| Tuesday, May 10, 2005 |
| the true story of what was |
A fourteen-year-old boy is afraid of getting close to other people. He tries to live in a closed world, making attempts to get to know him useless, and ruining efforts made to try and understand him. Convinced that, since he feels abandoned by his father, he is an unwanted person, he is yet a coward, unable even to commit suicide.
A 29 year-old woman also keeps her contacts with others as light as possible. She protects herself by running away into relationships that are strictly on the surface. They are both afraid of being hurt. They might both be thought of as being unsuited to be heroes, lacking the strength of self that marks such a person.
I can’t tell you why I’m so afraid of going home. I wish I could explain to myself this deep sense of dread I feel when I think of spending the summer months back there.
Do you know what it’s like to be paralyzed by fear and not even know what you’re afraid of?
I spent more than 15 years living in the village of Wheeling. A suburb of Chicago, while considered a “ghetto” town by most people in the surrounding area, it is still a privileged place to live. My family, while not rich, never wanted for much of anything. We lived, as well as I can remember, comfortably.
I attended private Catholic school from preschool through eighth grade, and despite best efforts of my teachers and priests, that experience provided the basis for my rather individualistic moral and spiritual code. I didn’t really have a choice but to make up my own. My strongest memory from my childhood is apologizing to my Czechoslovakian fourth-grade teacher for making a slobbery mess on her dress because I was crying on her shoulder. In fact, most of my memories from that period of my life are either of crying or trying not to.
I was made fun of a lot, I was beaten up a lot. I was smarter than everyone else, I was fatter than everyone else. I didn’t fit in with the boys because I didn’t like playing sports and, later, I didn’t like talking about who saw what actress naked in some movie. I didn’t fit in with the girls because I was a boy. It’s very easy to hate yourself when everyone else does.
It was also in fourth grade that I had my first friend, Jeremy. He was an odd-looking, scrawny boy who wore a suit to my birthday party and couldn’t play outside with everyone else because he was allergic to grass. He became popular eventually, though, and the day he joined the other kids in making fun of me was the day I was apologizing to Mrs. Simunek for dirtying her dress. I still feel a bit hurt from his betrayal.
A bit later I got my first long-term friend, Kristina. She lived in the unincorporated part of town, on a family farm with her mother and grandmother, who were always shocked when I politely refused to eat the green beans on my plate whenever I was over for dinner. Kristina and I were good friends until she moved away. We continued to send yearbook photos to one another, with notes written on the back saying that we would visit soon, as though we were still in class together. I stopped after a few years, fed up with the unfulfilled promise that the photos brought with them in the mail.
And then there was Chris. I am definitely not over Chris.
At the same time there was Chris, there was Mary. At various points in my relationship with her, I called Mary my best friend, or my soulmate. She never returned either sentiment, but she did call me her “heterosexual life partner, who just happens to be homosexual.” In reality, I put that idea in her head, but she liked it enough to adopt it for full-time use. I spent a significant portion of my junior high and high school life with Mary. I rarely did anything without her, because I never really did anything at all before I met her. I went with Mary on shopping trips, met her friends, accompanied her and her friends to the movies, and was there with her on the phone at all hours of the night when she was worried her friends didn’t like her. I even developed a crush on one of Mary’s friends, who later turned out to be a terrible womanizer (Jim, dear, if you read this, call me!). I was always there for her.
During one of those late-night phone calls, she implied that she had something damning to say to me. She would often do that, drop hints that there was something important to talk about, forcing me to labor to bring the subject to the forefront of conversation before revealing that the big crisis was that she had an argument with her boyfriend (Peter, of all the names she could have chosen for her significant other). This night, though, she was rather intent on talking about this herself, though she did drag out the telling of it long enough to send me into wild fantasies of what it could be. The one thing I was certain of was that she was breaking off our friendship. The only question was why. Was I too clingy? Did she not like how I kept prying into the parts of her life she kept hinting that she wanted to talk about? Was it because I wasn’t using the mouthwash the dentist prescribed? What she said was, “I’m dying.” She said that the doctors only gave her a couple more years to live. But the truth is that she’s still alive, that in reality, she was constantly, ceaselessly dying, and it was killing me.
She said she hadn’t told anyone. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong with her, so I researched it on my own. I took what I knew about her, what I observed, and what I learned from spending my life with a career paramedic for a father, and asked my expository writing teacher if I could spend the semester on a special research project. What I determined then was that she had Lymphoma. Reduced energy, increased susceptibility to just about every other disease, and a 20% 5-year prognosis. It fit her perfectly.
One night, about midnight, she had fallen asleep after declaring that she was going to bed, and collapsing on the couch. There were three of us there who saw it, and we decided that was our cue to exit. We left her a note that said we left after defiling her sleeping body and turned to leave, when we heard a thump from across the room. Mary’d fallen from the couch, and was sitting next to it. We were about to laugh at her sonambulatory antics, when she coughed and collapsed to her side. In the next few minutes we had tried rolling her onto her back to check her breathing, unsuccessful when she promptly rolled back onto her stomach, and running across the house to inform her father, who tried to apply her asthmatic inhaler. After those minutes my dad had arrived, who was able to give her a proper field examination. There wasn’t much to say, except that her vitals were normal, but she was unresponsive. We loaded her into her family’s car and her dad drove her to the hospital.
Bob and Debra followed Mary to the hospital in his car, but I got into my dad’s car so he could drive me home. He’s flatly refused when I said I was going with her. I was incensed, but obedient. On the ride home, he told me about Corneal Response. During his examination, he touched her eyelash. Her eye spasmed, which is a reflex. When he lifted her eyelid, her eye rolled down in an attempt to shut it, which is not. While he was helping her walk, she was able to support just as much weight on her own as he wasn’t. She was choosing to be unresponsive that night.
I don’t know on whom it reflects poorly that I have to say “she says she was raped.” It was a few months after she’s said “I’m dying,” a few months since my dad all but told me she wasn’t. I was home alone, and didn’t quite smile when her jeep pulled into our driveway. I opened the door to a sullied, bloodied Mary, brought her inside, and got her cleaned up. I gave her some of my clothes to wear, but I didn’t ask what had happened. I didn’t want to hear it, because I didn’t want to doubt her any more. She told me over the phone that she’d passed out in the park on a jog, woke up in that state, and didn’t know where else to go. I grunted noncommittally, thinking of the time I’d spent staring at the bloody grey lump of sweatsuit sitting in my room for two days that she made her dad take a trip to my house to collect. She’d been to the hospital since then, she said. She said that they’d “found some sperm…inside.” I don’t know if I said anything else at all to her during that conversation, but a couple of weeks later she left a message on my answering machine to tell me she had her period. By that time I’d already begun to ignore her emails and phone calls, a nonviolent form of protest against her using me that continues to this day, made easier by the fact that while we both moved to the same state to attend university, she never stopped attending Catholic schools, which keeps us out of the same town.
So maybe it’s Mary that I’m afraid of in going home for the summer. I sometimes think that it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to continue avoiding her for a few months, but explaining it to my parents might be a different story. I never told them that she said she was dying, never told them she said she was raped. As far as my parents are concerned, Mary’s still my best friend.
Life would be a considerable amount easier right now if my parents had decided to pay for me to stay here for the summer. An impossibly selfish sentiment from someone who hasn’t had to have a job since his paper route as a young’un, but even if they’d informed me of their decision a week earlier, I’d have had time to find a way to pay for it myself. At least, I suppose, I understand the reason for it. They are, in that overbearingly parental manner, concerned.
I’m not one to pay myself compliments (or take them from other people, either), but I’m not unjustified in saying that I used to be ridiculously good at school. My sister says that I was “scary smart.” Until my junior year of high school, there was not an academic subject I didn’t get top marks in. And the standardized tests. Oh, standardized testing, such an insufficient method for measuring my former genius. We took California Achievement Tests from first through eighth grades, and I ranked in the 99th percentile each time, without fail. Then in my junior year of high school, it seems that I stopped caring much. I got a C in pre-calculus, which left my parents and teachers speechless. I dropped out of the honors track in math and science altogether, and filled in those periods with photography, which made everyone who was looking out for my future take notice of what I was doing with the present and grumble. My 34 on the ACT was seen as less than impressive, and I graduaded high school “with honors,” a full three tenths of a grade point shy of my sister.
I only applied to one college, the one determined since my freshman year of high school that I should go to, the University of Chicago. They promptly rejected me, forcing me to come up with a plan B without telling my parents. I applied to the University of Iowa, who accepted me and even offered to pay a small portion of my tuition. In retrospect, I’m far better off here. For one, Chicago’s quiz bowl team seems far too pretentious for my liking, so much that they don’t even seem to be having fun. And also, it’s less than an hour from home. I couldn’t stand that.
So here I am in college. Until recently, I’ve been doing passably. My parents have noticed what they call a continuation of previous trends, though, in what they say every teacher I’ve had since high school has said about me in parent-teacher conferences, that “he’s got the brains, but he doesn’t do the work.” It seems to be true. I “get it,” I’m engaged, I enjoy learning and sometimes I even get excited about it. But I am indeed failing to turn in assignments. Written assignments, at that--interesting from someone who took such pride in being called a writer by his high school expository writing teacher. This semester, I withdrew from one class, expect to fail another, and there are three others up in the air.
Earlier this year, I had an instructor who was also a counselor with the university’s health services. He talked to me at length about my passion for the subject matter (it was a class called Cultural Diversity and Identity), and my lack of written work to show for it. He roughly diagnosed me with an inferiority complex coupled with perfectionism, which prevented me from getting anything done, because I was convinced before I began that it wouldn’t be good enough. He urged me to make use of the University Counseling Services and talk to someone there about depression, which I did. Once. I made an appointment, and kept it, and talked to a very nice psychology grad student about having to go home to my parents and explain that I haven’t stopped sucking at school, and in fact I might not be passing a number of classes. She said “kids can be very cruel,” she asked me to pretend that she was my dad and act out what I might say to him, and I haven’t been back since.
One of my writing teachers, whom I’ve known since I began study here and who knows as much about me as anyone else in my life, has been putting up with my spastic tendencies with incredible patience. He has an annoying habit, though, of countering writers’ block with advice to “lower your standards,” and in the next breath talk about an essay you’re writing in a way that goes straight over your head and out the window, and seems utterly beyond you. My dad, in discussion of writers’ block as a possible cause for my problems, suggested changing my major. I can’t think of a single thing, though, I’d rather be or do.
My parents have also mentioned in phone conversation recently that they’re considering pulling me out of school because of my grades. It is this that has paralyzed me. It’s the vacuum, the unknown, that returning to Wheeling brings with it. It’s the knowledge that in Wheeling I’ll spend my days doing nothing, not even leaving the house some days, and this time without even the knowledge that someday soon I’d be returning. As sad, lonely, and depressed as I am van get at any given moment in Iowa City, I know that I’m happier here than I would be at home. Here, I’m learning. Here, I’m writing, and talking with other writers about writing. Here, I have friends, as one of them put it, “plenty of people [who] think you're worth something, dear.”
I’ve been writing a lot lately about acting, and role-playing, and the masks that people, that I, wear. I have here a blog that I haven’t updated in a month, because I promised it would be honest, but I didn’t want to write something that would bring about people’s pity. But to be honest, this is a part of who I am, as much as anything else is. I am a writer, going through a fit of depression, perhaps who has been going through a fit of depression most of his life. But it wasn’t until I got to this place, at this point in my life, that I realized it, that I realized there was more to life than what I had experienced, that there was more worth to be found in myself than the sum total of my grade point averages and standardized test scores. I think that it’s here I have my best chance of working through this.
And yet, I made them the heroes.
-Hideaki Anno
Epilogue:
About 10 minutes after posting this, I got an automated email saying that Mary had listed me as a friend on facebook, which...I know I sometimes have words with the guy, but I can say this:
The Lord has a wicked sense of irony, y'all.
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posted by La Malinche @ 6:29 AM   |
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| 1 Comments: |
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Pete,
Don't let anything in the last few days fool you; I hope you're here next year. I like you, as a player, as a teammate, and--I hope--a friend.
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Pete,
Don't let anything in the last few days fool you; I hope you're here next year. I like you, as a player, as a teammate, and--I hope--a friend.