Coming of Age on Zoloft by Katherine Sharpe

monsters wait to swallow lost sailors.
    THAT MORNING IN Brooklyn, I hugged good-bye to my friend Anna on the strip of grass separating the sidewalk from the street in front of our building. We had graduated from college and moved to the city together nine months before. Anna planned to stay indefinitely, while I’d already applied to schools and expected to be moving on at the end of summer, though I didn’t yet know where. We rented a tiny loft near the river and built denlike bedrooms out of drywall and metal two-by-fours; in honor of my temporary-resident status, I slept on an air mattress for months. During the day I worked at a coffee shop while Anna went to her internship at a record label. In our off times, we explored our wonderful and bewildering new city, or compared notes about it while sitting together in the dusty glory of our first grown-up apartment.
    As thrilling as New York could be, the new shape of social life alternately excited and dazed me. In the city we went out a lot, but people seemed to disappear back into their lives more mysteriously; there was no nucleus, no point of reference to understand ourselves in relation to. I missed the way that Portland had felt like a real community. It had been a home to me, while New York City felt like a raucous way station, a wild party in an elevator.
    In the first months after college I had ended up applying to graduate schools almost by accident, out of a sense that the real world was too baffling and amorphous to handle. I hadn’t figured out what to do with my life, but I had been good at my major, English, and when one of my professors suggested that I might apply for PhD programs, the thought appealed to me. The implicit praise appealed to me too. All my life I had been a good student, adept at pleasing teachers and used to warming myself by the glow of the approval they gave me. Losing that old system for feeling worthwhile had been the hardest thing about leaving college. Getting back into the academic world, with its reassuring markers of achievement, seemed like a way both to feel good about myself again, and to silence the questions about what to do with my future that had become a monotonous, tormenting chorus inside my head.
    So I applied. I did it even though something about the whole process felt rushed and wrong, like a bigger commitment than I was ready for. I drove my unease away with the lockstep of details: I filled out forms, gathered writing samples, and sent packets off to a dozen distant addresses. I was admitted to a couple of programs, and even though my campus visits made me feel crazy with ambivalence, I accepted one, because I didn’t know what else to do and I wanted to make other people proud. And now, in my waning days in New York, every time I thought about it too hard I felt queasy. So I tried my best not to think about it at all.
    One night in June, Anna and I went to a party, and once again I noticed that feeling that going out in New York so often gave me, of not gaining traction . I was tired of explaining to people I’d just met that I would soon be leaving, tired of trying to sound excited about a step that in truth I felt no excitement about. When we left around midnight, it was pouring rain so we decided to share a taxi home. I had been feeling on edge all night, and as the cab crept slowly through the darkened streets, with thick sheets of water enclosing its windows, the sensation deepened to an unbearable claustrophobia. At a stop sign a few blocks from home I threw some money into Anna’s lap and let myself out into the night. I sprinted home and pounded up the six flights of stairs to the large, flat roof of the building, leaving foot-shaped pools of wetness behind me. Up there, the rain pasted my clothes to my body and then streamed freely through them. I was finally alone, as I had not been alone in New York City in months, and I threw fistfuls of gravel and banged my arms on the metal ladder that led up to the