The last day of 7th grade meant that the one girl in our class with a pool would be hosting a start-of-summer-vacation pool party. There were a lot of girls in attendance, but by no means was every single student invited, so I felt happy and relieved to be included. The pool was a medium-sized above-ground perfect circle. A slippery plastic ladder was required to clamber in or out of the freezing four feet of water. I was one of the few girls who was brave enough to submerge my entire body and head, pushing off the curved inside wall and taking one and a half breast strokes beneath the surface to the other side. Although I was easily the best swimmer at the party, there wasn't enough room to showcase my amazing butterfly stroke skills, so I just did the occasional summersault and floated effortlessly on my back, eyeing the small cluster of girls with flat stomachs who had worn bikinis. My lap swimming suit seemed foolish now, but remained preferable to revealing my negligible kid-paunch. At some point water balloons made an appearance and I had to act like this was a really fun turn of events. The exaggerated laughter and pretend-menacing looks as one took aim at a friend or acquaintance gave way to the giddy-wounded shrieks as one got nailed by the bursting latex. I hated water balloons only slightly less than I hated snowballs. The rubbery snap against my skin as it popped and burst hurt--not in a way that made me want to cry--but in a way that definitely made me want to yell, "Knock it the fuck off". It was a little like when one of my friends gave me a "smurf bite"--a pinch accompanied by a twist to the most tender skin on my arm. Who made the decision that we need to endure minor injuries inflicted by play with a smile on our face, lest we get the reputation of being a baby. I definitely wasn't at the board meeting.
Slowly, everyone began leaving the pool with still-dry hair, shivering theatrically. I took my time exiting the pool and toweling off, listening to the voices that had migrated to the front yard in an effort to get a sense of what new scene or activity I would be joining. I couldn't piece it together from the audio clues, so I stepped out of the perfect shade that their big maple tree and awning and melded together and into the glaring sun out front. The visual clues weren't much clearer. There were towels spread across the lawn, but no one was sunbathing, exactly. There were three sets of girls, each near a beach towel on the grass. Each member of the set had a specific position and job, it appeared. The girl in front, facing away from the girl behind her, would bend forward as if to touch her toes and then fling herself into a standing position while holding her own hands to her neck. A couple of seconds later she would fall backward, into the waiting arms of the girl behind her who would ease her gently onto her back on the towel. Five seconds would pass and then the fallen girl would open her eyes with a drowsy smile on her face and her friend would say, "Okay, my turn!" They would switch and the strange sequence would begin again.
"What are you guys doing?" My voice was not cool or curious or impartial. It was suspicious and a little scared. A blond, leggy twelve year old excitedly told me that they were making themselves faint. I thought they were definitely lying, and I wasn't about to look like a dummy by being taken in by this elaborate prank. I'd had "friends" from a summer school theater program who would routinely tell me detailed, outlandish lies as some sort of experiment to see just how gullible I was. Rather than being gullible, I was a nice kid who found their tales spectacularly unbelievable, but couldn't conceive of a reason why they'd lie to me. My only lies up to that point had been to spare other's feelings, and I learned that sometimes people lie to do the exact opposite--to deliberately hurt feelings for their own amusement. In any case, I wasn't going to look like a fool again, ever.
"Yeah right." I scoffed.
The leggy blond was very friendly for a leggy blond, at least according to my experiences with them. I liked her a lot, generally speaking. But this was the age of middle school. No one could be trusted. But she seemed so genuinely excited and very keen on convincing me that this thing they were doing actually worked. With a roll of my eyes I conceded to try it one time, just to prove that everybody was full of shit. She took my shoulders and led me to the top of a towel. She then gave me very explicit instructions about how to proceed. "You have to do it exactly right, or it won't work," she cautioned. I watched her mime the self-procedure a couple of times until I had it memorized. Then I began.
I bent down toward the grass, my arms and wet hair dangling. I could see the chain link fence through the small gap in my legs, and beyond that, the sidewalk and sizzling black street. I began to hyperventilate, in and out, as fast as I could while the leggy blond counted aloud to thirty. Then I launched myself vertical and squeezed my neck with the pressure she had demonstrated, while at the same time, pushing all of my air out hard, as if I were shitting like my life depended on it, or giving birth.
The next thing I remember were pinpricks of light blinking and fluttering behind my lids and my body awash with radiant tingling. My eyes blinked open and I found myself lying on the towel, a bit of grass itching at my ankles. Leggy blond was gazing down at me without a hint of smug satisfaction. She just looked thrilled for me that I'd had this experience and that she'd been the one to facilitate it. My head lolled as I sat up and I couldn't keep the groggy smile off my face. All I could say was, "Again." She was happy to oblige, pulling me up and steadying me on my feet before I had another go. Over the course of the next hour I became proficient as both fainter and faintee, faller and catcher. Ecstasy beyond measure had found me that blazingly hot summer day. I hadn't known it was possible to feel nothing and then lurch into feeling everything. If pressed to describe the experience I would have to say it felt like trillions of fireflies lifted and carried me upon their fluttery backs into outer space and then all zipped away, leaving me to parachute gauzily through the misty coolness of an eternity of creamy cloud-huddles. And even that doesn't do it justice.
It's difficult to believe that I didn't really understand what was happening, what I was doing. I had no plans to smoke cigarettes or pot or drink alcohol. At least at that time. I understood the dangers inherent to those things. But I didn't think of fainting as dangerous, not for a long time. I thought of it as a parlor trick or a party game. That's how it had been presented to me, after all. But for a smart kid like myself to not understand that I was briefly cutting off the flow of blood and oxygen to my brain, and that the dreamy coming back to life feeling was a literal coming back to life, is a hard and terrible thing for me to fathom. I was killing my brain and myself in short bursts for fleeting euphoria. The very definition of drug abuse, of addiction. And I was clueless. I presented the fainting game to various friends at sleepovers, and I too felt like Leggy Blond had--like I was an ethereal mystic with a great gift to impart. My friends and I put the fainting game into our regular rotation of Light-As-a-Feather-Stiff-as-a-Board, Truth or Dare, and the other surreal game we'd learned or invented where someone would lie on their stomach with their arms reaching straight ahead on the floor like Superman and someone else would bring their arms up as high as possible and hold them there for a full minute, finally lowering them back down so it felt like---Wait! my arms should be touching the floor my now! What's happening? They're falling through the floor!!! It was similar to standing in a doorway and firmly pressing your arms outward into it until they ached, then stepping out to feel your arms lifting as if by magic. Or cracking imaginary eggs on one another's heads--a sharp tap of fingernails on scalp and then fingers opening softly against hair, the illusion of warm, spreading yolk.
Fainting was exactly like that to me, for a while.
At some point in the thick of this season of fainting I discovered by total accident that my new prescription nasal allergy spray could get me high as the moon. The first time it happened I was watching TV and everything got really fuzzy and far away and then when it came back into focus again I felt happier about it all. I wonder if this nasal spray is still on the market. It came in a clunky casing, like an albuterol inhaler-- nothing like the small, sleek Flonase-y version today. That being said, I could still fit the inhaler in my pocket, which made me feel like I could experience a fainting sensation on-the-go, if need be. It was doubly convenient because I wouldn't even need a spotter!
The day I had the darkly brilliant idea to combine the nasal spray with the self-fainting was probably inevitable. I wonder what happened on that particular day that made this combination so self-evident. I can't seem to access it in the deep outer-reaches of my mind. Was it one horrible thing or a series of awful things that, added together, culminated in this good girl's desperate need to escape it all for just a few minutes. I've no idea. But after school one day in 8th grade, I climbed the stairs to my parent's bedroom and spent several minutes arranging pillows to soften my fall. I didn't have a spotter, but that was okay because I needed to do this alone and immediately. I took a series of hits of my nasal inhaler and immediately went into the fainting launch code.
I don't know how much time elapsed before I came to. I know that when I had gone upstairs to faint I was home alone and that when I surfaced from those depths my mom was calling to me from downstairs. "Tracy!" she sang out, mercifully unaware of what I'd just done and what I'd been dabbling in.
"Coming! Just a minute!" I called back in a voice that sounded like someone had tried to stuff cheer into my throat, choking and false.
As I struggled to stand up I realized that I'd fallen forward instead of backward, and that the pillow had only partially protected me from injury. There was a blistery-feeling cut that would, in time, darken into a hickey-shaded bruise just below my left jawbone where I'd smacked the edge of my parent's wooden water bed frame. I rubbed at it self-consciously. It stung. As did my eyes where the tears were welling up. My head throbbed concussively. I hurried to return my parent's bed to its normal appearance. There didn't appear to be blood anywhere, thankfully. Then I brushed my hair over the welt blooming on my upper neck and trotted downstairs with a smile.
That night I threw away my nasal spray and I vowed to never faint, purposely, again. It was a promise that I kept, easily. But I understood that uncomfortable or agonizing feelings were bound to surface again and I'd need to discover healthier escapes or construct more painstaking distractions. At twelve years old I understood more firsthand about desperation and dangerous escapes and addiction on a gut and heart level than I would realize for a very long time. I was bound to addicts of all faces and flavors. I was inextricably tethered to all those who flail against their own suffering. I was initiated into that airless darkness. But I kept swimming, upstream most times, until occasionally I'd catch a current and relax into it. Knowing a little better when to float and when to swim and in which direction and for how long. Knowing that drowning becomes permanent in a hurry, and that my forays with it only brought mirages of bliss. Near-drowning is a trembling mirror pressed to your face that shows you everything--all the searing pain housed in every single person. But also the reflective beauty inside of yourself and inside of everyone.
