Breathe out (tick) breathe in (tock) breathe out (tick) breathe in (tock). Breaths measured only by the ticking of a failing clock.

Time had stopped hours before. It was dark. My head rested in the hollow of an unyielding pillow, eyes glued to the shadowy ceiling, and sleep was nowhere, not even an afterthought. The only accompaniment I had in my fever of wakefulness was the tape. It operated silently and mysteriously, transmitting wave after wave of thoughts into my head, and I lay there powerless to disable it. All I could do was lie still as it reduced me to a lump of boneless flesh with a racing heartbeat.

The tape had been running nonstop in my head for weeks, and I was too tired to turn it off. I let it go, repeating the same things over and over until my head spun and nothing was real. You are not good enough. That is why you are alone. You are not good enough for anyone. You will never win. You will never be important. You will never succeed. You will never be loved. You are sick. You are ugly. You will fail. You will fail. You have failed.

There was no rest for me when the thoughts started, playing over and over in an unending loop, driving me mad with their repetition. Loneliness begets repetition, and it was loneliness that finally kicked the tape on in the first place, loneliness that finally plugged it in and hit the switch. I had been alone for almost two years with no one to fix things and no one to listen to me, and the thoughts were starting to build up a thick sludge in the canals of my mind, slowing everything down to a crawl.

At night, the tape sped up, sensing my body’s vulnerable state, and fed the same frantic energy, the same manic passion through my limbs that it supplied during the day, only it increased its dosage, causing my inert and exhausted body to fight within itself. I was torn in two pieces at night, the energy I felt in my mind betrayed by the exhaustion of my limbs. In the middle of the night, the tape told me to get up, get out of bed, paint the kitchen, clean the bathroom, write a novel, learn the guitar…thousands of impossibilities suddenly loomed up around me.

The hours spent lying awake are torturous. My body telling me to relax, to rest and sleep, but the tape is sneaky, it won’t cooperate. It won’t let me focus long enough on one thought long enough to prepare my body to shut down. It interrupts with suggestions and requirements, demanding that I get up and MOVE, DO something, CHANGE something, anything to prevent the sin of the status quo. On these not-so-rare occasions when the body and mind are incompatible, a moratorium on thought occurs and it all shuts off, ABORT MISSION, we’re all going down. Then, I sleep.

I find myself trapped in a small room with no windows, no doors, no air, and the tape playing in the background. I wish that there were a one-way mirror set back in the wall with someone standing behind it, a cup of coffee, a clipboard, and a white jacket, making small and meaningless notes on a blank white piece of paper, and nodding. If they were there, maybe they could help me.

The night it all changed was a war. It was a battle between everything I knew and the expanse of uncertainty and sorrow, which shimmered bleakly in front of me. I had uprooted all my beliefs, all my reasons, and still I had no answers. What was wrong with me? I tore everything apart and tried to make sense of it (why me, why this gripping anxiety?), furiously planning in my head a way to fix it all, to stop the tape, a way to make my escape from the tyranny of echoed thoughts.

I got up and decided to drive. It was a new habit for me, driving at night, and I always felt better when I was in control of something. I liked watching the lights and wipers and radio turn on and off at my disposal, hearing the swish of the seatbelt and seeing the iridescent glow of the headlights on the garage door. They were controlled only by me. I turned them on, I turned them off. It was simple. I drove that night even though I knew I shouldn’t. It was hazy and rain had started glinting off the windshield at acute angles even before I’d left the street. The tape had told me to get out of bed so I listened. It told me to drive so I drove.

I felt the collision as an afterthought, a bad taste in my mouth left by a bland and tasteless appetizer that my mouth didn’t register at first but haunted me for the rest of the evening. It was small and monumental. The tire let out a hiss as the glass from the shattered window settled in a fragmented carpet on my chest and lap. It was all slow motion, even when the air bag collided with my lungs. I felt it expand and press my heart and spine together, flattening me against the seat and compressing shards of glass into my skin and realized it was the most I’d ever felt anything. As the pain tore through me, I felt the tape slowing down, scratching and tearing and ripping…then silence. It was gone and I was free. The nearness of my own death liberated me, reality finally penetrating the hazy shadow that had held me in isolation. I almost died and it erased everything else.

The sirens cut through the misty rain and the officer told me I had to get out of the car, had to go to a hospital. He said I had wrecked a parked car and my own. He said I needed medical attention. I looked at him, blood coursing down my face, reveling in pain. “Don’t you realize? This is my escape.”