Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland

Author:Mac McClelland [McClelland, Mac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Mental Health, Nonfiction, Psychology, Retail
ISBN: 9781250053497
Google: HSt-BAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2015-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

10.

“J’aime bien mieux etre malheureux en t’aimant, que de ne t’avoir jamais vu,” Nico wrote on a card he gave me in Montpellier when I arrived to meet him there, quoting a seventeenth-century French writer. It was our third meeting after Haiti, nearly a year after we’d met. We hadn’t seen each other in person since Paris, three months earlier. He was talking about how hard it was to be apart all the time.

I would rather be unhappy loving you, he was saying, than never having seen you.

Well. He had no idea.

* * *

I was in Montpellier because everyone was in agreement—my dad, my friends, Denise—that I needed a vacation. I had been barely holding it together. I had arguably been not holding it together. I’d asked Nico during a Skype chat if I could join him in Montpellier.

“Of course,” he said. “You’re welcome, my beauty.”

The flight between San Francisco and France encountered rowdy turbulence. People clutched and gasped around me. I sat patiently, realizing that I would be more relieved than disappointed if we went down. That made me sad. The only reason I cared if we pulled out of it was that I would’ve liked to kiss Nico’s face another time—it’d been so few times—before never doing anything again. But other than that, I was 90-some percent resigned to our imminent death. When it became clear that we were going to make it, I was left with the sorrow of that peace.

On the ground, my symptoms stayed fairly well behaved. Conveniently, during that week, we were drunk all the time. Not in the PTSD way, but in the cocktail-before-dinner, then split-a-bottle-of-wine-because-it’s-August-on-the-Riviera way, which, however different the motives, produced the same results. It kept me loose and open, so that I was touched deeply by the sex we were having, but the steady stream of booze assisted a light dissociation that kept my rawness to below-freak-show levels. Only small amounts of it seeped through. One night when Nico was inside me, I clutched him and begged, “Please don’t ever leave me.” A sentiment I’d never felt for anyone, even the man I’d married, uttered to a guy with whom I’d spent a total of eight days. Another night, next to his warmth, buried under blankets despite the humidity outside, I wilted, losing the rigidity that kept me put together, and cried. But Nico had just been telling me that when he pictured his father’s face, he could often recall only how he looked hanging dead from a rope, so crying after a conversation like that gave me the appearance of a still possibly normal person.

Ditto my behavior when he came to visit me two weeks after I left Montpellier, in San Francisco. His deployment was over. He had some time off. He’d never been to America, and I’d been urging him to come since our first e-mail. Finally, almost exactly a year after we’d met, he arrived. I kept myself moving and kept myself busy with the task of impressing him with California’s majesty.

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