For a long time, I expected you to divorce me still. For a long time I thought, if you divorce me, I am going to kill myself. I realize this sounds dramatic. It's also true. I was a stay-at-home mom. My resume read like an impractical accumulation of non-income-generating skills. I was too old to reinvent myself. I realize that sounds self-defeating. Yet now, still somehow married to each other, we discuss the future together and where we might buy a country house. How did we get from there to here? Now wouldn't that be a useful piece of writing, how to get from there to here. But I closed my eyes for so much of it. These days, when you say you love me, there is a penetrating diamond asterisk studded at the end of the phrase. You will love me as long as I behave myself and as long as I do not get lost in my sadnesses again.
      It's a well-known fact that depressed people may make unreasonable demands. If they refuse to get better, they deserve to be left. I have heard you say as much when we're gossiping about other couples. A marriage can only withstand so much inconvenience and work. I don't mean to be judgmental. If anything, I think for a long time I was naive, believing somebody's love, yours, meant I will love you no matter what happens and no matter how much either of us change. A fairy tale, that's what I thought I was in, full of dark forests, and wishes, and disguises. It is wrong to confess all this to you in a piece of writing you will neither ask nor want to read. I know it's wrong.
      I threw away all the letters you wrote to me. Before I threw your letters away, I reread part of one letter, only one, a portion of a page where you had drawn a picture of us on our sides engaged in—let's call it copulation. I thought hard about that word choice. Engaged in sex: too graphic. In lovemaking: too ridiculous for what we did. In fucking: I don't like to swear except when I'm angry and I'm not angry anymore. I donated my wedding dress as well. I was pretending to clean house and thereby pretending to be overtaken by a spirit of generosity—there are women who, after all, cannot afford new wedding dresses—though I kept the accessories which could fit obediently in a slender pouch in my closet, the heavy crystal necklace, the feverish bracelet. On the other hand, that white dress had been expanding in the basement on the steel shelf, growing heavier and larger all on its own in the corner. Many afternoons I watched the sequins dilate whenever I walked down the stairs, the satin panting through its porous synthetic case, exhaling a suffocating atmosphere that would not dissipate no matter how hard I blew. So I had to get rid of it. I wish such marital confessions in one's writing did not reek of 1960's tea services, sitting rooms, and feminine products. How nice it would be, to appear modern and relevant, concerned only with the seismic shifts of the world.

An interview with my therapist

My therapist: "Depression runs in families."

An interview with my parents

My mom: "Alcoholism and depression are pretty similar. Your grandfather was an alcoholic along with many of his siblings. And my mom was angry all the time. Back then nobody went to therapists. Then there was your aunt on your dad's side. And your dad used to sit in the field, and all that about his black shirts."
      My dad: "That wasn't depression. That was just me thinking about things."
      My mom: "And your older sister had postpartum depression probably. I had to call her every day on the phone and tell her to open her blinds and pick her baby up."

An interview with my sister

My sister: "I firmly believe I have a chemical imbalance. I don't think it's ever over. It's always there, but each time you learn to cope with it, and you know it's not ever going away, but it becomes a part of you. You can embrace it. In the end, no one can help you really except yourself, to find that from within you and bring yourself up. On meds I can stop crying in five minutes and say to myself let's focus on this. Versus let's go off the deep end into this reality that doesn't exist."

An interview with you

You: "It adds a layer between us, a buffer. I don't want to say I share your depression, but I experience it secondhand. Like secondhand smoke, it's there, it affects how I feel. I don't know if you're aware of that at all, the effect that it has on us."
      Me: "Why did you bring up divorce when I was so depressed and suicidal?"
      You: "Certainly it felt to me like you were in a period where you needed a lot of support. That amount of support left no room for me to express how I felt. I wasn't sure there would ever be a good time. I thought I waited patiently. I did the best I could, I guess."

An interview with you, cont.

You yourself have never been depressed. "I don't really think about it much," you say. "You're asking me to talk about something on which I don't really spend a lot of time dwelling. I think I mostly feel sadness as something that doesn't really weigh heavily on me." But then, a minute later, you tell me it's funny how we're having this conversation now, because our family dynamics have made these last years one of the saddest points of your life.

An interview with you, cont.

You have, of course, known other people who have been sad and depressed. As sadness and depression is not, these days, uncommon. You tell me of a depressed childhood friend, of an adult friend, and maybe your grandfather, though by the end of our talk you're worried that I, lacking the East Coast propriety to which you are accustomed, might publish the names and specifics you've given me. Such a worry reminds me of that argument we had at the corn maze in Fabius one fall, when I had slipped back into my sadnesses and you were marching away from me. So I ran after you. Together we created a scene. The scene I created was critical and broken, while your scene was embarrassed and furious, as you had come here, you argued, to be a father to our kids, not a husband to a combustible wife. I had no idea we would have to choose. I had no idea, if you had to choose, that you wouldn't choose me. I followed you anyway. I kept following you. I followed you across the gravel parking lot, past the muddy stalls, past the rows of field corn. In the midst of my hysterics, as they were hysterics by now, powered by a growing sense of panic, a woman emerged from the corn maze exit, prideful and so pleased with herself, snapping pictures of herself with her shiny phone. And you turned on her, shining onto her with such infinite kindness. And you congratulated her with your kind, public voice, like you were the award committee, the self-appointed mayor of the maze, and she had won something, and I had not won. And I was condemned to shaking and silence for a long, long time after.
      We shouldn't look toward other people to save us from ourselves, I know we shouldn't. Every therapist I've ever had has told me as much. If you need something, ask for it. If someone tells you no, then find another way to get what is necessary. But I had always thought having a husband was a form of protection. I thought, after marrying you, I would always be helped. We had no idea what we were doing. Of course an emotional wife who wore her emotions as I did outside of her body like a shawl, a scarf, a robe, an ocean, or a shroud would become a burden. Who wants to carry an ocean? Of course burdens beget burdens, and burdens beget elements, and elements beget repercussions.
      Somehow this all is love, at least our form of it. At least I hope it's love. I guess what I'm trying to understand is, how can this be love? This essay was supposed to answer that question. But look, here I am, near the end of it, and I have run out of things to say except for this—
      Once you and I had a contest, where we had to lie beside each other on our quilted bed in our master bedroom without moving. Who could lie more still for the longest period of time? The contest was my idea. You didn't know I had been practicing. I suppose this made it an unfair competition. In any case, you lost. "Are you okay?" you said. I knew you were going to lose. You acted like it was no big deal, like no one would want to win such a contest anyway. But moving draws attention. This is one of the earliest lessons of depression. Becoming less noticeable is the first step to disappearing. It also is a kind of power. The wind blew through me. The stars saw through me.
      It is harder than you think to give up one's major depressive disorder. Despite the destruction and the rages, there are benefits, there were gifts. I remember how my sadnesses pushed aside the crushed velvet curtains of the world for me. The flank of a panting animal that everybody else thought was mythical—I actually saw that. How many people can say they have seen that? I think I became a writer because I could see that. My hand on its hide, its mane covered in silver beetles, hawk feathers, and magic eggs, ready to gallop me off.
      The next morning I raised the blinds so that the sun was shining directly into my eyes, and I imagined it was you, another version of you, shining into another version of me.

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This piece started off as 20,000 words of notes. Sometimes I write by subtraction.