Linear Regression
Libby Dakers
March 3, 2023
A gentle feeling of sleep tugs at my eyelids and I lie down. I focus on the sounds, on laughter and conversation mingling, until they become contorted, moving at an irregular pace, hanging densely in the air like honey as it pours.My eyes snap open and I stand in the basement. Our paintings cover the walls from the week before, so when the house sells, something will be left behind. I widen my eyes because I cannot see. My skin stretches over the curve of my brow and I try desperately to pull my eyes open, but I continue to stand in darkness. I feel a tug at the corners of my mouth and I start to sob. Her voice is calling to me, so I make one last, panicked attempt to see. The dim light against the shapes in the basement register, but when I turn to face her, her eyes are ablaze. My stomach falls because her mouth lies closed, but I still hear her voice talking to me. What if I am tripping, and I trip forever?They are rubbing my back and the pressure is cutting in and out like radio static. Numbness settles over my skin. Every second I feel more conscious. I wake up over and over again. Days after The Event, my body sits tight with anticipation, waiting on lagging vision, numbness and muffled hearing. My mind feeds me whisperings, convincing me that I died that night, until death became a coma, and instead I had made a home for myself in my vegetative brain. I will live here for the rest of my life, walking on a line where nothing is real and I will never know the truth. But that thought soon grows old, unrealistic, even. Instead, I’m convinced that my anxiety will spiral into schizophrenia. As I’m falling asleep, I hear voices calling me into my dreams. Pieces of everyday conversations making way for phrases out of place. “Let’s go swimming outside. Let’s go outside before lunch. Make lunch for school! Elizabeth, wake up, it’s time for school!!” Distorted like dreams with circular timelines. I jolt awake. Soon after The Event, I started the anxiety medication. As I drove to school, something broke in my head and a chill washed over me. I felt like the passenger seat was going to sink to the asphalt and I was going to turn to dust. I developed a daily fear that the walls would melt away until I was alone in a bright white room for eternity. Or that any second I would drop dead. Or wake up in a lab. I come to the same nursing home where I visited my great-grandmother ten years ago. I remember her in shapes: her wiry hair curved around her head like a pear, and the bulky outline of her recliner. The miniature Shasta Cola can from the fridge down the hall, where my brother and I would venture when my great-grandmother needed privacy. She called us “the boys,” which always made me a little sad because I was proud to be a girl from a thin line of women. Proud to be my mother’s daughter, my grandmother’s grand-daughter, and my great-grandmother’s great-granddaughter.The nursing home has become the synthesis of my wild fears and reality. The world condenses to a small cream-colored room where the syrupy voices of nurses call you to the next place you are due. In the clean hallways, you may run into another traveler. Their faces warp the picture of gentle tranquility into the force of a tranquilizer. Now, ten years later, I come to visit my grandmother. The halls see how I have aged. I notice that pills come with meals. Pills come with waking and sleeping. When I swallow my one pill, I feel a crushing dread of the effects to come—mornings of clarity followed by paranoia as the day drags on. How come no one else is concerned by the way the light is poking through the curtain? My fears are accompanied closely by sadness. A profound sadness, an unanswered question. Why am I no longer the person I once was? Am I dissolving into my lineage, into a trail of women who eventually lose their minds?One night, I listened to my mother describing my grandmother’s dementia to my uncle. She is not blissfully forgetful like most dementia patients. My mom describes her hallucinations, paranoia, psychosis—words that make me feel like the air is tightening. Words I fear will stretch towards me and weave themselves through my nostrils to my brain where they can plot my decline. My eyes stiffen as I obediently watch for straight lines to sway, in case it starts now. She sees people coming from the walls, from closets; dark people. I am never there when my grandmother is having an episode. But I know that whenever my mother leaves the house in the middle of the night to see her, it is to ease her paranoia and disarm her thoughts. During stretches in which my mother has to stay with her for a few days at a time, I know that when I visit her she will tell me made-up stories about cars driving through buildings and trips she has planned for the week. About a month after The Event her dementia is wavering at a peak. Each day is like a splotch on a graph climbing higher, and I am the regression line trapped between them all, mapping the upward trend. My magnitude shifts with her changes. My anxiety and her dementia are tethered. I hold her when she cries. I watch one of the women who raised me live through my biggest fear. The fall following The Event, things begin to change. She’s coming down from the peak, the points falling steadily downward. She has moved to a new facility where the nurses speak to her like she’s a grown woman. I have grown tired of thinking I am dead, or planning how I will wake myself from a months-long dream. When I think of her old house, I think of the scent of lake water on my T-shirt, the birds trilling and the rustling of afternoon leaves. I think of the sun hovering over the water. We float on the lake, pulling up weeds from the sand. I am afraid of fish, the snake I saw last summer and the feeling of mushy leaves on the bottom. She isn’t afraid of anything.
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