She tries to calm herself down. She tries to pick up what has fallen on the floor and return it to the nightstand, but the adrenaline is making her fingers big and clumsy. She fumbles and drops several of Sawyer's thin, gold rings and then gives up. Natasha tries the square breathing she taught Sawyer in the taxi. Her breathing starts off ragged, but then she gets it under control until the air left in her stomach bubbles up with a sharp noise she tries to clamp her teeth over. The noise spills out her nose instead.
Her body is still full of adrenaline. She can't keep still. Her legs walk her round and around the tiny room. She swipes the old landline phone onto the floor, picks up the receiver and jams it onto the handset forcefully. Cutting off the buzz of the dial tone with a violent click is addictive, and she only stops when she starts to notice a crack growing in the plastic. She does some squats to burn off her energy. When that doesn't work she rends the thin hotel notebook in two instead.
She doesn't touch the baggie. She doesn’t get close. She leaves it propped on top of the books where Sawyer left it.
Natasha has never been able to tolerate failure. She has always felt like Indiana Jones outrunning the boulder, sure that her next failure will be the one to crush her entirely. She'd tried to play the part of a responsible, loving, grown-up woman but failed. Sawyer will always remember Natasha as that nut-job that brought schedule two drugs on their first weekend away together. She can't bear that shame.
She knows Sawyer has a leather belt somewhere. In a dream she walks to the bathroom, stares at the shower rail. It's metal, and securely fitted to the wall. She might not be able to bear the shame, but she can't put Sawyer, eight years younger, through finding her. She can't put some poor housekeeper on minimum wage through it either.
She thinks about going into the street. Unsure what the plan is, there are cars, bridges, water, tall buildings, pharmacists, dealers. She doesn't want to die where she can't be identified immediately. Ideally she'd be at home in her apartment. She wouldn't want her parents having a phone call asking them to come to Philly to identify her. She has her bank card with her, but photo ID would be better. She thumbs through her wallet. Her BWAC staff card has a photo, snapped by Lucia against the wall of her studio. It's in Boston.
She tells herself she can do it the second she gets back to Boston, like an injured fox crawling back in its hole to die. Giving herself permission to want to die helps a bit. She thinks back to the anti-suicide course she did years ago at the centre. Gillian had wanted them all to be trained in case of vulnerable customers. She sometimes uses the principles on herself, pretending she is her own counselor. First, she listens to her reasons to want to die. She tries to make herself feel understood and respected. She is non-judgmental about her own ambivalence. She let Sawyer down, she let herself down, she ruined a good thing. Now, she listens to her reasons for living so she can identify a hook to keep herself safe. She likes her job, she likes the cold weather, and Lucia assures Natasha that she's not going anywhere even though Natasha suspects that being kind to elderly lesbians must be part of Lucia's charity work. Finally, there is Sawyer. Natasha knows she's fucked it up. Natasha corrects herself, she suspects that she's fucked it all up. But she feels she owes it to Sawyer to try and sort it out before she disappears forever, her short life infinitesimally small in the scope of the universe.
As the printed hand-out had advised, she tries to come up with a safety plan. Usually yoga or being in a crowded space will do the trick, but Natasha just feels exhausted. There's a winged armchair in front of the window, and Natasha lets herself flop into it. She still feels sick. He legs feel oddly weightless, she feels as though she's on a boat, the floor underneath her is tilting slowly up and down. She identifies these as symptoms of anxiety. She puts "I notice..." in front of her negative thoughts.
"I notice that I am feeling like I would like to jump out of the window."
"I notice that I am thinking that I don't deserve to be loved."
"I notice that I am anxious that the woman I love is going to leave me."
She repeats, "I have a lot of tools in my emotional toolbox, I have a lot of tools in my emotional toolbox," like a mantra until she remembers swinging Sawyer's pink toolbox on to the back seat of her car and wants to cry.
It's too cloudy for there to be much of a sunset, and the sky turns a murky mustard before it goes black. Or as black as it ever goes in a city. After a while, Natasha checks the time and realizes that Sawyer's show will be starting now. She gets up for a piss and manages to motivate herself to hit the lamps on.
