Depression

The realization dawned upon her like a chill, sweeping through her consciousness and leaving her body in the form of a digusted groan. She had regressed to infancy.

Her days were now spent entirely in sleeping and eating. She was consuming larger quantities of food than ever before. There was no scale in the apartment, but she didn't need any to know she had gained weight. She had been binging for weeks. Large meals of rice and whatever she could find for banchan: frozen fish sticks, curry, salted fried eggs. Six slices of bread and jam had comprised one meal. And then there were the snacks. She had never snacked with such frequency as now.

Five pounds,...maybe even ten. Considering the only weight she was ever willing to accept for her five foot frame was less than 100 pounds, the difference was sizable. She could feel the excess around her middle, especially on her stomach, which was never completely flat anymore, not even when she first awoke and went to the bathroom. She could see her thighs looking rounded rather than trim. She didn't even want to look at her behind.

And the sleeping. She slept ten to twelve hours a night. Not exactly fitful, yet not exactly restful. Sometimes, she dreamt she was walking or exploring. She dreamt of movement while her waking hours could have comprised a still-life. Once, she dreamt she was chasing a prowler, running and leaping as she had seen in a Chinese movie. Such dreams left her feeling tired when she awoke; once awake, she would consider lying back down for a nap within hours. What was the matter with her?

Several weeks ago, she had been unable to sleep at all. Or so she had told people. In fact, she had slept alternate nights, sleeping a few hours one night and not sleeping the next, continuing this cycle during the weekdays when she was mostly alone, then crashing for twelve hours each night during the weekends when he was home. It was her way of speeding the weekends, impatient for her own time. She had eaten very little too, and she had certainly been thinner.

She wondered now whether she had worn herself out with her self-inflicted sleep deprivation. Or was she lethargic from being severely out of shape? Was it depression or PMS? Was the extra weight sapping her energy? Could stress, if felt long and strongly enough, deplete her of energy? It could've been a combination of factors, but she didn't really know the reason why she was so tired.

The computer calendar highlighted the number 22. That left four days. And she still hadn't said anything to him. But she had told herself she wouldn't mention it to him until she knew whether she was going or not. And with only four days left, she still did not know whether she would leave for London.

She had not sent out resumes. Well, a few several months ago, to which she had received favorable replies until they realized she would require a visa. But she had not sent out the mass mailing campaign she had conceived, even having drafted a comprehensive letter. Her resume had been converted to a CV. All that was required was for her to find a list of recruiters and companies and send out the CV and letter. But she could not do it.

Yesterday, she had pulled up a partial list of recruiters onto her monitor, then walked away. She had watched a soap and eaten another huge meal, leaving that list on her computer. She had even answered the phone, having reconnected the line after leaving it unhooked for over a week. It had been her father.

His voice was gratingly loud, a fact which she had always deplored. The volume of his voice made her ear ring uncomfortably, and she had held the receiver half a foot from her ear during their conversation, almost as though she were repelled at it touching her face. Even at that distance, she could hear him. Did he think he was shouting across the distance of half a continent?

They talked for maybe 15 minutes, and she realized again how little they understood one another. The man did try to communicate his thoughts, however irrelevant they were, but she could not really understand his Korean, and his English was a patchwork of mispronounced words with hardly any grammar for cohesion. Her Korean was nonexistent, and her English seemed to baffle him, since after emitting a series of affirmative sounds while she explained how her last place of employ might not be in the best financial shape, he had asked her, "And your last company, it's doing good?" His plaintive voice asked her whether she was having fun cooking, and made her agree to continue cooking for and taking care of her husband. He told her again how he and her mother had no purpose other than their children, that they lived for the two girls and would do anything they could to help them. Her mother, at least, understood her English better. Or seemed to. She didn't really know what they comprehended and what they missed entirely. She had certainly not broached the topic on her mind with them.

That her father had called annoyed her. She intensely disliked talking to him. Probably because she disliked him in general. She felt obligatory love for him, but other than that, she wanted nothing to do with him. Whenever she thought of him now, she felt anger. In particular, she remembered the first time he had shown her husband a full frontal view of his ugliest character.

Furious for having been left waiting while she, her mother, and then-fiance had viewed an apartment they were considering, her father had thrown a hysterical screaming fit on the street in front of everybody, cutting short the meeting with the real estate rep. Driving home, he had gradually calmed down from his raving and even assumed the righteous stance of having acted justifiably; he laughed with self-satisfaction, believing that he had intimidated what was obviously a no-good real estate hustler when in truth he had probably made the man think he was certifiably insane. Her mother had played along with quiet tact, but she, herself, could not. Not with her husband there. And her father had grown mad at her for her initial sullenness then outright disagreement with him. There had been vicious fighting when they all got home.

She had been left feeling degrading shame and revulsion to have such a ridiculous, stupid, and deluded fool for a father. She had been filled with self-loathing to have been sired by such an ass. And she had remembered and put to text those feelings just the day before he called.

He had mentioned during the phone call that his cousin lived in London. Til then, she had not realized her uncle might still reside there; after all, he was an American and a successful stockbroker. At first, the thought had seemed comforting, but the idea quickly morphed from a security blanket to a funeral shroud. She could just envision her parents traveling to "visit" her uncle then harassing her endlessly to return to the States. They would even try to make her live with them, and if her London venture failed and her husband did not take her back, she would have almost no choice. She desperately feared returning to them.

Her parents were of a fiercely collective mindset, one which always stifled and suffocated her, and she sensed with the fear and urgency of a caged wild animal that they would never understand her desire to be on her own. They had never given her room to be herself, even now insisting that when residing with them, she had to follow their rules. With screamed insults and hysterical pleading, they had always coerced her to conform to their outdated and fear-formed image of what she should be, assuming any idea she had to the contrary to be wrong and bad. How many times had she drawn her own blood when having to endure their company for extended periods? She had once even ingested a bottle of toxic household chemicals one night, only to wake up wretching the whole thing up while her mother looked on wondering why the heavings were blue.

Her parents' very existence with their tightly controlling and unbending push for conformity eradicated any reason or logic in her. She was left a frightened, angry, and hysterical child, and she knew the only way to retain her sanity was to stay far from them. She honestly never wanted to see them again.

She did love her parents, but she hated them too; her knowledge of them made it almost impossible for her to feel otherwise. She knew what they were like. She knew they were not moral or noble or generous or even good-hearted. They were selfish and paranoid and miserly. They were terribly frightened of being taken advantage of, yet they had no qualms about taking advantage of others. They were concerrned only for their own petty concerns.

The very word family only evoked for her the shackles of guilt and encumbering emotion, the binding restraints of misguided restrictions, and the asphyxiation of her own misery. If she ever had to live with them again, she knew she would kill herself. She felt herself driven that close to the edge of madness.

Her choices were daunting: either total freedom on her own in London, where she could not contact her uncle without her parents hunting her down, or none whatsoever whether in the role of wife or daughter. To an extent, her husband allowed her as little freedom as her parents. He tried to restrict her out of his love and need and fear of losing her. He didn't seem to realize how desperately she resented restraints, but even if he had known, his possessive, protective feelings for her combined with his own nature would not let him be otherwise.

And people's inability to grasp or understand her dilemma filled her with frustration. Well-intentioned friends would suggest she try to reason with her parents, not understanding that this was impossible given the language barrier and the fact that her father was the sort of vulgar, irredeemable man who felt the only tool he needed for negotiation was his screaming voice and that no perspective other than his own was correct. Not to mention that there was a good chance he was mentally unbalanced. Her husband the doctor had initially thought him moody, then over the course of their year living with her parents wondered whether her father was bipolar, before upgrading the possible diagnosis to schizophrenia.

In the end, she had ruled out suicide. She decided she was too curious about what the future would hold, and hedonist that she could be, she did not want to miss out on any pleasures that should lie in store. But sometimes, she wished for insanity to overtake her. She would wistfully speak of lobotomies. Well, on that day, the twenty-second of the month, she got her wish.

She must have grown tired of being an element in a still-life image, because she had offered to accompany her husband to the supermarket, which had surprised him, considering she hated shopping for groceries and had not gone with him in months. But they had gotten into their car and been driving toward the grocery store that evening, when The Accident occurred.

The police report indicates that the car was hit hard from the driver's side by an oncoming SUV as they pulled out of their apartment parking lot. Her husband had thus sustained the worst injuries. Had she been wearing her seatbelt, she might have been left in better condition, but she was not. Jolted around by the impact, her injuries included a shattered skull. Still, she did not die of internal injuries on the operating table as her husband did. The doctors were able to treat her immediate injuries, only to determine that she had experienced severe brain damage. She lay in a vegetable state.

Both sets of parents were located and called in from the East Coast. His parents flew in immediately and solemnly grieved the loss of their son and the injuries to their daugher-in-law. They urged the doctor to save her and prayed for her, then claimed their son's body and returned home. Her parents took a bus and did not arrive until almost two days later. Meanwhile, she lay in the hospital, a living breathing vegetable.

The doctors had meanwhile determined that there existed a small chance for recovery. It would require neurosurgery and intense therapy afterwards, but there was a chance she could recover. She might sustain some impairment of speech and motor functions, given the area of the brain that had been affected, but the prognosis did not look completely grim.

This scenario was presented to her parents. If operated upon, she had at least a chance. Otherwise, she would remain in her vegetable state until she died. Her father could not stop wailing loudly. He could not seem to focus, so unmanageable was his distress. Her mother listened quietly, nodding and trying to understand what the doctor was saying, filling in any gaps in her knowledge of the particular medical terminology he used with her own limited understanding of head trauma cases. The doctor told them he'd understand if they needed a little time to think, and they nodded and sat together, talking in Korean.

Those in the hospital corridors could hear the loud, plaintive voices of the father and the calm, remorseful voice of the mother. Their voices held resignation and sorrow, as though the worst had already transpired. With morbid practicality, they reached a decision. They rationalized that the costs were too great, the chance too slim, their own emotional stress to unendurable, and their daughter's prognosis not certain enough and asked that neither their daughter nor themselves be put through all the distress.

Puzzled, the doctor tried to explain again that she had a chance for recovery, but the mother replied that she knew her daughter would never really be normal after sustaining brain damage — she said brain damaged people looked and acted like stuttering, crippled retards and she did not want to make her daughter suffer through life as a retard. The doctor tried to explain the reality of the situation, but the debate soon ended; the doctor had no choice but to respect the parents' wishes since they would not hear otherwise, and the young woman, who did not require life support, was sent to an institution, where she lay unconscious til she died.

The funeral, like her wedding, was planned entirely by her parents for her parents. It was attended solely by their friends. No one who had known her knew she lay unconscious for the last thirteen years of her life, nor that she died. And no one cared.