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BY HAMLET WRENNCROFT

In print | Published March 5, 2009

Disclaimer: This column is part five of a 10 part series dealing with the author’s experiences with mental illness. As it contains explicit subject matter, sensitive readers may wish to avoid.

I spent that summer working in a bookstore, shipping back titles from small Christian publishers and dreaming exactly how thoroughly and succulently I would be roasted in Hell. I was off the medication again, and the bad thoughts had started to return although I denied furiously their existence. I returned to Swarthmore early that year, to write and act in the freshmen orientation play. So I spent time with friends, and I played videogames constantly to silence the voices, and I practiced a lame New Jersey accent (I was inexplicably, considering my lack of experience with non-prescription pharmaceuticals, cast as the badass stoner kid. Somewhere in the darkest abyss of my dresser there is an undershirt with a giant clipart pot leaf ironed on. I think I was supposed to return it to the costume shop. If anyone in the drama department would like to reclaim it, please e-mail me.)

I can try to avoid it but eventually I’ll have to write about The Girl, capital-Tee and capital-Gee. There are many things that I would like to say about The Girl. I could probably waste my life cataloging our relationship, filling countless hardbacks with dense nostalgic prose written in French for some reason. But it would be better, I think, to keep things short.

She was beautiful. Understand that I am not trying to aggrandize my hypothetical mack; during sophomore year my seduction technique, as it were, involved staring down attractive women without once blinking or averting my gaze and repeating to myself, again and again, “I am 1970s hairy-chested love-god Batman.” I was floppy-haired, lanky, confused and self-conscious; I grew a scruffy goatee because it was the only symmetrical, continuous pattern of facial hair I could produce. (Of course, I have changed and matured a great deal since then. I have shaved the goatee.) But The Girl attended Bryn Mawr, and Bryn Mawr students are not known for sophisticated reproductive strategies. Every girl who attends Bryn Mawr is psychologically rewired, perceiving the world in duotone Terminator vision, constantly scanning and running sexy diagnostics. Imagine that the Terminator was not hunting for Linda Hamilton, necessarily, but just someone who looked sort of like Linda Hamilton, because it was very late on a Friday night and the Terminator really just wanted to assassinate someone, anyone really, so it could brag to all its cyborg assassin girlfriends once it returned to the post-apocalyptic future the next morning.

I was taking a course on Nabokov at Bryn Mawr. I noticed The Girl during our first class and afterwards wondered aloud, not-entirely-innocently, if someone could help me find the registrar. I was then taken down like a wounded antelope. She ran me down, sliced open my hindquarters, snapped away the circling buzzards and then waited for me to pass out from blood loss. We had lunch that Friday (at one point I dropped a slice of cucumber on her foot but she smiled and laughed so that was alright), and she invited me to watch a movie with her Saturday night.

She really was beautiful, objectively, like seriously ten-out-of-ten. Understand. I was nineteen, and I’d never been in love before, and I was pretty much utterly fucking besotted. She liked David Bowie and she wore black nail polish and she played Super Nintendo RPGs on her computer. She wore glasses, fer Chrissakes, legitimate sexy-librarian-style glasses. She was tall but not too-, slender, redhead, had freckles that only really showed when she was exhausted or embarrassed. She was brilliant and funny and insightful, and she was crazy about me, and she suffered from untreated depression and anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Somewhere, against the ring of debris encircling a celestial gaseous giant, God struck a single cosmic rimshot.

I took the bus over that Saturday night. The first sign of trouble was a pair of handcuffs dangling from her desk lamp, but she told me that these were a (professional-quality, presumably very expensive) gag gift. Second sign: she chose from her DVD collection Quills, a biopic of the Marquis de Sade that prominently features Geoffrey Rush’s naked ass. This was also a little unnerving but I remained confident that everything was perfect and wonderful. Then the third sign: after we kissed for the first time she rolled up her sleeve and told me she didn’t feel right keeping this from me and revealed a series of short horizontal scabs across her forearm.

The powers that be were punking me again. I am not a gifted comedian but I can still recognize classic joke structure. Two beats and then the punchline.

She said she was better now, and I believed her. Things progressed rapidly, and although we agreed to discuss marriage only after graduation we had regular conversations about baby names. We played videogames and walked to the comic bookstore, and she cut herself only occasionally. I would wait in the health center for her, and she would leave irate because the psychiatrist had refused to prescribe her less than two weeks of medication, and she was worried that if given that many pills at once she might try to kill herself. I offered to hold on to them for her; she thanked me but said she didn’t want to get me involved in her problems. She hated talking to therapists, however, so in the absence of a trained professional I got to be Doctor Boyfriend. This was my responsibility. I loved her. My OCD took note of my unhappiness and my growing ambivalence and began to reemerge. But I had made a commitment to her and to myself from which I could not back down, and I was determined to save her even if it killed us both.

I cannot be the only Swarthmore student who, boggled by innocence and a lifetime of bad fantasy novels, threw themselves selflessly into a damned and damning romance. You probably won’t listen like I didn’t listen but I am obliged to say it anyway: You cannot save them. You cannot fix them. Love does not conquer all; it can become a parasite, if you let it, it can allow two lives to be destroyed instead of one. Sometimes love doesn’t mean shit.

We survived the semester. She had decided to visit me in Boston over break, and I was not emotionally cognizant enough to refuse. We visited Faneuil Hall and the New England Aquarium. Her aunt took us out to dinner, along with a pale and lumpy out-of-state gentleman who made suggestive remarks about the presentation of the rice. I went back to the aunt’s house with her, where the two of them decided it would be appropriate to entertain me by cataloguing their family’s complete history of infidelity, spousal abuse, addiction and mental illness. I had noticed that she seemed uncomfortable, over the evening, and I so confronted her afterwards. I worried she suspected my doubts about the relationship. Actually, she told me, she was convinced she had AIDS.

This was her OCD at work; although she had recently tested negative it had occurred to her that there still existed an infinitesimal possibility of infection. She had fixated upon this, and in a moment of uncommon generosity she decided that I should share in her torturous, irrational anxiety. In retrospect I am grateful; I do not know how long I would have endured, if not for such an absurdly unforgivable relationship faux pas. We decided things were not working, for now, and that we would keep in touch and try again once she was better. I abandoned her. I was the one person she held on to in the face of absolute despair and I abandoned her. I understand that our relationship was unworkable and that it would have been insane to continue it but it took me a very long time to forgive myself for this.

She transferred at the end of that spring. We have not spoken in person since. I sometimes imagine what might have happened if we had stayed together; the psychological abominations our unnatural comingling would have produced. Perhaps that is something to be proud of, that I was in a relationship that might have produced a legitimate crime against God. But looking back, there were two things I am genuinely thankful for. I think at the end of it we did love one another, for a little while, as much as it was possible for our actual persons to evidence themselves through our collective clusterfuck of symptoms. And I recognize that I might have gone undiagnosed for much, much longer, had the stress not exacerbated my disorder.

But it was difficult, then, to keep perspective. I had stopped the medication, I was trying to finish a semester at this masochistic academic circlejerk, and I had survived a relationship that was effectively a one-man, 24-hour suicide hotline. She was gone now but it didn’t matter. This was how my obsessive compulsive disorder finally caught up with me. She had been a door, and it walked through her and now I could not be rid of it. I could no longer escape or deny it. Nothing visibly changed, of course. I made jokes, worked, got drunk. I slept, breathed, ate and shat. You wouldn’t have noticed anything. But I wasn’t really there anymore. There was only obsession.

Hamlet is a senior. You can reach him at hamletwrenncroft@gmail.com. The next installment of “Trigger” will be published in two weeks.

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