PLEASE PLAY AGAIN

Words by Tamara Frooman Photos by Rebecca Gao

(Content warning: suicidal ideation and depression.) T here is a Joan Didion passage I almost chose for my high school yearbook quote.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.

I spent a long time mulling over these sentences, molding my tongue around their syllables, turning them over like cards I was palming in a magic trick. Keep on playing like light across water, like liquid sun dappling the surface, refracting asymmetrically. Selfperception warps over time. When I reread my old journals I am unsettled by the version of myself I find preserved in the pages. In these entries I write things like: “Sometimes my moods remind me of constellations, as if I could connect them with silver slivers of thread into something worthwhile—I could tightrope between them through the chemical imbalances, trapeze swing from one to the next.” I write: “How can I tell you I’m not okay again? I talked to no one yesterday. I feel like a ghost.” I write: “Someday I will forgive myself for those wasted years.” When I reread my journals I realize the optical illusion at play.

The pauses are my earliest memories. They began like a record loops, binding me to a moment. I found myself unable to move forward with time. When a movie is paused, the outside world continues. It is the internal world, the diegetic world, that is frozen. The diegetic world is not real, we would say. It can be paused without consequence. When I am depressed, I am also not real. When I cease to interact with the outside world it continues to occur, continues to exist within time. But try telling the characters in a movie that reality exists elsewhere.

The first pauses happened at night— in the darkness I lost the thread of time, I couldn’t see the world so I thought it had ended. Even once I started living into the morning, I kept getting stuck outside of time.

With toys I would re-enact a single moment—one motion, again and again. No lack of energy was expended in setting up the scene: each element positioned just so, frozen in place. The background, the scenery, the audience, all arranged. The momentum, a lion’s leap, a ball’s arc, sustained ad infinitum, perpetually on loop, audience with rapt attention. Keep on playing for the audience, spellbound. Maybe depression always seems theatrical from afar. When a death drive subverts the survival instinct, everything becomes performative. But I did know what nothing meant, dramatic as it seems. The words resonated with me.

In high school I started detaching from the moment, becoming untethered in time. In the middle of conversations I would simply cease to exist. How to make sense of this as a 15-year-old? I did not have the words to articulate what was happening. I thought I was slipping away, fading.

How to make sense of this numbness? In these moments my internal monologue echoed, annexed off into cavernous thought:

All I want to do is go home and lay in bed for eighteen hours and then rearrange the bookshelves and go back to bed unshowered, eating nothing but cereal, cold soup from the can why does it take so little to undo you throw you over the edge again send you careening off the cliff into the breakwater if I could just see one flower I would be okay again one flower growing out of the earth one sunrise but I can’t wake up in time I can’t see the sun anymore.

I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.

Every day I fall further and further out of the habit of being human I don’t remember how to function anymore all I do is put up empty picture frames like a fucking maniac my fingers hurt from typing but I haven’t responded to any messages so what have I been doing? Just the crossword all winter again?

It’s not even that any of the days are so bad it’s just they’re nothing there’s nothing left of me.

Why do I always come back to this how hard could it possibly be to just get through the fucking day?

I don’t play with plush toys anymore but the audience still factors in. The audience is maybe my future self or maybe my past self or maybe some other iteration of me, but it

is always a way of communicating to myself certain motivations for playing along and keeping up the act. In the end, keeping up the act becomes the act.

When I stopped being a person, I didn’t see the point of being a body either. Why bother? The ‘why not?’ was what saved me. I promised myself ten years to reassess. The ten years are almost up but I’m not counting down anymore. Some days I wake up knowing I’ve already lost the round. But I’m getting better at living life like it’s a Tim Horton’s cup at the end of winter: most days you get “Please Play Again” but it’s worth it for the hope of a donut somewhere down the line. Sometimes it’s okay to skip a turn, to wait out the storm, refuse to leave the house in the downpour. It is the rain that will dissipate, not you.

Somewhere in my mind still, on loop, the lion leaps on a living room floor in a halfforgotten house. I keep on playing.