Cary Randolph writes.

For three summers in a row we...

kept a house on 68th Street in Virginia Beach. With brown clapboard siding it won no beauty contests, but it boasted a wide screened-in front porch and room enough for all twelve of us. A lot of hilarity took place within those salt-beaten walls. There was the night that our parents got so startlingly shit-faced at the dinner table that my mother (I’m pretty sure) passed out face-down in the lamb chops, and even our grandfather, knee-deep in a bottle of bourbon, couldn’t rise from his chair for fear of tipping into the centerpiece. We were in junior high and high school then and spent a lot of time outdoors, of course, untangling board cords and fighting about who wanted to wear what spaghetti strapped crop top to the boardwalk and whether Sister had really shoplifted all those key chains or was just blowing smoke. (Full disclosure: We both lifted the plastic dolphin chains.)

Before 68th Street came the blue house closer to the Atlantic Avenue strip. I remember nothing about it except the first night we stayed there in summer of 1998. NMC and I shared a bedroom with a big picture window facing the street (onto which we stared one night, rapt, as a drunk homeless man berated and eventually tried to physically subdue a telephone pole). On the second night, exhausted after a day in the sun, we climbed into bed, turned out the lights, giggled for a minute about boys or some other nonsense, and then were silent.

Minutes passed. Suddenly at the same moment each of us leaped in the air and onto the floor. We tore off our sheets and began beating the mattresses with our pillows.

“SAND!” we shouted. Down the hall in the other children’s rooms, one could hear the muffled laughter of cousins trying desperately to empty their beds of oceanside evidence.

I remember only that first burst of energy. How long did it last? How long did we giggle and scream before a mother or aunt banged on the wall for us to be quiet? How much time passed before we gave in to the night and crawled back under the covers, sand or no sand?

I’ll never remember. There are few photos from that summer. But ever after, when I head home from a beach and rinse my bikini under cold water and call my mother to tell her exactly how big the waves were, after I pull on the ratty old tee shirt and turn out the light, I think of that night and the sandy twin bed, and I think that if only I’d known at thirteen how badly I’d want it at 23, I would never, ever have tried to rid those sheets of the very thing that keep me alive in winter - the thought, the feel, the memory of sun and summer and beach sand everywhere.

Following a party in an...

caryrandolph:

…abandoned warehouse (heavy with half-pipes and red graffiti), we drove south to Oak Pointe where JK’s parents were in Europe and the house was just absolutely rocking. Beyond the Jersey-esque front gate emblazoned with his family crest, around the north wing and down a hill, we found the lawn filled with kids and booze. A fiberglass canoe, pushed, somehow, into the pool, now braved white-capped waves of briny beer foam. This party, I knew even then, was epic and monumental and destined for the annals of [Hometown] lore.

She took off in search of her boy, and I wandered the wrap-around balcony, replete with Doric columns and railings designed perfectly for Juliet swooning, searching, perhaps, for a boy of my own. I don’t remember. The clock chimed midnight; I saw no pumpkins. I cracked a fourth Keystone Light and spied him shooting pool. We toured the manse together - first wandering to the “French Country” kitchen then south a quarter of a mile to a master bedroom overflowing with chintz. Our exploration was chaste, a game of hide-and-seek behind taffeta and French doors. Below and outside two hundred of our high school’s finest cavorted on a clipped lawn; inside we ran fingers over wainscoting and traded June plans - I’ll go here with you if you do this with me. The ink on my diploma had not yet dried; we were sunburned and sleepy and drunk with the endless, eternal promise of summer.

At three-thirty she reappeared. “My mother is going to kill me,” she said through clenched teeth as she dragged me across the cobbled driveway. “Do you really care?” I asked. “We’re in college now, and anyway, it’s summer! We do what we want!”

Last night over calamari and...

…chardonnay, everything changed. But you know how it feels when some small shift in tone becomes the catalyst that disbands an entire cocktail party. A finger runs around the rim of a lowball glass. An eye slides, only just perceptibly, to the grandfather clock by the library door. We were talking about the differences between boys and girls (or men and women, or gentlemen and ladies), and the talk moved to depression, namely mine, and the effect it has on writing. To write about it, he said, one has to have experienced it, but to have experienced and be able to write about it is a very rare thing indeed.

I recovered from my depression sometime in 2006. To affix a precise date would be inaccurate; I look back now and remember not a clear awareness that I felt better, but a satisfaction that on one of those 365 days the sun rose and flowers bloomed, and I took notice.

Until very recently, however, I could not write about it. I could not look back on my disease and see it objectively and without pain or resentment or the taint of victimization. There was a block on my heart and the hand that held the pen, and for three years I discussed it only in terms of how the disease had waylaid all my plans. But depression has no regard for plans or for the glass breakables that stand in its way. Depression is the worst tornado, sucking up lives and depositing whole houses where there had previously been flower gardens. For three years I had to rebuild silently.

Something happened in March to blow the lid off my imagination, and all the old feeling came rushing back. First I read William Styron’s memoir Darkness Visible twice in one day, and then in a South Street Seaport bar heard those words that plow most deeply into the heart, spoken slowly, quietly, with enormous clarity. We must all hear them sooner or later. So I began to write. The vestiges of my depression became a life preserver, where before they had dragged me under water.

In these four weeks I have begun an enormous excavation project, turning over each stone that had begun to erode in my already windswept mind. And I have found in me a completely new calling, a new purpose, a new passion. I am gifted with an incredible talent: translating on paper, on screen, the indescribable torment of melancholia. And if I can create with my writing some portal through which the world (or even one other person) can better glimpse the hailstorm that pounds the mind of the depressed, if by affixing my face and my experience to an illness which has waylaid ten percent of the global population, then all the heartbreaks, the silences, the million daydreams I had of ending it all with one leap or one swallow or one sharp turn of the steering wheel, will not only be worth it but will be a point in my life about which I can be proud.

We all know what a...

caryrandolph:

…pet peeve is. It’s the “worst thing”. The nail on the chalk board, the banana noise, the smell of burnt pumpkin seeds, whatever. It’s your own worst case scenario bottled up in a dripping faucet or the hum of a housefly. But what about the “best thing”? What’s the name for that? Anti-peeve?

My best thing is very specific so to ensure that everyone gets a fair shake at making me shake with unexpected joy, I thought I’d share it. After all, “best thing season” is right around the corner.

You know that feeling when you step onto the beach, and you’re schlepping so much crap that you think at any moment a finger might slip and send the whole pile tumbling? And it’s super hot - the air and the sand and the sun - and you’re already thirsty and tired, and you start to wonder if the struggle is at all worth it. This beach is endless. Didn’t it take you an hour just to park and find the boardwalk? But this is the longest hundred feet you’ve ever traversed. Factor in the beach blanket real estate game (Where are all the boys?!), and you might as well have stayed home and aimed the hose at your face.

Then you stake out your territory, and you start to walk faster lest someone else encroach upon your diamond sand acreage. Maybe you trip, and you come very close to catapulting your Corona-packed cooler into a nearby pop-up cabana. You start to sweat. You walk, you walk. And then there you are, inches from high tide, exactly where you want to spend the next six salty hours.

Here’s where the best thing happens:

You drop everything. You don’t set down the cooler or the towels or the folding chairs. You don’t throw them either; you release the weight from your grip and let everything fall at your sides. And you start running toward the water. You don’t stop to think about your hair or how tightly your bikini strings are tied or whether you remembered to take off your Ray-Bans. You just kick off your flip flops and book it waveward. You run at top speed, arms akimbo, hair flying, knees to chest, feet kicking up sand, and you CRASH into the water and dive head first, and it is so fucking cold and gritty and salty, and —-

YES, THIS IS THE BEST THING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

I am spending this weekend in the...

caryrandolph:

…land of lawns, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to grow up in New York City and not have a screen door to slam on the way outside. No matter how many summer homes one’s parents cart one off to, season in, season out, it simply is not the same. I grew up with a tree swing and a forest and a creek and a cul-de-sac, and I knew every crack in the sidewalk, and we would clatter down the deck stairs early in the morning and not return until the street lamps turned on. How do you do that as a child in Manhattan? How do you turn a spontaneous cartwheel without first having to travel? How do you make the monumental upgrade from mere two-wheeler to ten-speed bike? How do you explore for hours the inner depths of the overgrown garden without ever once telling your mother that you left the house at all?

I have a very vivid memory of my...

caryrandolph:

…depression, and not a day goes by that I do not replay it in my mind. Nearly four years later the details are as clear as if I had dreamed them last night, but this dream was a nightmare.

I was twenty years old and a third year transfer at the University of Virginia. The decision to leave [Alma Mater] for Thomas Jefferson’s academical village was as much a product of my insanity (and that’s what clinical depression is, if you don’t want to mince words) as it was a rational decision to better my education and fulfill previously unattained goals. On this particular day I remember being very aware that autumn was closing in. Rain fell nearly every day. My once religious runs dwindled to twice a week, and I skipped class constantly. At about three o’clock in the afternoon, sunlight hovering at the Smoky Mountain tree line, I got in my Jeep and began the drive to Monticello. I do not remember what day it was. I probably didn’t know then, either.

I am a descendant of Jefferson’s, and that August I obtained a key to the family gravesite so that I could put flowers on my grandmother’s grave. It was a routine I enjoyed because it got me out of my Rugby Road apartment, and I received some satisfaction spending small minutes with a grandmother I never knew but whom I did know spent many of her own days locked in a stupefying but never diagnosed depression. We shared more than the name Cary Randolph and an affinity for cigarette pants; we shared a hideous gene.

Music has always been important to me but then it was an aural manifestation of my torture. I listened repeatedly to Coldplay’s X and Y album and a small handful of other equally miserable songs, most memorably “For a Dancer” by Jackson Browne, written about his wife’s suicide in the late 1960s. I remember winding the car up and up the mountainside, “For a Dancer” playing an endless loop, and I felt panic encroaching, at which point I would have to pull the car over and wait for it to pass. I should not have been driving at that point in my illness. Every highway overpass became an escape. All I would have to do was turn the steering wheel a little too sharply. I had stopped wearing my seatbelt, willing oncoming semi trucks to swerve in my direction. And that afternoon, with the sky turning gray and gold, I felt the sun swell and my eyes were filled with light. Noise from the speakers seemed to be getting louder, blaring, but I hadn’t touched the dial. I couldn’t breathe. The only apt metaphor for the physical affects of depression is “drowning”. No other word comes close to describing what this immense pain resembles.

I don’t remember how I got home that day. I don’t remember making it to Monticello, although I would have had to reach the parking lot in order to turn around. All I can remember is light exploding and noise, noise, noise, and the absolute certainty that I had to leave this place, that I had to go home.

The worst mistake in the world that a friend or family member can make when trying to help a sufferer of depression is to suggest that her illness is a weakness of character. Don’t ever list for her all her wonderful friends or the beautiful weather or her great job. Don’t remind her of all the love in her life. She knows. It isn’t the knowing that is problematic, but the total inability to feel anything but sadness; the panic, the horrifying realization, that nobody around her has any idea what tempests rage inside her unwell mind; and the fear that perhaps they know something she doesn’t. Perhaps it is all her fault.

In 2004 and 2005, I was held under...

…a veritable lock and key of clinical depression. Unlike so many “lucky” victims of the disease, neither pharmacology nor cognative therapy abated my suffering. But running did.

In running I found a single window of time to which I could look forward every day. Whether it was a quick three miler down Providence Road or a long slow trek up the Virginia mountainside, my daily run pulled me out of bed and above the misery. Say what you will about runner’s high; I felt an endorphin rush that no pill cocktail ever matched.

Running saved my life.

I remember running up Sargent Street in [Hometown] one summer night. It was much too late to be out by myself. It was nearly midnight. I had convinced myself just days prior that I would not survive my depression, that at some point soon I would have to deliver myself from what I saw would be a lifetime wasted doing battle against a darkness I could never match. By then I could barely drive my car, and I did not trust myself alone. But that night I ran, and I ran, and I ran in the middle of the street through the worst projects in town. I stopped on the train track that bisected Jackson Street, and I looked up at the stars, and I shook and cried. I had hit the absolute bottom, and yet I feared that there would be no bottom, that I was born to be depressed (and, genetically speaking, I was and I am), and my entire life would be spent sliding, sliding, with no end in sight. I felt at that moment that I had nothing. But I kept running. It was all I could do. I turned and I ran home, faster then, and I went to bed still sweating, and I woke up the next morning, and I was alive.