Chelsey Clammer is the award-winning author of the essay collections Human Heartbeat Detected (Red Hen Press, 2022), Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017), and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Brevity, and McSweeney’s, among many others. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing and is a freelance editor. www.chelseyclammer.com

The March

Before my mom can take me to the psych ward, I jump out of her car. It’s parked. I tend to jump out of parked cars when my emotions overwhelm me.

2015: Parking lot of a bookstore, Minneapolis. Then-Husband yelling at me for whatever reason his unmedicated schizophrenic mind decided yet again that something that didn’t exist was my fault. I launched out of our clunker 1994 Mazda truck and started marching the six miles toward home. In chunky heels, my feet started to hurt with four miles to go. Turning around, tail between legs, then-Husband found me en route, picked me up. Silence.

2018: Stoplight in Vegas. Now ex-husband—though we were attempting dating because that makes sense to date your ex-husband six months after your divorce—was yelling at me (again) because I wouldn’t let him pay for dinner, which he believed constituted me treating him like he was my “pet.” Done. I tossed down the dish cloth I was knitting (never got it back—the one thing I regret about the entire fiasco) and threw myself out of the car at thatstop light, never to see him again (six years and counting).

2023: Here we are, apartment parking lot, Austin. Mom and I are headed to the psych ward because I’ve cut myself a few times for the first time in thirteen years. Suicide ideation is the main dish, self-harm the appetizer. Two days prior, I cut four times and hesitated the fifth, knowing if I cut again, I would lose what little self-control I had over my determined fingers gripping the razor (which I had extracted from a pencil sharpener [those little things are surprisingly sharp—even more so than a regular razor]) and I would need stitches. Razor tip pressing into my forearm, something snapped in me and I sprung into my empty bathtub about as quickly and desperately as I would hop out of my mom’s car two days later. Fully clothed, I called her from the echo-y tub, shower curtain pulled because I needed the dark. Sobbing as the phone rang, sobbing as she answered the phone to the sound of her daughter’s wails ricochetting ominously off fake porcelain. She was at home in Colorado Springs, 863 miles away from me.

Seventeen hours later, she hopped in the car I would eventually hop out of, and she rush-drove the fourteen hours to get to me by 7 p.m.

She gets to me—an unexpected reunion after having seen each other just a few months prior.

Talking. Crying. Hugging. We do all of this as we figure out what to do with me.

Next day, 11:30 a.m. She’s called the nearest psych ward, I’ve snapped directives at her more than a few dozen times. I’m irritable and bitchy. Not to mention explosive and impulsive. Plus, I’m in the middle of a mental health crisis and I just want it to end. I have an assessment at noon and I’m being an ass because my legs are burning with antsy resistance—I want help, but I know psych wards incredibly intimately having spent a good number of weeks in them at various moments in my life and I don’t feel like I need someone to remove staples from paper or strings from my hoodies for me. I might have cut, but I’m not at that point. However, help is needed. Just something to make this anxiety and panic over a traumatic breakup from six months prior to finally end. He gave a reason for breaking up, but I was too blindsided, too dissociated at the time to hear it. All I know is I was in a solid relationship then I wasn’t and I don’t know why and in the past six months, he has refused to explain it to me and—neat fact—he is also in the middle of a mental health crisis right now and is debating a psych ward and although he lives 0.3 miles away from me, he feels so far away.

I’m considering all of this in the car. Bless my mom’s seventy-two-year-old heart and how she can’t figure out how “to make the lady talk” on her GPS.

“It was working the whole time until twenty minutes before I got here last night!”

So as Mom’s doing her fiddling with the smartphone to figure it out thing, I’m, well:

“Fuck this. I’m not going.” I swing open the door, slam it behind me, and march through my apartment complex without my phone, wallet, or keys that are still in her car. Smart.

It’s a gorgeous day for December. If I wasn’t mentally crisis-ing and had not sliced up my arm two days prior, I’d be writing at a picnic table in a park somewhere. Instead, I’m marching across the courtyard’s grass that apartment buildings surround so my mom can’t follow me. She does her best anyway as she sidles up next to the courtyard in her car and screams, “Chelsey! Come on!” It’s not frustration in her voice. Not desperation. Perhaps just exasperation because this is kinda awkward.

I don’t yell back. I have nothing to say other than raising my electric-blue sweatered-sleeved arm in the air and flipping her off.

My one-woman crazy parade continues. The apartment complex is gated and I don’t have the fob or the body weight to open the gates. I’m literally a caged animal.

My options:

1. Walk to the north fence and climb over or under somehow (and go where?).

2. Walk to the side gate and squeeze through a small opening I know is there (and go where?), but it’s directly across from my apartment and Mom might see me.

3. Return to my apartment and see if Mom’s there.

I go for Option 2: side gate.

She sees me.

FML.

“Chelsey.” She more of states than hollers from the second-floor landing of the stairs that continue up to my place, her body looking so tiny and slightly annoyed.

I look, keep walking toward the gate.

“I’ll be here when you’re ready.” A simple statement.

The march continues because I don’t have any other plan and the angry movement feels therapeutic. Out the gate, take a left. I can see my ex’s (who’s kinda-sorta a friend—as much of a friend as a recent ex can be) apartment building from here. Just the Post Office and a storage center sit between us. I start traversing the 0.3 miles down the sidewalk. If I was someone driving by, all I would see was a woman in a bright blue sweater and jeans, taking a brisk walk down a non-residential street in the late morning beautiful sunshine. How serene.

What a lovely day for a walk to an ex-boyfriend’s apartment to scream at him (lovingly) that he too needs a psych ward and come along now because the matriarch of this situation will provide the ride.

I imagine knocking on his door, banging, really, hollering, “I’m not going without you!” Because just the night before, he too expressed how his mental health was declining. Call it an inability to let go or wanting to rekindle some sort of connection—and isn’t an unfurling psychosis an excellent way to have a true, deep, lasting connection with someone?—I’m starting to get internally adamant that I’m not going to the psych ward without him.

As I stomp down the sidewalk paralleling the Post Office, I consider the exact verbiage of what to say:

The aforementioned: “I’m not going without you!”

The basically same thing: “If I’m going to a psych ward, you are too!”

The not-totally-the truth: “You need the hospital more than I do!”

As I approach the storage place, I consider the verbiage of what his response could be to each option:

“No, that’s not how this is going to work.”

“Go to the psych ward.”

“Maybe I do, but you gotta go.”

His parking lot comes into view, most spots being unoccupied considering it’s close to midday on a Thursday.

His black Chevy Colorado isn’t there.

FML, Round 2.

I’m doing this alone. Or at least without him. The way it should and needs to be. I know this. Deeply. I sigh out a fuck you for not being home, turn my black-booted feet around, re-march the short sidewalk route past the storage place, past the Post Office, slip through the little side part of the gate, across my parking lot, up the three flights of stairs to my apartment, and open the door.

Mom’s on the couch with my dog, looking at her phone.

“Let’s go,” I demand.

“Okay. Let me grab my things.” Simple statement, Round 2.

“ARRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!” I literally growl into the five feet between us, fists clenched. Back out the door, slamming it behind me. I continue this apparently unending march of anxiety and mental breakdowning, and go down to my car, which hers is now parked next to. I lean on my ride, arms folded, huffing out breath as I watch Mom descend the stairs. Casually. She walks up to my body that is boiling with—just, everything.

“I’m having a mental health crisis. You could show some fucking urgency!”

Now, yes, I will apologize for this statement when I calm down, considering she made it to me within thirty hours of my initial bathtub-sobbing phone call. But that won’t be until the car is in motion, until I put GPS on my phone to help direct her. Until we’re on the highway—doors locked because now’s not the time to yet again revert to car-jumping habits. As we get on I-35, headed north to Austin Oaks, about to attend to my literally—hopefully relatively momentary—madness, the raging lessens. I was breaking, and something needed to be done.

Here, in this car, that something is getting done. We are on the way. Regardless whether I’m admitted to the psych ward or do an outpatient program, we are in movement toward a solution. The fringes of South Austin onramps whiz by and similar to how my ex is on his journey to figuring his shit out, I’m in motion toward sorting through mine.

I won’t remember the rest of the ride to the psych ward. Was there traffic? What exit did we take? Did anything happen? What conversation did we have? No fucking clue. Because once the movement started, I knew that whatever was going to happen, I was going to be okay. The motion was creating more momentum than marching to and from my ex’s apartment ever could. Plus, Mom swooped in, saving me with a level of urgency like no other.

I sigh, release my emotional grip on the door handle.