was reserved for me and he would talk about dropping out of school in grade seven. Of a life of trying to scrape by with barely anything and of all the regrets he had. He would talk of his home at the town dump, where he was employed to keep people out during the night after a few people had killed some bears.

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          While they would talk about themselves, they rarely talked about me. The first few trips, they would ask the silent girl questions about herself, but I would stare at them and answer with non-committal words. We knew the moment I slipped into their car, I was there to listen to them...and listened I did. Before we knew it, they had stopped asking and would simply start talking where we had left off the trip before.

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          Every day I walked that road, I would see one of them and they would drive me into town only to say, “Sirena, stop walking, take the bus.” I would nod and they would nod but we always knew they would find me on that road again.

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          And just like that, our time together was done. I didn’t say goodbye, simply slipped away when I disappeared out of the town to live with my mom again. But they had left their impact on me, and I stopped all of the things from before. I didn’t burn myself, didn’t cut, started taking school seriously and just moved forward in life; my depression had been worked through, their stories had eased a pain inside me that I couldn’t ease on my own.

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          I still found myself being stopped on the street, or in the hallway of my apartment building, by strangers who would cry against me and tell me all the horrors they had seen in their lives. I would stand there and let them cry. When they finished, I wouldn’t say anything as they wiped their tears and walked away; their steps lighter than when they had first looked into my grey-green eyes. And I would gather up their sorrows and carry on – searing each story to my heart as I did.