The Fixer

            I go to the Fixer because I am Broken.

            Every seven weeks or so, when I am more Broken than usual, I schedule my appointment with him. Usually, he can take me on the weekends, but only on Sundays. He doesn’t tell me why, and I don’t ask. He is the Fixer, and he Fixes me.

            His clinic never smelt right to me. When I was younger, I thought it smelt like old people, and medicine. Now, although older, it just smells wrong. Maybe it’s just the staleness in the air, which he needs for his Fixing. No matter how many times I return to this clinic, it never sits well. Maybe it’s the knowledge of what is going to happen. Maybe it’s the despair of not knowing what will happen. Maybe both. I always remember that smell when I come in, but never when I leave. I guess I get used to it when I’m Fixed, and by the time I Break I’ve forgotten it again.

            There’s always someone here. Sometimes, it’s just me and the Fixer. Other times, I see those people, who haven’t been Fixed yet. They don’t cry. They never cry. They just stare. I remember that stare. That apathy. Towards everything. Towards nothing.  The anger, the fear, the pain, the pain, the pain. Always the pain. It never leaves. Permeates everything. Everything you see, you see through a pane of pain. And you just want to scream, but you can’t, or you won’t. To someone who is Broken, there isn’t much distinction.

 I wish I could explain exactly what being Broken feels like; it’s not for a lack of trying. I’ve spent so many sleepless nights, before finding the Fixer, trying to explain this feeling. Feeling is the wrong word to describe it; a lack of feeling is more accurate. The strongest thing you feel while Broken is the pain, the pain, the pain. Everything else fades into the background, an undiscernible chatter; the anger and the fear dominating that space, and everything else exiled from the emotional spectrum. When was the last time I could recall being happy, when I was Broken? Years, at the minimum. This nothingness hurts more than anything; but like everything else, there is nothing you can do about it.

The Fixer’s assistant was sitting at the reception desk. The assistant was the main person I interact with; he is the one who gets me ready for Fixing, finds me a comfortable chair, makes sure I am nice and cozy before the Fixer comes out. Today, the assistant knew I was coming. My chair was ready for me, one of the biggest he’s got. Not only was I cursed by being Broken, but I was also made in unnatural proportions. Maybe my height was what Broke me. I must assume it played a role. No freak like me could exist without being Broken. It simply is not possible. I am too different to conform, too stubborn to bend, so I Broke.

I sit down, and the assistant starts preparing for the Fixing. The first time I came in, we sat and talked about the process, what to expect, what will happen. He tried to make me relaxed about it then, and in the end, I agreed to be Fixed. Now, sitting in this chair, I try to recount how many times we have done this song and dance. Nineteen times? Twenty times? Some number around that. The preparation process is the easiest part; I sit down, get my music ready, and put on a nice blanket, all while the Fixer’s assistant connects me to machines that will take my blood pressure, body temperature, track my heartbeat, and finally, stab me in the arm.

It always starts like this. For a second, I see stars; then, the pain numbs for a bit, the old scar where the needle keeps penetrating growing used to having something underneath it. It still hurts. But this pain is just the start.

At this point, my music is starting; I always choose something relaxing, no words, just a gentle, relaxing, and familiar theme to guide me through the Fixing. It was one of the things the assistant had told me to do when I first met him, and I understand why. There is something about the music that brings me to a lull, a relaxation. Once, I put on some Bach; that mistake will never happen again. Today, I chose a gentle guitar, strumming near a campfire.

I don’t know exactly when the Fixer arrives. I usually have my eyes closed at this point, trying to ignore the pain in my arm. The pain. It is an old friend to me these days. It had kept me company for years. The doctors don’t know when it started; they say in cases like mine, it could be recent, or it could have been there since I was too young to speak. Regardless, it never left me. I have a pretty good idea when it truly started to surface. When I was younger than I am now (why can’t I recall exactly how old I am?), my family dragged me across the world. I was left here, ignorant of the language, the culture, the world, snatched from everything and everyone I knew before. Everything – family, friends, most of my worldly belongings – was left behind.

My family. They never came to visit us here. I get it. Times are rough (I don’t remember what my cousin’s face looks like) and they can’t come to visit us as much as we would like (but they were here, weren’t they?).

My friends. I haven’t talked to them in… two years? I remember texting one of them happy birthday a few weeks back. They’re in the military now, most of them. Not me. I’m now studying at a university halfway across the world.

The Fixing has begun. The easiest way to notice it is starting is the lack of pain; actually, it is the lack of all sensations, but the easiest way to notice it is the needle that is stuck to the back of my hand isn’t hurting anymore. I want to laugh when I realize this, but I can’t. I can’t move, except maybe my toes (I think this is normal for the Fixing). No way to communicate with the rest of the world.

I’m back in those months when I first moved here. I’m sitting at the school cafeteria (the concept of a cafeteria in a school is unknown to me until this point), reading a book in a comforting language, my language, the one that is rapidly fading away from me. One of the other kids in my class takes pity on me and tries to ask what I am reading. I answer him with the words my mom made me memorize before the day started.

I don’t understand you.

Those first months, and the ones that followed, were the worst in my life. These were the months the pain manifested. I remember sitting in my room, late at night, filled with the feeling that something is wrong with me. Why couldn’t I be like the people around me? Why was I so different? Why was I so Broken?

            I try to swallow the accumulating saliva in my mouth; my throat feels unresponsive, as if it is only doing this action because my body is compelling it to under threat. This is the worst part about the Fixings; my own body seeks to betray me during it. It knows that being Broken is its natural state, and it revolts each and every second it is being dragged out of it.

            This can’t go on. My body may revolt, but my mind is still my own (it hasn’t been in years). I can think of something else, something less painful (everything is still painful). There’s a flowy feeling in my mind, like someone stuffed it full of cotton, and my neurons are firing though a layer of impedance. It’s hard to properly think without slipping into a spiral, flowing from one thought to another, connected only by invisible threads the conscious mind cannot comprehend. Fixing brings you to a unique state of mind; everything physical is suppressed, while everything mental is emboldened, allowing everything you seek to forget to come to rise. It’s hell; it’s heaven. It’s everything in between, and nothing at all.

            My family. I had rougher patches with them all, but when things really turned for the worse for me, they stepped up. I feel a little guilty not telling my extended family the true extent of how badly Broken I am, but I don’t want to add more stress to their lives. They manage just fine, and the burden of knowledge can safely be held close to the chest.

            My friends. The ones I made here are some of the best I’ve ever had. During the darkest days, the ones where I couldn’t be trusted to remain alone, they dropped everything and came to help. They know what’s wrong with me; they don’t care.

            This is the truth the Fixing allows me to see. There are ups and downs to life; when you are Broken, you can’t see the ups. Fixing allows one to be put in a position where you can see both of them. It doesn’t put you in the up of life. It doesn’t necessarily put you out of the down of life. All it does is give you the capacity.

            Capacity. What a concept, that people are, in different point in their lives, able to contain different levels of emotions and comprehend different impacts of those emotions on their lives. How is it, that a person can be born into ignorance, and be capable to understand their fellow man on an atomical level, but later, as they gain intelligence, lose that capacity? How is it that the cold calculation causes them to lose the capacity to care? How is it that Breaking a man down, bringing him to his knees, causes his capacity to care for anyone or anything but the pain, the pain, the pain, the overwhelming pain, to drop to zero? I remember the apathy for everything, creeping in, bearing down on me. It started with the loss of capacity (back to this concept, huh) to focus on anything but the bare minimum. My therapist called it “auto-pilot”; I called it surviving. Everything I did in those days was stripped to the simplest, least energy consuming form. Wake up, drive to school, blink, the classes are over and my notes are filled, drive home, spend the rest of the day doing something (anything), sleep. I simply did not have the capacity for anything more. I couldn’t see a way out; it’s impossible to, when you can’t even force yourself to eat more than a meal a day. Those days, of monotony, were the days cracks finally started showing on the surface. After many long years, people around me started to realize something was wrong.

            I crack open my eyes, checking on the monitor next to me; it doesn’t tell me too much information I can use, especially not in this state. My gaze shifts to the painting by the door, illuminated by the dim, warm, lamp on the counter. I don’t recognize it. Is it new? It looks as if it’s moving slightly, the brushstrokes swirling around one another, switching places and celebrating their release from the framed prison. I lay there, hypnotized by the dance of colors taking place beyond my reach. I close my eyes again and let the current of my subconsciousness take control again.

            It has been almost two years since I started getting Fixed. I was still in high school then, slowly but surely gaining cracks in my surface. The first set of Fixings comes one after the other, very rapidly. For two weeks, I would go in, have a Fixing session, go home, rest a day, and then come back for another one. I kept going to school, taking classes at a local college, but in those days of rest, I got so tired it was impossible to stay up for more than a couple hours at a time. It was as if I was suddenly burning every spare piece of energy in the Fixings, and since I already was operating on the most I could dredge, I had to borrow some from tomorrow; when tomorrow came a-knocking, all I could do is shrug and fall asleep for a couple hours.

            Nowadays, I’m barely affected after the Fixings; but something is wrong during them. They’re stronger. Deeper. They drag me down lower and lower, forcing me to face my collapsing psyche and acknowledge just how wrong I feel. Imagine a rip current, flowing underneath a perfectly dark, glassy lake. When the water is disturbed, and you go to investigate it, the Fixing pushes you in; soon, the current drags you all around the lake, and spits you out. You are so exhausted from the experience, you pass out, but only after it is done. That rip current is the Fixing. After years of knowing the current, your response to it changes; or maybe the current grows more treacherous as your mind Breaks and is Fixed over and over again. Now, the current doesn’t spit you out as harshly, and you are able to wade onto the shore, but the swim around the lake has become the more dangerous part; whereas before, the danger was drowning in the shallow lakebed, you are now faced with a deep and powerful current, your own subconsciousness, which has revolted against the life that birthed it and demanded vengeance for the pain it endured.

This newer, more dangerous current does not care that you are spit out safely at the end of the swim; it does not care that the swim you are dragged along for is pleasant, or casual, or even bearable. The current pummels you against every invisible bump, every rock hiding under that impenetrable glass lake surface, wishing its hardest that you will not walk out of it unharmed, just as it itself is damaged and hurt. The survival instinct directs every iota of power towards keeping your head above the water, fighting the mind’s adaptation to previous Fixings, which were easier to float in, but harder to endure due to the inexperience with them. These are the Fixings I now contend with; angry, harsh, unforgiving. All my strength goes to surviving the current, which threatens to drown me at every second, but once that is passed, I can recuperate fast.

The current wasn’t always so rough, especially in those first times; but back then, I had no idea what to expect, nothing to previously compare the experience to. The original current felt like the roughest waters I’ve ever gone into; when it spit me out I was so exhausted, the struggle for survival occurred laying in the shallow bank, attempting not to drown in it.

Recuperation is now the afterthought; it used to be the part I dreaded most, since the exhaustion could have hit while I was driving, or at my classes. During that initial period of Fixings, when the Fixer would take me in every other day, I used to go to my morning classes, and in the seventy-five-minute period, become so exhausted I could barely drag myself to my car and drive home. Then came the blessed reprieve, the sleep, and then a day and another sleep later the Fixing starts anew. During those Fixings, the current was far weaker; it took me on a gentle tour of the lake’s edges, showing me the sites, giving me a tour. The new Fixings give me no such privileges; helpless as I am, the current drags me out and tries its hardest to smother me. Every single second feels like a fight for survival, and yet, the surface remains unbothered; no outside observer could ever guess the primordial struggle undergoing in the subconscious world.

            During my first meeting with the Fixer’s assistant, he told me that the Fixer’s best results occur when you give up on resisting the current, and going with the flow; I never found this advice helpful. How can one relinquish control over themselves so fully that when they are being pushed underwater, they are unable to resist the rip current?

I am now in this current; I feel myself being bashed against the corners of my consciousness, inviting my mind to repair itself, aided by the Fixer. Such an odd experience, knowing that the Fixer is at work, feeling the current drag me along, understanding that I am helpless to stop anything from happening in this state, and giving in. It is in this stage of the Fixing when a new emotion rises, when all others are suppressed: fear. It, too, is suppressed, but the irrational fear of the current, and the fear that you may go under and never surface again, still makes itself known. I know it is irrational; the fear does not stem from the known, but the unknown. Mostly, it comes from the suppressed bodily movement; when the Fixer is working, it is almost impossible to move, which only amplifies the irrational fears.

What’s the saying? “If you wanted to die, try to drown yourself, and see that your body will try to persevere”? That’s the basic idea here, as best I see it. I wanted to die, and was about to go through my plans; but now that I am here and faced with the rip current, I thrash and struggle and float, not allowing myself to be dragged down deeper and deeper, of fear I will never resurface if I let go.

My music is still playing, the gentle guitar’s strumming doing nothing to calm my unbased fears. My breathing doesn’t change, but my mind is starting to fight the current, fight the fixer. It takes much of my focus to allow myself to stop resisting, and I am back, floating along the current as it seeks to eviscerate me. The clock in my room appears to move as a metronome; I cannot discern the time. Trying to move my arm, to check the time on my phone, also results in failure. The gentle beeping of the heartrate monitor lulls me back into closing my eyes. There’s nothing else to do but wait the current out.

There is a real struggle to think while being Fixed. The current drags you away, invading your senses, blunting the ability to form coherent thoughts. I’m often asked “so, what did you think about during the Fixing?”, and I can’t answer. My brain becomes viscous, the thoughts like honey, and my mind loses its cohesion. Thoughts flow from one to the other, connected by the most abstract lines of thought, which do not appear understandable even to the Fixed individual. Everyone who undergoes the Fixing is warned about it; the assistant tells us about it in the first briefing, when he warns us to let the current take us. I suppose the same metaphor can be applied to the thoughts; the mind is a dam, and the Fixer opens the flow into a steady, rapid stream that makes its way into the current. Supposedly, the Fixing works better if you don’t resist it, which makes sense in theory. The way I see it, to the Fixing I am a bystander; if I (the conscious self) could be gone from the site of the fixing while my subconscious gets worked on, safely and unaffecting my body, I would be expelled from the room in the first available opportunity. Unfortunately, the Fixer cannot remove my conscious self from the subconscious mind, and therefore I am dragged along for the ride, forced to see where the current will take me as the Fixer does his magic.

For a while, I did regard the Fixer’s work as magic; I went in Broken, and came back Fixed. I regarded this Fix as a perfect reconstruction of my mind, as if it never had been Broken; nowadays, I know this is not the case. The concept is more similar to Kintsugi, the Japanese repair art form. In Kintsugi, a broken pot or other vessel is repaired using an adhesive mixed with a gold or other metal powder; the result is that the breaking line appears visible on the broken object, which adds to its history and symbolic importance. The Fixing is just that; a rendering of something Broken into something whole, but not perfect. The imperfections are still there, still visible; living reminders, if not to the outside world then to me, that at some point, I was Broken, and while I was Fixed, the Breaking point is still there. The Fix is not seamless. The knowledge that once, I was on the verge of killing myself, without regard to anyone or anything, will remain within me forever. The longer I go since that first Fixing, that first Kintsugi, the more golden-filled fractures fill the surface of my mind. I am Fixed, but the past remains. The Break remains.

Of course, even with the Fixing, things did not stay golden. It took a while after the first set when I Broke again (more like shattered). That Breaking was probably the roughest Break I’ve gone through in years; it felt like a relapse. This was the Break I realized the Fixer’s work isn’t magic. My family and I were basking in the Fix, overjoyed that the darkness of the days before were behind us, blind to the fact that the pain, the pain, the pain was not gone. It merely retreated, held at bay by the Fixing like Fenrir, chained by Gleipnir until he was strong enough to overcome his prison and devour the gods. It lay there, festering, building pressure at the dam until the waters threatened to drown me in their sedentary state. And eventually, like all forms of energy, that pent up pain wanted to escape. To Break.

And Break it did.

Over the course of two days, I’ve regressed from a Fixed person to being more Broken than I ever was before. Out of essentially nowhere, all progress made was lost. I became bitter, uncaring, apathetic to all but the ringing in my ears caused by the pain, the pain, the pain. All the good of the past two or three months was erased in a moment. I stopped eating. I stopped drinking. As soon as I finished my classes I returned home and barricaded myself in my room, snapping at my family, and started once again to prepare for my own death. Within the next day or so, my family caught on that I Broke once again, and so, I found myself back at the clinic of the Fixer, this time with a plan to “upkeep” the Fixings with a routine. Six to seven weeks at most in between Fixings was what the assistant recommended; so, after that catastrophic Break, every six to seven weeks I was back at the clinic.

The very same clinic I am in now.

I take a deep breath, and try to flex my fingers. To my surprise, they respond. The stabbing pain in the back of my hand is slowly returning. My mind feels less cloudy, and I see more clearly the room around me. I am nearing the end of the Fixing. By now, the Fixer is gone; he came and went without me ever directly seeing him. Within a couple minutes, the effects will have completely passed; the current will finish spitting me out, and I will be left gasping for air in the shallow bank, ready to stand and wade my way out of the water. These minutes are the most uncomfortable part of the Fixing, or of the process of Fixing, since the Fixing itself is done. I am left here, slowly regaining my senses, bit by bit having the stuffing that was shoved into my mind removed, but still unable to properly move or get up from the chair. I call these minutes my contemplative minutes; I am left here to think about the experience I just went through.

It’s not always this bleak. Something about today made me more reflective than usual; but then again, comprehending every part of the Fixing, and remembering exactly what I go through, is a herculean task. I will never be able to get out of a Fixing and say, word for word and thought for thought, what I went through. The current is too fast for coherent thoughts, and the Fixing inhibits my mind too much to allow that to happen. I guess I had a lot on my mind recently. The Fixings have a way of pulling through the deepest truths we think, bringing them to surface, even if they are in a format we are unable to comprehend. Sometimes, those thoughts are friendly, unthreatening, even enlightening; other times, those thoughts are dark, dwelling on an uncomfortable past for no apparent reason other than to remind myself that nothing stays gold forever, that I shouldn’t take the Fixings for granted, and to highlight the gold streaks in the dam.

The assistant comes into the room, along with my mother. By now, I am fully able to move. As the needle is removed from my hand, and the heartbeat monitor is disconnected, my mother asks me how the Fixing went. As usual, I give a non-answer.

“It was alright. Can’t remember much.”

This song and dance is our routine after the Fixings. I think she knows I remember more than I am willing to say. She doesn’t prod me further, just asks that if I recall more that I will tell her.

Getting up, my legs still wobble as I shakily get out of the chair and start making my way out of the room. I use my hands to grab onto the doorframe, and then the walls of the long hallway out of the clinic. The assistant pats my back as I get to the waiting room at the front entrance. I thank him weakly and keep going, making my way to the door. Once again, the waiting room is occupied; those people, both the hopeful and the hopeless, still sitting there, some with light in their eyes as they wait on those whose’ lights have long been extinguished, waiting on the Fixer to reignite their lives into motion.

Once the door opens, I am greeted with a wave of clean air, and I am reminded of the clinic’s smell, the dry, stale air, which always smells wrong. Like always, by the time I have finished the Fixing, I have gotten used to it. Like always, by the time I would come back, I will have forgotten it.

Getting in the car, I take a swig of a water bottle I left there before the Fixing. My throat is parched; such is the way things are after a Fixing. My body still has to get used to being in control. My eyes close themselves as my mother drives me to my apartment, where I get out, hug her goodbye, and settle into the couch. The rest of the day goes by uneventfully, but I find myself filled with unexpected motivation to get to work on things I before would have continued putting off. Little things, that once seemed so impossible. Life, suddenly made survivable when once it felt like hell. A breath of fresh air; a breath of hope, of possibility, of ability. A reminder that things aren’t always the darkness that clouded life. The Fixing had worked; it would take another couple weeks of wear and tear before I would even start thinking about the Breaks again, and a couple more weeks after that before I would need to return to the Fixer’s clinic and start the process all over again.

As I go to bed, I once again enter my contemplative minutes; this time, I am far more aware of my day and my mind, unimpeded by the Fixing’s aftereffects. My thoughts return to that Fixing, the hour of paralysis and uncontrol. It is only then that the tears start to flow.

Because the truth is?

I am terrified of the Fixer.