Tunnel Vision

This essay is dedicated to my mother, who helped me realize my life was still worth living.

The spring had come in 2012 and thawed the creek in our way, but traversing it had never been a problem for me. Whenever I found myself coming down here, I’d make sure to wear my waterproof boots. Only as I was halfway through my own crossing did I realize that maybe I had left that key detail out for Tommy. I turned to look at him standing there on the sandy, silty bank in a pair of white Adidas and ankle socks. I looked up and down the stream, resting my gaze upon some rocks about twenty feet away. He could go further up the bike path, then come back down to the stream and hop across a few all-too-conveniently placed steps. I told him this, as it had totally slipped my mind. To be fair, he was probably going to get his feet wet at one point or another where we were going. Tommy looked at me with this big dumb smile on his face, citing no problem before happily jogging to the first rock.

Tommy was a good friend of mine in the tenth grade. He had just transferred to my school during our freshman year, and he was a good kid. I can’t recall another classmate of ours that had such a dry sense of humor that still appealed to most of the campus, students and teachers alike. Best way I could describe it would be a little-less-blue Norm MacDonald; he even had the same squinty look and shit-eating grin that made strangers warm up to him right quick.

I forget what it was that brought us together in the first place: could’ve been our love of acting, I knew his older brother through my forays into the drama program, or perhaps it was because I was aggressively friendly. Think of it as “personably confrontational.” I had spent a lot of my life being bullied and friendless, and when I made some strong personality changes I decided that I should go out of my way to make sure others around me didn’t go through that, if I could help it. I spent so much time being a fish out of water, I figured I’d keep a bucket around for those still struggling with the unfamiliar territory, the dry land. Somehow we gravitated toward each other and, while we weren’t inseparable, it seemed to me like we were cut from the same cloth.

Think of it as “personably confrontational.”

As he hopped from stone to stone, I had moved to the other side, breaking sticks and pulling vines that would be in our way. After climbing some dense underbrush, the type of fetid vegetation that you can only find engulfing forgotten structures of the city, we stood before a gaping maw of concrete and impenetrable darkness. One of the hundreds of entry points into the county’s municipal drainage network, it was an opening into the miles and miles of tunnels running underneath the suburban neighborhoods, laced parallel to the sewage system but separated by layer after layer of piping, cement, and cracking asphalt. A few other friends and I had explored loads of the twisting and turning corridors, but this little section was my own. In the multitude of times I had come down there, I saw neither hide nor hair of anyone or anything else. Aside from the fading graffiti and small animal prints, you’d think it had remained untouched since the cement was originally poured. Well, except for the bugs. All sorts of cold-blooded creepy crawlies kept massive broods down there from the floor to the ceiling, all along the walls. I didn’t have a problem with them; most kids grow out of thinking bugs are cool, but me? Not so much. I decided to not tell Tommy that part; I figured it was probably for the best.

This was it. I retrieved my flashlight from my pack, flicking it on and off three times (I had my OCD under control at that point, but some of the little impulses slipped through the cracks). The torch I had was one of the heavy-duty ones you can only buy at home depot, matte metal with more lumens than I can remember. One crack from that son-of-a-bitch would give most a concussion or a nasty break, but thank the hoodlum gods that I never had to use it.

Before us, a chamber was revealed about seventy-five yards down the line. That was the first turn, and after that there was no light that could reach us apart from the few and far between grates overhead. I directed Tommy’s attention to the floor of the tunnel, submerged in an inch of water. It deepened and shallowed as you went in, but sticking to the sides and straddling the water would keep our feet from getting soaked. Unless we slipped, but that didn’t cross my mind. We began the journey down.

Even if you’re perfectly still, a concrete cave is far from quiet. The smooth surface of the poured stone reverberates and amplifies any noise, from the flow of the water to the breaking of its surface from improperly disposed trash. Sooner or later, it all washes out into the watershed. What was it that the monster from It said? “Everything floats down here.” So does the sound. Every step, every splash, each breath seems to linger longer than it should. When you’re this far below, everything stays with you. I had gotten used to it from previous expeditions, but I had no idea what was going through Tommy’s head. I hadn’t considered how strange and foreign the change of scenery would be. We kept up some light conversation about how many other networks I had explored, what the longest time was I spent underground, how often I did this, and what the weirdest things were that I had seen down there. I remember it being hard to put words together. As the days went by, talking about anything seemed to get more difficult. But to answer the questions: several, three hours, three or five times a month, and a freshly deployed sleeping bag. We kept moving.

The reason I brought Tommy down here was coming up in the second junction. See, I didn’t come down here just to get away, I came to create in peace. Within the past three or four months of this event, I picked up the habit of painting graffiti. In that amount of time, with several dozen cans of dollar store paint, I had amassed a few pieces in my subterranean studio. There were sections where I practiced my tags and my alphabets, and then there were areas where I sketched my bubble letters for throw-ups. I had two or three big pieces down there, and different versions of the characters I was working on. I considered Tommy my best friend, and I wanted to share this with him. I wanted to share part of the real me. My mind was a warzone, and I had been putting up a front to most everyone at school, aside from the faculty. None of my peers knew what was wrong with me. I recalled the horror stories my mom had told me when she had opened up about her mental illness: the stereotypical pointing and laughing; the jokes; the gossip; the “pranks.” I was scared, but I had to tell someone. I thought my mind was going to burst at the seams, so I had to do it someplace safe. This underground gallery was mine. It was my dojo, my fortress of solitude. As we came up on more of my works, I just kind of dumped it all out.

I was sixteen at the time, and I had already spent eight years with an OCD diagnosis. But recently my psyche had started to crack in other ways. Feelings started to dull, and apart from sadness, I went numb after a while. I started thinking about stupid, hasty things. I almost made some bad choices, and the resulting doctors’ visits gave me a second diagnosis: Major Depressive Disorder. I was still trying to find a medicine. I was still trying to learn what was going on in my head and why. I didn’t understand, but down here I didn’t need to. The hiss of paint and aerosol made my head go quiet. I don’t think it was due to my decision to not use a respirator down there, but graffiti is a drug in more ways than one. As I delivered the story, my words fit together as much as my perceived self-image.

Something freaked him out, he had a surprised look on his face. Did I say something too heavy? In reality, he noticed a particularly large wolf spider at my feet. I directed his gaze to the ceiling, where I shined my flashlight. The surface of the roof began to twitch. Above us were hundreds upon hundreds of wolf spiders. The neighboring section was a breeding ground for some of the biggest fucking spider crickets I had ever seen, so it made sense why the neighbors moved in en masse. I always had a thing for spiders, so I thought they were pretty cool. Tommy’s face indicated the opposite. I think a bit of color had drained from his face.

Hastily, I was informed that he was allergic to spider bites. I hadn’t done my arachnology work at the Smithsonian just yet, but I knew that most death from spider bites didn’t occur from the big bads like the Black Widow or the Brown Recluse; most of the time, it was just people like Tommy from common wolf or garden spiders in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were very much in the wrong place.

Spiders didn’t rain down upon us like a scene from Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, but we ran back with just as much fervor as Ron Weasley or Samwise Gamgee. So quick was the transition from heavy moment to allergy-avoiding sprint to being close to the entrance that I only remember it as a blur of darkness, concrete, and splashing water. We slowed down, and I patted him on the shoulder to get his attention. I profusely apologized about the spiders, for I had truly no idea about his allergy. I spat out the other important things I thought he should know: that I felt like I was getting worse, with the painting holding it back, and that my mind was going to some dark places, the kind of places you don’t come back from if you succeed in certain actions. But friends like him held me back from going through with certain things.

Now that is a hell of a lot of emotion to dump as a high school dude onto another, but it felt needed in the storm’s eye of my mind. I could’ve gone into more depth about the dark places I was in, how I planned to punch my own ticket over Christmas months prior to this day, but confessing that was just something I couldn’t do. I wouldn’t be able to until my freshman year of college, but in the meantime I did understand that people can just be whisked away unexpectedly. With the fragility of human life, especially my own in my mind, I learned early that you tell people how much they mean to you when you can before something swipes them away forever. What they leave on walls can’t talk back.

Tommy looked at me with his same squinty look and smile, letting out a laugh and assurance that I didn’t have to worry about it. He smacked me on the arm, and we walked back through the bike path to the street where his mom picked him up. I waved goodbye, and the I walked back to my house alone, my boots still wet.

It’s a damn shame this isn’t where the story ends. I wish it did.

Over the next few months, I noticed that Tommy started to pull away from me. We didn’t talk or hang out as much, and when I asked him about it over the phone, he wouldn’t respond. He just cut me off on his own accord, and it felt like a knife in the gut. My mental state was deteriorating so quickly, maybe he didn’t want to be associated with someone so close to going off the deep end. I kind of understand that, for I was morphing into a person that was a twisted reflection of my former self. Trying to find the right medication and a reason to live will do that to a person. Accepting who I became, pulling that knife out of my gut myself, took three years. But some wounds heal slower than others.

I don’t blame Tommy for his withdrawal from our friendship. I also don’t blame that act for the transformation I made into an incredibly loathsome creature, a thing I was forced to greet in the mirror each morning during my senior year of high school and freshman year of college. I alone made the choice to turn to drugs, giving more and more into my anger and prescription-backed, brazen overconfidence. But, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t fuck me up for a while.

I think it reawakened all of the trust issues I had buried after those major personality changes from earlier in my life. I expected the worst from people more and more. I expected those around me to cut and run when things got too real. Mental illness is ugly inside and out, and I got stuck thinking this was the new norm. No one in my age group would ever understand, it seemed. So, I withdrew. I focused on myself, on staying alive and staying my own hand. I put up blinders. I had tunnel vision.

In my immaturity, I only saw the withdrawal as abandonment. I guess that’s the way my brain partitioned it since I didn’t have the mental and emotional fortitude to get to the root of the issue: me. Maybe my subconscious mind was protecting itself, passing the blame to outside factors instead of destroying my weakening psychological foundation. You don’t need to read Dale Carnegie to know that people never blame themselves, I learned that from five years of food service. But I had deluded myself. I wasn’t the hero of my own story, I was at once the victim who needed saving and the villain attempting to destroy the world. My world.

I don’t think Tommy was ever against me, and I don’t think my other classmates were, either. Who knows what was going on in their lives? Still, at the end of the day, I was alone. I was once more what I never wanted anyone to feel ever again. It hurt. It still hurts, and I never want to go back. All the faith I lost in my fellow man, I misplaced that trust in myself. I was in my own tunnel, and I kept digging myself deeper and deeper.

Three years went by. To me, it felt like five minutes. Most of it blurs together, but I remember when I “woke up.” I remember not recognizing who I saw in the mirror of my freshman bathroom. Did I cry for an hour? Two? A whole day? I remember promising to myself to quit. I remember the horrible pain of withdrawal, the shakes and the sleepless nights. But what I’m most happy to remember is my return. “The old Nik is back,” my grandmother said, with the most relieved look on her face.

I’m still embarrassed about my past. Some days I’m even ashamed. I pulled that knife out of my gut and it didn’t heal for a while. Even now the scar is still tender. I pulled away from a lot of people. Good people. Good friends. But a lot of people pulled away from me. Who can say who threw the first stone? Who first lit the bridge? Their backstories are just as complex as mine, and I can’t say I knew what they were going through. What struggles did their homes know? Mental illness? Finances? Abuse? Identity? Love? Hate? I wish I asked. I wish I knew. I wish I could have helped.

It’s so easy to make yourself angry thinking about these kinds of things. The frustration, the spite and the hatred; they’re intoxicating, and you can lose yourself in them. I know I did, and I can feel where those flames licked in my recollection. Thinking about my past hurts, but it’s the only way to learn from it so you don’t repeat your mistakes. I might find myself in crisis again in the future, but focusing my worldview solely, and so intensely, on myself is, what I now know, a recipe for disaster. I have to stay aware that I’m the center of my world, but not the center of the world. I’m hoping that I can help those around me recognize that, too.

It was never me vs. Tommy. Neither me vs. my friends, or me vs. the world. It was always me vs. me; I just couldn’t see it.