Claire & the End of the World: a true love story, a true tragedy, by Rewired.

[rewiiired]

chapter 6.

Chapter 6.

The car was an aqua color from what I remember; a shiny blue-green.

Looking back on that pivotal moment -- which is, I must admit, a little fuzzy -- I find that thereI slipped into another part of me. A part that's observing externally, from some third-person perspective. It views all of this as if it were sitting alone in the back row of a dark theater and observing this on the screen. It noted the shiny aqua color of the car, and the part that watched as I turned towards it. And it also felt that sense of
glee. That high of adrenaline. That roller-coaster feeling of I'm-going-to-die. The excitement of a brutal and sudden force that knocks you from your intended destination, however vague that might be, and into something that leaves you feeling confused, vulnerable, trapped. A feeling of a fate worse than death. The kind of life one only feels when life is threatened.

It gazed in wonder as time suspended and perceptions burred. When things became a bit clearer, it noticed what was in it’s view: a tan-colored van. A van that now had a cracked windshield. A van that had uncertain things hanging, swinging, from it's rear-view mirror. A van that now had a figure getting out of the driver-side door in one hell of a hurry.

And then I snapped out of it a bit. But only a bit. This snapping-out-of-it-a-bit was characterized by questioning the nature of the experience in a suspicious way. Can this really be happening? Is this a put on? Was I stuck in some dream or something?

I mean, we've all had those dreams. One of those dreams where you die or are faced with a horrifying, irreversible situation or circumstance that demands your immediate, full, unerring and undivided attention? If so, I thought, let me wake up.

I then looked at the windshield of my own car. Then my car's steering wheel. And then I stared down at my own hands, and a new feeling kicked in full-force. More than horrifying. Unimaginable.

This was no dream. This was real. Horror of this magnitude was exclusive to reality.

I felt like exploding like an a-bomb and drawing myself in like a turtle simultaneously. There was no fight or flight -- the choices were madness or playing possum. Crazy or catatonic.

Instead, for some reason, I just got out of the car.

I was dizzy and off balance. The world was bright, vivid, painful. I wasn't walking straight and perceptions had an undeniably surreal flavor to them. The sound of a blaring horn, a horn that had a volume that buried all other noise, struck my eardrums with an unceasing violence. The smell of burnt rubber and car fluid filled my nostrils.

All of this built up this deathly feeling rapidly growing in me. All of this spelled out a fate worse then death; the fate of living with the consequences.

I hardly heard the guy from the van talking to me, asking me if I was all right, even as he shook my shoulder and looked at me. I was still walking, ever-clumsily. He was following me. I told him that I was fine, just fine. Then he started saying something else, something that was totally unclear to me at first. And then when I did hear what he was saying clearly enough, it still didn't seem to make sense. Nothing really made sense. Was there a car wreck?

I turned to him, concerned. "Did I hit your van?" I asked.

He brushed his hands aside. He said not to worry about his piece of crap van, I've got bigger problems. Don't even mention it to the cops. And then he told me not to look back at it. I was even more confused now: look back at what?

"Don't worry about it, man," he was saying to me, this guy from the van. "It's gone."

Gone? What was gone? My perplexed look at him fed the look of sympathy he threw back at me. He seemed like such a nice guy, but what the bloody fuck was he talking about? I followed his gaze, but I was stopped halfway by his finger. And then my gaze caught his finger and where it was pointing. Like a Zen Buddhist pointing to a moon whose meaning cannot be caught in the net of limiting words or ultimately vague facial expressions.

It took me a moment to realize this `moon' the Zen master van man was pointing to -- a `moon' that could be more accurately described as an oversized wad of tinfoil that had for some reason decided to beach itself in the middle of a busy intersection -- was what once was my 88 Oldsmobile. My mouth dropped at the sight of it, my eyes doubled in size, and my jaw dropped. I could feel it. I could feel my face wearing the kind of shock usually reserved for cartoon characters.

"I'm telling you man, don't sweat it," he said to me. "Don’t even bother looking at it. It's gone. It's history. You got bigger things to worry about."

He told me to stay put and then rushed towards a car. An aqua green car leaking green antifreeze. He worked under the hood to try to detached the horn.

Then it suddenly dawned on me that I had hit someone. What if I had killed someone? What if there were children in the car? How could I live with myself if I'd killed someone? What one earth have I done?

I don't remember how I found the lady, but I will never forget her. She was fucking hysterical. There were a few people there, a little crowd around her, comforting her, or at least trying. In-between sobs she was babbling frantically. She had never been in a car wreck before. She’d just gotten this car a short time ago. She was so scared. The car was new. She couldn't believe this happened. And on and on and on. She was repeating herself constantly.

Of the people in the surrounding area, I recall only one specifically and in any clarity: this was a black-haired woman in a policemen shirt -- off-duty, perhaps? -- who sucked down on her cigarette as if it were her sole means of life support. She was the look of utter tragedy. As much as the lady I'd hit was the look of total lunacy and I was the look of a total zombie.

In an instant that gave birth to a crisis, we'd all become stereotypes.

The policewoman, she looked jittery, paranoid, very apocalyptic. In between her cigarette-sucking and her staring off yonder -- looking dreadfully for something, perhaps some shred of hope or an inkling as to what the purpose of this dreadful existence was -- she would offer bits of commentary and advice. It was as if she supposed her morose, tortured look and continuous smoking and looking over yonder gave her some mysterious aura. As if her silence was solely for the purpose of dramatic effect, and that it was supposed to add emphasis to whatever little things she might say.

She stopped breathing smoke once to remark to the lady, while patting her on the back, that everything was going to be okay. This happened to someone she knew recently. Insurance would cover everything. There was no sense getting bent out of shape about everything. There was no fault in this, no blame.

All in all, the lady seemed to give off the impression that she viewed anything that ever happened to anyone as purely random. No one has control. We're all the product of our genes and our pasts and the whims of fate. No blame should be assigned to anyone. This was just life, everything about her said, and life is constant crisis. An ever-growing nihilistic pile of shit. And you’d best learn to bear the stench and buy a good pair of boots because the shit-tides getting higher all the time, baby.

I asked if the lady was okay once, no one heard me. I asked again, and no one heard me. I felt as futile here as Claire must have felt trying to break that damned bottle of Jack Daniels on that god damned rock down at Hell Hollow.

Claire. Yeah, Claire, my girlfriend. When was the last time I had talked to her? I'd been too busy writing about stuff and reading about conspiracy and drawing those crazy faces that always floated into my head. I'd been too busy not sleeping and burning myself out on coffee. I'd been too busy exercising my narcissistic tendencies and being bitter about having to work for old fucks like the lady at the convenience store. I'd been too busy worrying about passing summer school, and just what the fuck I might do if I ever passed summer school. Summer school. Shit, I was going to be late for summer school. Because I'd slammed my car into another car. A car this crazy lady had been driving. And I can't get her fucking attention.

The more I tried to ask if she was all right, the more I became convinced I was invisible. Was I seeing things again? Was this real?

I thought for a moment that perhaps I was dead. That my mangled body was lying in that 88 Oldsmobile over there, and maybe the Zen van man was my spirit guide here to take me to the other side. He didn't want me to look back at the car because I might see my bloody and bruised dead body hanging out the windshield or something. If so, I wondered if any living being had taken the time to actually look in my car.

After I had established that I, in all likelihood, was not dead, I asked again if the lady was okay again. And then someone even recognized my existence. It was Miss Chimney.

"She's okay, honey," she told me, "She's just a little scared no, that's all. She'll be fine."

That wasn't nearly enough for me. It wouldn't be enough for me if I'd heard it out of the mouth of the blabbering blubbery bimbo I'd hit, let alone some morose, fume-bellowing bitch. The blubbery bitch, however, was too busy blabbering and crying like a baby. I was more worried about the poor, overweight fart from the aqua green car having a heart attack more than whatever minor damage might have been caused by the accident.

I asked her again if she was the only one who had been in the car, but she still failed to recognize my existence. The maiden of Lung Cancer spoke for her once again.

"She was the only one in the car, honey. Don't worry, everything will be all right. This just happened to a friend of mine. This kind of thing happens all the time, honey, it’s nobody's fault. And there was no major damage. The insurance company will cover it, no problem."

When the ambulance came out of nowhere, and the paramedics ran to the lady and asked her if she was all right, it was the cloud-bellowing mistress of misery who announced that I was the guy from the other car. You know, not the one with the cute little car with the tiny dent but the big boat-sized car that now looked like a huge crumbed piece of tin foil over there.

Yeah, that’d be me. Hello.

They finally noticed me, and I assured them I was fine. The first time they asked me and the second time. You sure? He asked me and yes, I said, yes, I'm sure. Truth be known my knee hurt like bitch, but could walk and I was already worried what I'd have to pay for all this, monetarily and otherwise.

It was just about when I was about to give into the apathy swelling in me that the lady of lard finally noticed me.

I was, for a few brief moments, in some sudden realization of hers, the focus of all concern. The whole of her reality. She asked me fifty miles a second if I was hurt, if I was okay, if I was the only one in the car, if so, if any of them were hurt -- she asked me all the questions I'd asked her when she was oblivious to my existence. I assured her I was fine, that I was the only person if the car, that I was more worried about her.

The paramedics told her to calm down. And they told me to sit down. I'd hardly realized I was still standing, actually. I said it was okay, I was good standing. They pressured, and so I finally sat down by the lady, who was still crying frantically.

Then it happened: I cried. I was scared shitless, but that wasn't the reason I cried. I simply felt like I should cry. I felt like if I didn't cry that meant I was a cold, unfeeling bastard. That I was guilty. I had to look as bad as she did or she'd get all the sympathy and I'd be perceived as the enemy. So I cried and cried.

As they took the lady away in the ambulance, she asked me once more if I was okay. I said I was. And as they took her off, then the cop showed up.

Yes, that's right, the cop. Singular.

Years later, cars later, I would get pulled over for a busted headlight -- two cops. I saw three cops show up when a drunk idiot from a 24-7 restaurant was just getting into her car, she hadn't even put the keys into the ignition yet. Swarms of police congregated at Dairy Marts and Eat n' Parks all over northeastern Ohio. For a car accident in a busy intersection? One measly fucking pig.

And this lone pig? He approached me with a face void of all the kind of expression you'd expect out of a human being. I could have whipped out my dick while clucking like a chicken and slapped it in his face several times and I don't think he would’ve changed that expression one bit. The look he carried, the message in his body language was: life sucks, I hate my job, it's early and until you disturbed me I was perfectly comfortable at Dairy Mart drinking coffee, feasting on donuts and dwelling in my misery. So let's get this done and over with.

He asked me if I was the other driver. I nodded, wiping away tears and snot. He was unaffected. I was the obstacle between him and his donut. There seemed to be no chance for me to elicit sympathy.

That was the first time I'd ever sat inside a police car. Walking toward the cruiser, I couldn't help being overwhelmed with the feeling that I had done something really, really bad.

He said to get in the front seat and he handed me a clipboard with some papers on it and a pen. I looked at him, confused. What is this? He explained it was a statement. I was just supposed to fill out what had happened.

After a few moments of the pen hovering above the page, I looked at him and confessed that I really didn't have the slightest idea what had happened. It had all happened so quickly, I told him, and I wasn’t quite sure. I mean, I knew fully well that if I survived long enough, I'd go home and write this all out in detail, perhaps years later, but that was all just subjective interpretation. I was fairly certain he wanted objective facts, and in this situation, as with most situations in my life, I was dreadfully uncertain of them. How on earth could I make a statement in regards to something I had no actual knowledge on? Couldn't he, like, ask somebody else?

Between a rock and a hard place. A Pig and a donut. I had to write something.

And so I got to work and wrote down a brief and utterly incoherent sketch of what had occurred. In an extra-light pencil. In shitty handwriting. And ended it with, "I think."

I then handed it to him, he read it, dropped it down in his lap, rubbed his eyes, then his temples. And he sighed. "The light," he asked, "was it green?"

"What?"

"Green. Green. Was the light green?"

I shrugged. I nodded. "Yes."

"Was it a green arrow?" He asked. I paused a moment, looking back. Damn, was it a green arrow?

"No," he said, "It wasn't a green arrow."

Okay, then why the fuck did you ask me in the first place?

He scribbled in his pad. "I'm writing you up for a failure to yield," he said, and explained that I'd have to either show up in court to fight it, and he didn't know why I would, or I could waver the ticket and pay the fine.

He had me get my things from my car, and then I got into the passenger seat of the police car again, my nerves on edge. After I closed the door and we both put on our seat belts, he asked me in an apathetic voice if I needed to be somewhere. I nodded, and said that I needed to go to summer school, and I had no idea how late I was.

"Summer school?" He echoed. He sounded very confused. "You mean Mentor High School?"

I looked around for a moment and shook my head yes, afraid about what was going to come out of his mouth in the next few seconds. He looked at my hunk of junk car again, and pointed straight ahead.

"The school," he told me, "is that way."

That way. Oh, all I had to do was go straight. I didn't even have to make that fatal turn. Isn't that a kick in the ass?

I didn't look back at him the entire car ride.

The drive to the high school was a silent, nervous one. I think I actually began to feel a certain sympathy in mister piggy -- a sympathy for me and my high levels of stupidity.

I'd turned when I wasn't supposed to turn to go in a direction I didn't have to go. All I had to do was wait for my green arrow and none of this would've happened. All I had to do was yield to oncoming traffic and none of this would've happened. But all I had to do was go straight like I was supposed to and none of this would've happened -- no fatality, and I would've ended up at my destination. I could've even gotten lost, traveled miles from the high school, but it would've been without real fatality.

And I wouldn't have to go to that destination, and I therefore wouldn’t have had to go straight, and I therefore wouldn't have had the reason or opportunity to make a wrong turn at the wrong time if I would've passed high school to begin with.

I'd had so many chances to avoid that wrong turn at the wrong time and I'd fucked it up. I'd fucked it all up.

I spent the time in that car focusing on the feeling that numbed me. I tried to push outside my mind all the important things I'd have to consider and do after I stepped out of that car and focused instead on this horrid, soul-splitting emotion in me. I’d felt the likes of this before, only spawned by different things. I'd been led here in different ways. Different wrong turns in the past had led here.

What was this feeling? It was like tension, like death. Years later, after much more had happened, I'd come to see the day of the crash as a major turning point. The kids in my senior class got graduation, which signified their accomplishments of last thirteen years and being cut lose -- for some, it also signified gradating to the level of college in the following year, or merely being let free into the world, which I would come to consider thirteenth grade.

Regardless, it was like being squeezed out of that hole at our birth and having the umbilical cord cut; it signified a separation, a change, a death and rebirth in one foul swoop. For the kids in my senior class, at least those who hadn't failed as I had, graduation was the traditional rite of passage. The car wreck and the intensity in it and what it led to became a rite of passage for me, as that intense, death-like, vulnerable, naked feeling indicated.

What it led to was the question that was plaguing me as I sat in that police cruiser on the way to summer school: change was imminent.

As the police car stopped, dread came back times two. I looked at him, and he handed me a card and told me to call him with my insurance information. I said thank you for the ride, and then we went our separate ways.

He was back to his coffee, donuts and misery and I went to face my ultimate doom: I had to call mom.

In a strange way, it was rather funny when I finally got a hold of my mother with the phone in the school office -- she didn’t even seem surprised at all. I guess she was having a pretty bad day. All sorts of shit was hitting the fan around that time. I remember, in the span of a week my grandmother was having problems getting up out of bed, our two dogs died, my uncle Phil died and I got in a car accident.

At the end of the conversation, after I gave her the number the police guy had given me on his card, after she asked if the other party was hurt, after she asked how bad the car was -- then she asked if I was okay. And I said I was okay. Thanks, mom.

That day ended far too soon. I remember standing at the doorway of the school that day, seeing my parents van parked outside. Could they see me? My guess was no. I still had a chance. I could run. I could hide. But where could I go?

It was like the march of death, to that van.

My mother opened the door for me to get in the front seat. They asked if I was all right. I didn't look at them. I said I was fine. And then it came. They told me they were bringing me to a doctor, and that they wanted me to get on medication, because I needed help. I shook my head in anger and just stared out the window, into the rearview mirror.

What they really meant to say was: "we need to find a doctor to take you to that will feed you pills until your normal." Though I felt something bad was coming, and I didn't feel surprised at this, I was confused as to why a car wreck finally inspired them to take such measures. Of course, they reminded me that I'd failed high school and quit my job, too. That I was going nowhere. That I wasn't happy. Did that mean I was insane?

"Trust us," my dad pleaded, "we love you. You're my son. Trust us and let us help you."

"You've known that something was wrong," my mom said in her soft, sympathetic, give-in-you-know-you-can't-win monotone. "You’ve known it for a long time. You need help. We don’t want you to hate us because of this. You know we wouldn't hurt you, honey."

I swallowed. I was biting my tongue, holding in all that I truly believed and truly wanted to say. What difference would it make if it escaped my lips? So I said nothing.

"Say something, son," dad said, massaging my shoulder. I moved away, closer to the window.

"I guess there's nothing to say, is there?" I told them. Dad sighed. Mom sounded frustrated. She told me they just wanted me to understand.

"No, mom, I understand," I assured her. "I understand that I don't have a choice."

And I didn't. And that's all that I said. That was really all that there was to say.

 

[rewiiired]

Chapter 7.

Chapter 7.

Claire called. I told her what had happened. That I'd gotten in a car wreck, that my parents had been driving me to summer school, that I'd gotten a new car. The car was a blue Mercury Topaz. I told her how dad had me drive it around a mall parking lot. And that the entire time, I was terrified. That I’d be happy if I never sat in the driver’s seat of a car again for my entire life. Oh, and my parents wanted to throw me on medication because of the car wreck.

I told her I felt like shit but that I didn't want to rely on a drug to make me feel better. It was okay for other people, I’d fight for their right to do it, but it just wasn't my thing. Like her. I knew she smoked pot with Katie. I knew she smoked cigarettes. That was her thing, not mine. I was the coffee guy. Not the boozer. Not the smoker. Not even the guy who takes the occasional Asprin. Certainly not the guy who takes prescribed medication.

And Claire? She said that maybe I should give it a shot. Maybe it would help me. I told her I tried medication back in Sophomore year and it hadn't helped. She said maybe it would be different this time, maybe it was what I needed.

I couldn't believe it. Claire, even Claire, even my girlfriend, thought I was crazy. I could hear it in the tone of her voice. She was the shining flame in my world of darkness and even she seemed to be against me.

I remember going with the guys up to the coffee shop. For the first time since I could remember I wanted to be as far away from that room and that house of mine as possible. I felt totally alienated from them now. I felt alienated from my friends, too. I felt estranged from my girlfriend, for fuck's sake. But I felt distanced from my parents and that house more than anything.

I never wanted to come back. I wanted to run away. I wanted to live on my own. But it became painfully clear to me that if I couldn't focus my mind enough to drive somewhere or pass high school or do normal things like engage in small talk or buy flowers for my girlfriend than there was no hope for me out there in that scary `real world'. That life beyond high school. What the fuck was I going to do? What the fuck could I do?

My parents made an appointment with my doctor the night of the accident for a few days later. Their persistence and sense of urgency in the matter kind of worried me. You see, I hadn't been to the doctor since I was a kid, so the only sorta-doctor I had available was my old pediatrician. That's how urgent my parents felt it was to drug me up.

I had always remembered my pediatrician as a very kind, soft-spoken, professional individual of a fairly sound mind. That ended the day I went into his office at age nineteen for my physical due to mental psychosis indicated by a car ACCIDENT and he said to me:

"Okay, now drop your pants, because I'm going to put my finger on your balls."

After that day, I thought he was a bit strange. He did the usual embarrassing procedures, and then I put my cloths back on. That wasn't even the worst thing about it. The worst part about it? I didn't even get a fucking lollipop like I did when I was five years old. And god damn it, if my mother's going to pay a fifty-year-old pediatrician a fortune to touch my balls against my will due to a mental dysfunction of mine indicated by a car accident, the least I want is a lollipop, you know?

So after he had put his fingers on my balls and allowed me to pull up my pants, he called my mother in. She appeared anxious to know if I was a certified head-case, and jumped right on the question. To my amusement, he ignored her completely and, turning his cool swivel chair in my direction, asked me exactly what the problem was. My other broke in and started talking about me not sleeping, how I have no concept of time, how I don't seem to be a part of the family anymore, how I quit my job and failed high school. The doc, he just brushed that off as normal teenager stuff, citing the like behavior of his own teenage kids.

"Well," said my mother, arms crossed and voice hesitant. "There are other things. There anything you want to tell him, Tim?"

I cringed. What a bitch. "No," I told her.

"Tim…" She said in that threatening tone.

"Oh yeah," she expected me to say to him, "it almost slipped my mind: hey, Doc, I've been seeing aliens who enjoy putting visions of worldwide catastrophie in my head and telling me that I'm `one of them', I occasionally sleep walk and awake to find myself doing things, and I'm having visions of past lives and recently began falling into what seem to be other planes of existence where I battle it out with an evil entity I believe is trying to drain me of psychic energy and perhaps possess my body. This has fed my distaste for humanity's ignorance, general feelings of personal nihilism, has put a damper on my interpersonal relationships, and has eld me to insomnia, anxiety, depression and an emmense fear regarding the future of the human species. Now, in the Western materialistic/scientific context you undoubtedly see the world through in your left-brain dominant mind, would you say I'm a certified head-case?"

Right.

So I told him I was just having a little trouble sleeping. That I'm a night person, that I drink coffee, and that I got in a car accident and near as I can figure that's why I'm here. My mom cut me off and asked if he couldn't just give me something. The doc returned with informing her that medication was simply not his field. He said that physically, I seemed to be a very healthy boy.

I found it hard not to laugh. A very healthy boy? Over the past two years I'd gotten the equivalent of three nights of sleep, my strict diet was limited to massive quantities of coffee, Pepsi and Ritz crackers - and I was a very healthy boy? What do we pay these physical doctors for - copping a feel and making up some half-ass diagnosis?

He said that I was probably just clinically depressed. That was his unofficial diagnosis. He suggested that I go see a colleague of his who happens to be a psychiatrist, that he was very good at what he did. So, of course, she got the number and called that day. I had an appointment within days. When I went into the guy's office I decided, once and for all, that all of this mental health professional bullshit was getting just a bit redundant and useless.

He was about my height or a bit taller, with short dark hair, razor eyeballs, a long neck and a big nose. He seemed to be a very stressed individual, and very bad at concealing that fact. In the beginning of the session, he walked me into his office, offered me to sit on the couch, and then sat down on a swivel chair a few feet away. (Why do doctors always get the cool swivel chairs?) He placed his notebook on his lap, and had his pen rested on it in his hand, ready to take his little notes. Then he began asking me questions. As far as that all went, it was the usual. I was used to it by now. This guy, however, was a lot more distracting and disturbing.

As he asked me questions, he would fix his eyes on mine, apparently dedicated to giving me this poorly-acted look of empathy and curiosity. He also faked his attention on what I was saying very badly, as it was evident that he was playing mix-and-match with me and several ready-made diagnoses in his mind. It was as if he expected me to be stupid enough to interpret his steady gaze and carefully-placed facial expressions as signs of sincere interest. As I spoke, answering his questions as carefully and fully as I could, he would nod every few seconds or so, his eyes never moving from mine, as he went `mmm-hmmm, mmm-hmmm', barely taking in anything I said. He scribbled notes on the pad he had on his lap without ever taking a second's glance down at it. I wasn't sure if I wanted to burst out laughing, get up and walk out, suggest he should see a head-doctor himself, or bash his brains out with my chair. I figured none of those options would really better the situation.

The anger came when I saw deep within his eyes the plain truth - he'd had me diagnosed the whole nine yards before we'd even began speaking. He opens by saying that he respects my free will, and he's not trying to push me into anything, but eh thinks I should try medication and he might ask me a few times throughout the course of the session. And I started off by telling him that I simply was not interested. I didn't even take over the counter drugs, and I thought there must be some other way to overcome my problems. So he lets it go and begins asking question but, sure enough, brings it back up later. I still say no. He lets it go again.

He asked me why my parents brought me here. And that's when I made the big mistake. The words just forced their way out: "Have you ever heard of alien abduction?"

"Alien abduction? Yes, yes," he said. And for a brief moment, I thought there might be chance, just a chance that he could be my key to uncovering these memories, that maybe he worked with abductees, that maybe he believed in hypnosis. "There's a lot of work in the field today about that. It's becoming an interesting topic, no matter what it's source."

So I gave him a run-through of what happened. Everything. My doubts about it's reality, but that what I was saying was true to experience. And then I think I'd finally realized the mistake I'd made by being honest. The same mistake I'd made with my mother; that mistake that, with the help of my recent car accident, had inspired her to bring me to this very head-doctor.

I started getting this horrible feeling that he was scribbling down on his pad just how insane I was. What was I this time? A schizophrenic? A fantasy-prone, like last time? Was I lacking a specific brain chemical?

I told him I pursued my own therapy and quest for understanding through art and stream-of-consciousness writing, through regressive meditation and independent research. I told him I read up on psychology and philosophy and the occult, trying to understand a bit more what my problem was, and I didn't seem to fit any of the descriptions that I'd come across.

"Have you ever heard of OCD?" He asked. I gave him a weird look. "OCD - obsessive-compulsive disorder? Do you have intrusive thoughts, disturbing things in your mind? Like many things are going on in your head at once, and it's hard to concentrate? You find yourself doing things obsessively?"

"No, not really," I said, perhaps lied, "I don't think so." The only thing that would come up in my mind concerning OCD was a picture of some kid washing his hands until they were bleeding, and still not being able to stop. I wasn't getting the connection.

"I'd like you to think about taking some medication - it's a free sample, just try it out for awhile and see how it works for you."

During the session, this was about the fifth time he'd asked me if I wanted to take medication -- and each time he stressed the fact that he didn't want to push me into anything, and I didn't have to take any medication yet, and that he didn't want to bring me into anything I didn't feel comfortable with. Every time he brought it up, I kindly said no.

"I'm sorry, I'm really not interested." I said. "You said you didn't want to pressure me, and that's exactly what you're doing. So, again, no. I think there's other means to clearing up my life, and drugs will just distort my mind right now. I don't want any chemical influences."

"These drugs can really help you," he said. "I know you have this thing about foreign chemicals in your body, but these medications are not like your illegal drugs. These are prescribed to patient for the specific purpose of helping them cope with the disorder until they can recover themselves."

They're legal, you fucking idiot, I thought, that's the only distinction. Just like my mother, he couldn't recognize my right to a free will. I knew I had problems, and I wanted to talk it out. I knew there was something horribly wrong with me. I just wanted the cure to be the result of my own Will and Self-mastery - not something along the lines of Prozac and sheep mentality. Not something that they could use to basically brainwash me into a mould that I knew damn well I didn't belong in, and had no desire to exist within the confines of.

He kept trying to pressure, and I held firm: no. Soon I noticed that his face was getting blushed, and his eyes began digging into me. His little game of manipulation wasn't working, and he couldn't accept that. "I really think this will help you." He said, and he wasn't trying to put on the illusion of being nice anymore. The devil in him was slipping on through.

"Look, I'm sorry, but I said no." I suddenly heard the philosophies of Nancy Reagan echoing through memories of what teachers, public speakers, school posters, public commercials had said all throughout high school. Don't give into peer pressure. Other have no right to tell you what to put into your body. "My answer's no."

Then it happened. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, it was as if somebody flicked a switch. His face got beat red -- we're talking ripe, strawberry, blood red -- and he hopped up from off his chair and to his desk. He then began to speak boldly, and in a loud, violent voice. The guy had gone completely neurotic. He started screaming at me. Waving his arms around and pacing around the room. Telling me that he couldn't take this anymore, that I had to take medication or I was going to end up in a rubber room and he just cannot let that happen to me.

When I look back on all this, I see myself sitting there, a nineteen-year-old in the office of a psychiatrist referred to my mother by a pediatrician due to a car accident. I see myself sitting there on that couch, leaning forward, with my elbows on my knees, my fingers interlocked. I see myself sitting there quietly -- perhaps a little nervous, but overall fairly calm. Especially in a relative sense. I had been honest, against my better judgment, not trying to manipulate. At the same time, I refused to be manipulated. This is what happened: I drove the poor quack crazy.

I sit there calmly and watch him, the psychiatrist who had suddenly shot up out of his chair in a fit of rage, a face as red as freshly-drawn blood. He was shaking, screaming, sweating and looking frantically for a box of medication he just happened to have a sample of in his office. I see this doctor who, in his repeated failure to manipulate me into taking happy-happy sane pills, had lot his grip on his sanity. I see the breathtaking irony. I see this head-case of a head doctor for what he is. I see him darting to his desk, muttering to himself, occasionally bursting out, "WHERE DID I PUT IT?" with such a sense of urgency that it would lead one to believe that he was on a frantic quest to find an extinguisher to put out a fire. I was no fire.

I was half-tempted to say in mock innocence, "So doc, is it bad?" I decided against it, though, not wishing to add fuel to his psychotic episode.

He finally found what he was looking for, and walked over to me and stuck the box of medication with `Luvox' on the front of it right in my face. I just looked at it, and then at the carpet.

"TAKE IT." He snapped loudly, and then gathered himself a bit more. "You're going to try them."

"No, I'm not." I told him.

I followed him out of the office and walked to the waiting room. My mother glanced at me, and then him, and then at the space between us in a very confused fashion. He led her down the hall to talk. As they were gone, I just thought a moment and got beyond my anger over the situation. I let out a laugh. The guy had more of a condition than I did, and here he was, getting paid how much a week to put people like me on drugs we didn't want to take when he's the twitchy fucker who needs to be sedated. They were trying to force people on drugs, sometimes locking them up to administer such drugs to them, and at the same time those people out there who wanted drugs and took drugs were locked up as punishment for taking them. It's a crazy, fucked up planet, this earth.

I could overhear their conversation, overhear the doctor calling me "very creative and very intelligent" - the standard kind of thing every school teacher and so-called `mental health professional' opens up with before dropping the bomb of bad news to the parents. He then went on to explain that there was certainly something wrong and though he didn't yet know what was at the root of it, he thought the medication was necessary.

My parents drove me home without really saying a word. We stopped at Subway and got some food, which I brought up to my room upon getting home. As I was at my desk eating my sub, my dad came in with the pills. He stucks them in my face and tells me to take them. I tell him no, that I want something else to get me through this.

This day and age there are assholes at every corner of life echoing Nancy Reagan's `just say no', schools pushing DARE, people left and write bitching about everything from cigarettes to pot to pill-popping. I was a kid who actually didn't want to take drugs, and now two highly-respected adults had pushed a bottle of pills in my face twice in the same day and demanded I take them. Welcome to my fucked-up so-called life.

So I leave my room and walk downstairs. He follows. As I'm walking, he announces to my mother, in the front room, that I refuse to take them. And then my mother goes off. She took the time to yell at me for ripping the family apart, that it's taking the toll on everybody, that I have to change. She basically lays the blame for everything on me. As if taking the drugs is more for her than it is for me. I hate her with every ounce of hate I have in me. Then she tells me that if I don't take the medication that she's going to throw me in a rubber room.

I refused to take the medication. For days I just drove to and from summer school and otherwise remained in my room, with the door locked. I was terrified. Was my mother serious about throwing my in an asylum?

When Claire eventually called and asked me to go over and have beef stroganoff with her cousin for about the fifth time, I told her I’d be over in a bit. I crawled downstairs where both my parents were in the kitchen. Dad was my the sink, mom was cooking something on the stove. I said I was thinking about going tover to see Claire, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go. And mom said that I should go, that I should get out of the house for a bit and just have fun. Those days, that woman was really confusing me.

So I followed the directions Claire had given me, confident that I wouldn’t crash, confident that I’d find my way. I was one road away but try as I might, I could not find Claire’s road.

After about forty-five mintues on what should’ve been a twenty-minute drive, I called up Claire. She asked where I was. She told me she was right there, that I was close by. So for another fifteen minutes I looked. Frustrated, turning around for the umpteenth time, I drove home. There, I called Claire again. I was blabbering and sounding pretty out there, I think.

And I was crying.

Sobbing, weeping like a baby. Tears running out of my red eyes, snot running out of my nose. Just like that stupid blubbery bitch at the car wreck. Just how it seemed I shoukld've been: totally breaking down. Was this a delayed reaction?

I told her everything was so confusing. And that I was beginning to think there really was something very seriously wrong with me. That I really was crazy. I told her how my parents had threatened to throw me in an institution. And how I was afraid of fading away. Afraid of loosing her.

She said that she wasn’t going to break up with me because I couldn’t find her house. But though that may not be the sole reason -- me not finding her house and all -- I felt in her voice that she was giving up.

I was so fucking crazy I couldn't follow a simple set of directions. Couldn't graduate. Couldn't make a real date with my way too patient on-and-off girlfriend. Claire didn't know it, I would have never told her, but she was the only thing holding me together at that time.

I told my mother that if she weanted me to see a psychologist, fine. But I was taking no medication. And I was going to see one that I knew would actually help me, rather than to one that was more insane than I was. I told her I’d go back to see Dr. Navier, but no one else. And she accepted my compromise, and wasted no time in setting up an appointment.

 

[smileyfish]

 

[rewiiired]

chapter 8.One more fucking chapter,then it's over,I PROMISE.Very combersome piece,no?

Chapter 8.

I told him everything that had happened. That my mother was threatening to throw me in an institution if I didn’t take the pills she and dad were trying to force feed me. He told me to relax, that they cannot do that, that I’m over eighteen and I’m not a threat to anyone. He told me sometimes people say what they don’t mean. They say it out of anger or fear, and that was the case with my parents.

He told me that now that I had a car, my next duty was to get a job and then to finish summer school and get myself into college where I belong. And he said that I should get on medication.

I deflated. For the love of Nancy, even he thought I should `just say yes' to drugs.

He told me that as much as I may not what to face the fact, it could be that all this was due to a chemical imbalance in my brain. He said that I didn’t have to continue doing it, but that I should at least give it a try. I told him I’d been on medication before, Nortripiptyline. He told me that was for anxiety and depression, those drugs were not for me. He wanted to get me on Zyprexa, or Olanzapine. I asked him what it did, what it was, and he told me not to worry about it, to just try the drug and see if it worked. He said that he was going to try and get me on a plateau so my emotions and perceptions aren’t like a roller-coaster. I told him I wasn’t so sure I wanted to do this. We argued for a bit, but the session ended with him giving me a prescription. My plan was to give it to my parents, who he’d had a meeting with before me, and then just not take the pills.

I went home that day, feeling on the verge of defeat. My parents weren't pushing me to take the pills, they asked no questions, because I made it out like I planned on taking them.

I finished my last week of summer school, and I got hired at a grocery store in Chardon as a bagger. All the while, I had this horrible sinking feeling in my chest. I’d put it off for two weeks, and I had to do it. I hadn't heard from her.

I had to call her.

Someone picked up the phone. It was her cousin. I asked if Claire was there. She asked who it was, and I told her. She said just a minute.

Claire picked up the phone, and I said hey. And she said hey, but it wasn't a happy hey. You know what I mean: if there was happy hey center of the universe, this hey was the farthest point from.

She asked me where I'd been. She asked me if she even had a boyfriend anymore. She said that she hadn't heard from me in a week, and that this was bullshit. She asked how I could do this to her. That I could be dead in a ditch somewhere and she wouldn't even know. And she asked me what I wanted to do about this. What I suggested. I had never heard Claire so unbelievably pissed in all of my time knowing her.

A silence fell over the earth. When I look back I wish I would've found something better to say. Argued, maybe. Begged her to forgive me. Promise I'd get better. But I said what I felt.

"I don't think you should have to put up with my bullshit anymore. I think we should break up."

"Exactly what I was thinking," she said.

And she went on. Went off. She said that she hoped whenever I got another girlfriend, if I ever got another girlfriend, that she hoped I treated her better. That no one else would put up with as much bullshit as she had. And I knew she was right.

"Sometimes I wonder if you could ever love anybody other than yourself," she said to me.

I said I was sorry, and she said she was sorry, too, but she just couldn't take this anymore. She had given me enough chances, but I never changed. And she said she would never go through this again. She told me that she would still be friends with me, but she'll never go through a relationship with me again. This was it. Never more than friends, not ever again.

"Never again," she said, "never again."

Never again. That echoed in my head that night as I drove to convenient food mart, bought a pack of Marlboro, drove home, walked down to the end of the driveway, and smoked the second cigarette of my life.

And then I began taking my medication.

I remember it as a time where I had totally given up. After the car wreck, after loosing my job at the convenience store, after going through a pediatrician and a neurotic psychiatrist

After the drugs kicked in, and it took awhile, it's hard to explain how I felt. I didn’t feel bad, didn’t feel good – I just felt numb. I gained weight. I went out with the group about once a week. The group, by that time, was mainly Duncan, Nathan, and I. Ned had joined the military by that time, surprising all of us.

Things did seem to get better, though. I bagged groceries. I drove a car. I stopped reading up on aliens and the paranormal. I'd go to the cafe with my friends and sometimes I even laughed. I chopped wood, carried water, asked no questions.

And I still saw Claire. We were on friendly terms. She called me up one evening and asked me to come over top help her with her English homework. She answered the door in a black sports bra, told me to come in and asked if I wanted a Pepsi. I was awed by her, as I had always secretly been.

That day, though, there was something different in the air. Something lit by her. Something cryptic, almost sinister - as if there was some game at work here. I reminded myself that I was prone to irrational paranoia, and I should quit worrying about everything. What had I to be worried about? Certainly nothing important. Nothing that I was aware of, anyway.

Her English book sat on the coffee table that night. And it would remain there, untouched. I sat nervously on the couch as she played Sublime on her living room CD player, dancing and bouncing about like a playful child. I couldn’t help but smile, the way she seemed so free before me, so trusting and uninhibited.

I was the polar opposite. She asked me to get up and dance with her, but I couldn’t - I was locked up, frozen. I wasn’t that open. I had never been.

She eventually sat down beside me, and I tried to start conversation with her. It was difficult for me; I was never good at small talk, and after all these years of knowing her I was still quite locked up around her - especially in a house were both her and I were alone. She lit up a cigarette and seemed to find my nervous state amusing; the way my stomach would growl and the way I bit my bottom lip.

I watched her; I saw the grin on her face. I noted the way she still licked her lips every few seconds. I almost laughed out loud - almost. Then she ashed her cigarette and finally spoke. It was odd the way she did it. It was as if she had planned this out all along, and had been waiting for the right time to start talking.

She suddenly came out and said she wanted to play a game called `truth,’ and after a pause she said she’d go first.

She told me that she had written under an assumed name in my internet magazine. Shortly after I’d gotten the post office box, I’d gotten my first - and only - submission from someone. I really liked the writings. This was a girl who secretly believed that she loved her boyfriend. She asked me how funny I thought it was, that she had been so young and foolish back then – and then she laughed. It was almost an insulting laugh, a prelude to insulting words. She then paused again, and seemed to be awaiting my response.

I just told her I had figured it was her, and I tried to say it with as much coldness as I could, as if I didn’t care. It seemed appropriate enough. In truth, I had known -- but I hadn't discovered it for myself. Marcus had told me.

She’d intended to shock me - to let me know she was over me and that I’d had it all set up for me and fucked up, I thought. And that was fine, but I’d burn in my own personal hell before I let her win at this little game. I watched her face. She seemed a little put off, a little saddened by my tone, if not my words. She quickly recovered, ashed her cigarette again and said that it was my turn – I should tell a big secret.

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me a big secret you have,” she said. “Something you’ve been hiding. Everyone hides certain things about themselves.”

I shook my head in the negative. “I’m not hiding anything. I have no secrets. I have nothing to confess.”

“C’mon, you look like the type of guy that could be hiding a lot…”

“No,” I said. “Really. I’ve got no big secrets.”

Of course, I knew I was lying. It was the single most enormous lie I'd told in a long, long time.

I pushed her out of my mind. I kept taking my medication, going to work at that blasted grocery store. I bagged groceries, I watched people, and never said much. Then Justin came along.

Justin was a very intelligent guy, and the most morose individual I have ever met in my life. He was more bitter than I was, and I think that’s what initially drew me to him. Our friendship began over exchanging complaints over Christianity. We got some vile looks from some of the old women who worked or shopped there, but it was nice to feel my brain working again. It was nice to feel a bit of life again.

For the longest time I had really been afraid to think of anything controversial or with any depth for fear that things would lead back to aliens. I was afraid to talk about anything because I was focusing on mastering the mundane now, on engaging in meaningless, petty, pathetic small talk which I still had not mastered.

“Hi, how are you?” I was supposed to say.

“Fine,” they’d say, “and you?”

“Spiffy,” I was expected to say.

But the truth? It usually came down to the fact that I was miserable and they were underpaid, under laid, and neither one of us truly gave a shit about what the other was thinking or feeling. It was just appropriate; another meaningless human ritual that we both carry out, operating under the mindless assumption that the other person truly does give a shit. No one gave a shit, though, and I just couldn’t operate in such meaningless talk. So I bagged at Dustin’s register.

It was during our conversations that I suddenly noticed it: I couldn’t think like I used to. It was as if I’d been raped of the complexity, stripped of a dimension in my thinking, or it was hard to connect things as I once did. It was no longer the stir of echoes from which I got to tie together voices. It was no longer an elaborate, complex, mish-mash web work of intertwined associations. Suddenly, I only had one line of thought at a time. One or two channels, opposed to five thousand.

I remembered the high I used to get when I’d try to conceive the mysteries of existence, and I realized that my mind just didn’t work the same anymore. I still felt different, and I had all along – the drug hadn’t changed that – but I felt barred somehow. Avenues not of thought, but of ways of thinking and feeling seemed to have been blocked from me. I didn’t want to start wondering if the aliens were still fucking with me, and I didn’t want the out-of-body stuff to start happening again – all I wanted was my brain back. I certainly didn’t have my brain, I realized, while on this medication.

So I did all I could think to do: behind my parent’s backs, I got off my meds. I remembered skipping a day here and there, then more often. Then I skipped two days, occasionally only one. Then I thought I had done the gradual process of getting off the pills rather well, and decided my body could take not having any more of the drug. I think I hadn’t taken it for three days when I began to feel something. It was a cold winter night outside, and it was dead inside, slowly approaching midnight, when my shift ended. I was feeling light-headed, and my stomach was a bit queasy. It came and went, and I figured I’d be fine. I still felt a little ill, but the drive home was okay. I didn’t swerve, I made it down the driveway – and then I opened my car door and vomited all over the lawn.

After that day, I had no more adverse reactions. I didn’t take the drug, and my parents asked no questions. I simply stopped seeing Navier. He’d been a big help, and I felt I owed him a lot, but I just wanted to put everything behind me. I was okay now.

Shortly thereafter, I was on break one day sipping a cappuccino, perhaps having a cookie as well, and it suddenly hit me in the midst of writing some crappy poetry that I had gotten nowhere in my pursuit of truth. I had been sifting through my delusions and chasing after my own shadow since I had flipped out my sophomore year of high school. But truth had proven to be an ultimately futile pursuit.

Then what was the purpose to living? What would make life worthwhile? What on earth did I want?

It suddenly struck me: happiness. I wanted to feel for once. I had been lost in a constant stream of thought all these years, trying to figure everything out, and I'd gotten next to nowhere. I’d nearly driven myself over the edge in my intense self-involvement. I needed to feel something. I needed to live in the present rather than be engrossed in the past; I needed to change, and to feel something positive and caring in my life. I needed to be happy, I realized, and then I tried to systematically explore conceivable routes to happiness. I never had realized before how hard a person I was to please.

There was, however, a certain key feeling wrapped up in a word that suddenly began clawing it’s way into my mind. It was a word I’d ceased to believe in and vowed never to say. I suddenly realized that this four-lettered stranger that could offer that happiness, and that passion -- that true passion, the kind I could only touch upon through the medium of my artwork. I needed that. Had I been repressing the fact that I did believe in it - in a way almost desire it?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’d not only been seeking it - but I'd already experienced it. And that made sense. I mean, how else could I know the feeling, if I had not experienced it? I’d simply ignored what it had been, what I’d felt -- what I still felt -- for her.

It was Claire. All these years I'd been wrapped up in my intellectual roller coasters, this emotional mesh that I’d embedded my whole being in. All these years I had been so lost in this labyrinth of truth, lie, in-between and beyond that I hadn't even realized or striven to hear -- and probably had in fact striven to block out - how I felt for her. How I felt with her. What I felt between us. In trying to find words to describe how I felt with her, I recalled a night that we were on the floor of Nathan’s living room. With the candle. The colors.

That feeling was what I wanted. What I needed. I felt a warmth I can’t explain, an energy that went through us, over us, behind us and beyond us. I felt peaceful in that cocoon of soft, dancing energy.

I suddenly realized that if I could spend another moment like that - feeling so peaceful, so content, so warm, so passionate, not desiring anything else in the entire world - I couldn’t ask for anything more in my entire life. I decided that the feeling that I had denied even existed, the word I’d refused to say, I’d already experienced. I wanted that feeling again, but I knew there was a good possibility that was impossible. In the very least, I had to express to her how I felt about her. I had to have her know. I had to communicate how much she meant to me. Then I realized how difficult this was going to be for me.

So there I was, a few weeks later, atop my shitty and blue Mercury Topaz looking out over the parking lot, my mind reeling over my feelings. I still hadn’t done it. I still hadn’t swallowed my pride, but I knew that I had to, because if I didn’t I don’t know if I could ever live with myself.

I looked at Ludwig, my friend of four years, and I wondered if I should even bother bringing it up, or simply keep the issue to myself. Then I remembered just who this guy was - the wise man; the guy who would’ve been a shaman if only he’d been born in the right culture. He had been the only person that understood me, the one who had aided me intellectually all throughout the years as I was loosing my mind over my bizarre experiences. I had entrusted him with so much for so long, valued his curiosity, his empathy, his sincerity, his honesty and his mind of many channels - valued his many unique perspectives on anything and everything for so long - why stop at this, a matter of utmost importance?

He listened, as he always did, and found it strange that I believed I loved her. He asked when I’d decided this, and I said that it was more like a realization, and that it’d happened recently. I tried to express what I’d been thinking about as of late – how if I had started seeing things at any other time - say, after I got out of high school or out of a college, even - I would’ve had a clear head when I met her.

I would’ve tried, you know? I wouldn’t have felt I needed to dedicate every waking moment of my life, sacrificing sleep and sanity and food and a rational train of thought, to understanding what it was that I’d seen. I wouldn’t have had the need to detach from everything else and dedicate all consciousness, all awareness, the totality of my being to answering those questions. I wouldn’t have been so self-involved. I would’ve paid attention to her and my own damned feelings. I would’ve actually been a boyfriend and did boyfriend things - get her flowers, take her out places. Maybe make an effort to call her every once in awhile. I would’ve been an actual boyfriend.

He assured me that I couldn’t know for sure how it could’ve been, and that there was no sense playing the what-if game. As fun as it was, it was ultimately irrelevant. Apparently me and my overpowering unconscious had other plans. He said that at least I was taking the first step toward enlightenment in this matter, in the very least. When I asked him what that first step was, he smiled:

“Enlightenment is all about the small but steady process of removing one’s head from one’s ass."

And me and my realization? I may have just gotten a peek passed the cheek.

As it often is with Ludwig and I, the conversation drifted to other topics. Eventually, we came upon the conversation regarding a movie he wanted me to watch - until he stopped suddenly. Apparently he had realized that we were in the parking lot of my place of employment - a grocery store, which had a video movie rental section. After a brief look, we found that very movie - Tombstone - and after talking to his mother, some old friend of his sister’s who looked too old for her age, and two hoodlums who asked us if we knew a good place where they could go smoke some weed, we headed back to my house to watch the movie.

Roughly half-way through, the phone rang. My mother handed the cordless to me and said that it was Claire.

Claire told me she had some news, and I automatically asked if she was pregnant. She laughed and said no, she was getting married. Somehow that didn’t make matters any easier. You know those moments in which the world suddenly seems to stop - the noises around you meld together into static and then disappear, all image becomes terribly vivid, and your sense of hearing becomes painfully acute, and all your attention in focused on the last words that someone said, which play over and over in your head like some record skipping at the worst line of your most hated song? Times that by twenty-three, and you can’t come close to the feeling I felt when I heard those words: “I’m getting married.”

You know those moments in which the world suddenly seems to stop - the noises around you meld together into static and then disappear, all image becomes terribly vivid, and your sense of hearing becomes painfully acute, and all your attention in focused on the last words that someone said, which play over and over in your head like some record skipping at the worst line of your most hated song? Times that by twenty-three, and you can’t come close to the feeling I felt when I heard those words: “I’m getting married.”

“Huh?” I said, as if she’d spoken some foreign language.

“I’m getting married,” she said. “Isn’t that great?”

`Great’ - what a great word `great’ is. Was this a fitting word for the occasion, however? According to Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, page 568, third listed definition, `great' can be described as a “unusual or considerable in degree, power, intensity, etc: great pain”. Yes indeed, this was an appropriate word for the occasion.

Apparently she’d met him while videotaping the band play at a concert. he was an old friend of the band’s, and, she said, it was “love at first sight.” They weren’t going to get married until he got back from leave – he was in the Army. And she had decided to join the Army Reserves herself. Why? Because it `just made sense.' That’s where it all started - and it spread like wildfire. It spread like the Ebola virus through so many of my friends - beginning with her.

“Here, Ludwig wants to say hi to you,” I said. I handed the phone to Ludwig. He just looked at me weird. “It’s Claire.” I told him.

“Hey,” I heard him to say her, over the phone. “So what’s going on? …. oh…. well, congratulations…. you’re welcome…”

`Yeah,’ I thought, as I watched the second gun fight of Tombstone, `congratulations.’

Telling her became a bit more difficult after that day.

Hanging out at the coffee shop was a continuing habit, at least for Jim, Nathan and I, and eventually Nathan began bringing his cousin, Liz, along and she eventually brought her friends, Nell and Sandra. It was nice to have people around again -- a large group of people. I enjoyed the new faces as well, the new characters I found swarming around me.

When I'd first met Sandra, she was a shy girl, with her face in a notebook. She seemed quiet and nervous, so I decided to throw my questions at her. I'd been very interested in dreams as of late, and I asked her if she ever remembered hers. She said she used to keep a dream notebook, and that got us talking a bit.

As we so often did, we went over to Nathan's house one night to hang out -- and, as often happened as well, we fell asleep on the couch while watching TV. Sometime during the late night or early morning hours Sandra and I, who had been sitting by each other the night before, ended up laying on our sides, face to face. I was half-awake that morning, but I could feel her close to me and the warmth of her breath as it blew upon my face. I wasn't sure how I felt about her, but I hadn't been that close to a woman in what seemed like millennia. The warmth wasn't the same, the glow wasn't there, the ecstasy wasn't there, the love wasn't there -- but it was warmth, a friendly warmth, and an affection from the female of the species that I’d been lacking in my life. A particular affection between her and I that escalated.

I ended up kissing her some time after. My raised hormones mixed with the alcohol and my realization that I loved Claire and couldn't have her and had to get over her drove me to developing a flexible morality and trying out new things. I began to write really bad poetry about Claire, and once over at Nathan’s I let Sandra read some of it. She knew how I felt about Claire, but she had asked me to go to her prom just as friends. I’d agreed. Why not? I hadn’t gone to my own prom.

It was approaching that summer when I got a letter from Anne in the mail. By that summer, Annie and I had known each other for four years, and I hadn’t spoken to her in months. It was a short and vague letter, and only said that I should call her for there was something important she wanted to ask me. She wanted to know if I could do her a favor, but said she’d rather ask me over the phone.

She was certainly trying to pique my curiosity, and she certainly had it by the balls. I actually called her that time – admittedly, a rarity. She told me that she was breaking up with her short, buff, long-held, live-in boyfriend and needed a date to the prom. She asked me if I’d go, and I said yes, so long as the date didn’t collide with the date of Sandra’s prom. I was amazed. I hadn’t gone to my own prom – not Junior or Senior – and that year, within a short period of time, I’d gotten invited to two.

Then it came.

“One more thing,” Anne told me that day over the phone. “I’m going in the Army.”

Sometimes things occur and they seem to have connections your logical mind insists they cannot have. Still, they’re there. You feel them, dream them, think them, see these invisible connections everywhere, interconnecting all of existence in this invisible, multidimensional web work.

When two women who have been inarguably the most important women in your teenage life both confront you in the same year that they’re joining the high ranks of the society you want so much to change; joining, as a matter of fact, the very heart of the problem, the government, the enemy – you can’t help but feel a little cheated, a little hurt, a little confused. Even a bit enraged. In the synchronicity, you smell a psychic conspiracy. Not some wimpy government conspiracy; we’re talking conspiracy of a higher order here. Some immaterial force in the universe is fucking with you. As it continued to happen girl after girl, friend after friend over the years, it became sort of a running joke – my joke, that is – and I ran it into the ground. I got bitter about it. By memory, I can count six important people in my life who have chosen the military, and only one never made it to basic. Not only that, but there were startling coincidences linking them all.

Anyway, when both Sandra and Annie’s proms came that June of 1998, I’d been smoking cigarettes for awhile in secret.

Prom itself fucked. Annie insisted I shouldn’t wear a tux, which I really didn’t want to do anyway, because she wasn’t dressing up super-fancy and she didn’t want me to out dress her. I was nervous the entire time, I broke my corsage, drew on a napkin, too, I think. I got that familiar feeling I always had during high school: everyone’s watching, you know your strange and out of place. The heightened awareness, clammy hands, cold sweat, narrow through, clenched teeth – all of which convinces me that even if I was initially reacting to nothing at all, my growing nervousness was attracting attention. You try and talk yourself out of freaking out, but it doesn’t work. It’s a constant cycle of reinforcement – a negative cycle – and not by for the only one present in my life.

I made it through prom alive, and we even got our picture taken. I’m slouching, of course.

I don’t remember what happened between then and after prom, but we eventually got bored at after prom – or at least I did – and decided to go sit in the car. We talked here and there, smoking out cigarettes, but the silences between our comments grew longer. It wasn’t’ an uncomfortable silence, but there was certainly an underlying intensity. I worked my way closer and asked if I could kiss her. She laughed and said yes, I didn’t have to ask. I stopped kissing her for a second to explain why I had asked, but she cut me off.

Sandra’s prom was a mess, and after prom was pure hell – and it had nothing to do with her, either, so quit thinking I’m an asshole. My friends didn’t know of my nicotine habit at the time, and I was around them constantly.

It was then that I experienced the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal for the first time in my life. The withdrawal as only part of it, however. At Sandra’s party, most of the songs were fast songs, and I, as a rule, can only slow dance. With a person with my level of anxiety, it’s hard for me to fathom I could even slow dance. I was therefore King Grump the entire night, going from wallflower to nervous sit in the chair boy. I stared out the window, thinking how nervous I was, how guilty I felt, and how I was fucking dying for a goddamned cigarette. Maybe I could sneak outside. I never did, though. I felt pathetic, and I felt bad that I looked and felt apathetic and that I made Shannon look and feel pathetic and the kinds of things everyone was saying to her out on the dance floor.

“What’s his problem?”

“Why did you even bring him?”

Even worse was my imagining them sighing and shaking their heads. Then, we were at a water park for after prom. I wanted to sneak a cigarette when we went to the bathroom half way through the day, and I sighed a relief as I made my way to the bathroom stall. It was then that I discovered my pack of cigarettes had gotten soaked on one of the rides. I was cold, wet, pissed and standing in a stall in a crowded bathroom at a water park with a massive case of nicotine withdrawal and nothing but a pack of soggy cigarettes. That day was all about me being pathetic.

I ended up seeing both Annie and Sandra interchangeably. I told them both were I stood: I wasn’t committing, because I was all about Claire. I wanted Claire back. I really cared for them, I told them, but I wouldn’t commit myself and I wouldn’t have sex with anyone because getting Claire back was my goal. you got to have goals to give you meaning, give you purpose, give you excuse, right? It keeps you focused. It gives life a plot. It makes things interesting. It gives and keeps and makes you everything that I was lacking.

So I fooled around with both of them and for awhile it was fun. Within my set boundaries my instinctual , animal part had some free reign. The boundaries, like years before, I had sworn were moral boundaries.

Of course, I knew I was lying. It was truly fear. Fear of commitment, of sex, of feeling and sensation. Somewhere deep down in the pit of me, I knew all this, but I wouldn’t say it, I wouldn’t even write it, I wouldn’t even verbalize it or recognize it in my head.

The animal didn’t get to play in the boundaries for long, either, until I was faced with a true moral challenge. It was there all along, and I figured the natural course of things would work it’s way out. I argued all along that I wasn’t in the wrong here. No one else seemed to agree, though Sandra played like she did. I often put it in this way: it wasn’t as if I was getting my dick wet with both of them or leading them on to believe that I was exclusive with either of them. To the contrary, from the very beginning I’d told them the situation.

But the fact that Sandra knew I was screwing around with Anne but not the other way around began toe eat away at me.

I thought it would be easy to tell her, convincing myself that she would think it was no more of a big thing than I had convinced myself it was to me – but I just couldn’t’ say it to her. I threw out hints, telling myself she already knew, had to know. Did she know? Who knows? I still don’t know. All I know is that I was absolutely terrified of telling her, and that only proved to me again and again how immoral I truly considered myself in this situation deep down in the pits of my being.

I tried desperately to weigh things: did I like Sandra or Annie? Truth be known, I liked them both. As I tried to weight this issue, I notice correlations between them that became a secret obsession of mine. They were totally different beings, no doubt – but their like aspects hinted to me that I was chasing after something else. It was something that could partially be found in either of them, perhaps, and of which some aspects could be found in both. it was something binding them, but beyond them. Something of myself that I was projecting upon them, something from someone else that I was displacing on both of them, or displacing one of them on the other. Casual connections between thing in the outer world imply these things – or how you perceive them – are really reflections of something from within or beyond you.

Then came the night that Duncan stepped in. A monumental occasion, to be sure.

I had been at Nathan’s, lying on the couch with Anne. Duncan was in a chair nearby, and he suddenly turned to me and said, “Tim, wasn’t there something you wanted to say to Anne?”

Adrenaline rose, and I turned and shot him a glare. I then ignored him, but he repeated it.

“Not now, Duncan,” I shot at him, but he pressed. In all my years of knowing him, I’ve never wanted to hurt him more than I did in that moment. I couldn’t believe the nerve he had. Sure, he couldn’t tell how hard I’d been trying, how often this had been on my mind, how delicate I wanted to be with this. Wrong as all of that was, as much as I felt I should tell her, it was not his right to step in and push it like that. It was non of his damn business, as a matter of fact; it wasn’t his fucking place. No hard feeling remain today, but damn I was pissed.

She questioned what he had been referring to, but I tried to throw out hints that indicated anything but what he was referring to and the then played it down. Now there was no way in the fiery blazes of the hell I ceased to believe in that I could tell her.

Duncan and I talked outside Nathan’s front door a few days later. Another heated debate, this time on ethics – something we haven’t brushed upon, really, since I’d thrown out my pro-choice views in his face some time back and we eventually had to stop talking about it. Argument on the matter brought us nowhere.

As the date for Anne’s departure came ever-closer, we began hanging out more often. I had to ask her why she chose the military, and she told me that she could se the money, her parents needed the money, and she didn’t want to end yup like her siblings. What about her writing, I asked her? It would take years, she told me, to get it as a profession. She’d need a side job, and anyway, she enjoyed it, she didn’t want to make it a job. Job would kill her passion for it.

In the end it wasn’t about me agreeing, or even understanding – it was just about accepting. I know I couldn’t change her mind, and I( didn’t try to – it was her life, her path. If she wanted to take some camouflage bus ride through hell to gain her paradise, so be it. Far be it from me to intervene with protests or otherwise.

I came to like yet another thing about her in that period: I could talk with her in depth about important things, higher things – spirituality, the cosmos, the Big Questions – while we were fooling around. It was the perfect mixture of the primitive and the higher, the spiritual and material. Things often got heated, and I’d be on the edge of giving it, to saying the hell with it – but she’d stop me.

“You don’t want that,” she’d say to me, echoing the summation of all the things I’d been preaching about my desire for Claire that summer; thing I’d said in a less-heated state of mind. “Remember Claire?”

In a sigh to calm myself and the rapid breathing, I’d close my eyes.

“Yeah,” I’d say.

Then Claire’s words, just before we’d broke up for what would be the very last time that previous September, echoed in: “I don’t know if you could ever love anyone but yourself.”

But Claire was wrong. I knew she was wrong. And regardless as to whether it made a difference or not, I had to tell her.

 

[rewiiired]

chapter 9 -- the END.

Chapter 9.

Summer fell to autumn. The leaves change colors. Things were dying. The world took on a shadow, steadily growing darker, waiting to consume everything. I could feel it creeping. Killing.

My friends were going to be leaving for college. Claire and Anne would be leaving for the Army.

The night before Annie left we got together at her house with a bottle of 7-Up, Coca-Cola, vodka, peppermint schnapps, my micro-cassette recorder, vanilla cigars with sugar-coated tops and some strange guy named Steve that she’d met a day or two before. We smoked a lot, talked a lot, I recorded a lot. I think I had every possible concoction of the four bottles, and I drank most of it. After a period of amnesia, I remember waking up on Anne’s bed with my head in a bucket as she massaged my back.

Talk about a mixture of pleasure and pain.

I remember the sensation of her hands on my back as I looked into the spinning white-out of the bucket’s interior, splattered with chunky puke – and boy, do I remember the smell of minty upchuck. Previous to that evening, mint chocolate chip was my favorite flavor of ice cream; now I can hardly write or read the word “mint” without inspiring that nauseating feeling, the smell of it bring the gag reflex, and if I have any I find it hard to hold back wanting to vomit out all my internal organs. I puked so hard that night I burst a blood vessel in my eye.

As it approached morning, I’d vomited up all I could. I woke up feeling as if I’d been to the bridge of death and came out alive. I felt cleansed. My throat felt sore, but my back felt nice. She got me yup and we walked into the dark of the kitchen, where she’d made us some coffee. I wondered than, as I had so many times before, just why this intelligent and beautiful girl was so nice to me.

We sipped coffee, we talked. She warned me she would change, that things wouldn’t be the same after tomorrow. As we drank our coffee, she told me that the micro-cassette recorder was full. She said she’d recorded a message on it that she wanted me to listen to, but only after she’d left by that evening, and while alone. I promised her.

Death hung in the air like a foul mist that day. As often as I've written about it, always trying to do the event justice and express it’s many layers, nothing has satisfied me. I was very confused that day, and because of the intensity of the emotions I'll never forget it.

It’s permanently burned in my mind how we had locked ourselves in that room, how my eyes kept drifting back to that clock, how she kept pulling me away from it. When she looked at me I could no longer deny it as I had so many times before. I knew I feared her with a fierce intensity. With me, fear was the shadow of desire. And shadows were as real as the things cast by them in my world. The more intense the fixation, the more profound the repulsion. The bigger the desire, the greater the fear. I shook that day, because I was certain it would be the last I'd ever spend with her. It was a day of silent revelations.

There was a knock on the door, and she quickly got up from where she was laying on my stomach. She tried to quickly dry her face, take a few deep breaths. They yelled her name, and she said she’d be out in just a minute. She gave me one last kiss and then turned around, put her back to me, and put her hand on the doorknob. With a final, deep breath she stepped outside her bedroom door and into the hallway of her parents’ house. There the Army men stood, all prim and proper in their arrogance. They smiled as they looked at her – like hawks fixating on their prey, like fishermen reeling in one hell of a catch. Annie and them exchanged a few words, she hugged her mother, they took her bags leaning up against the wall nearby.

Anne motioned for me to stand by her, and I reluctantly stepped forward and offered my hand. As we shook hands, I couldn’t wipe the scowl off my face. They asked if I was her boyfriend, a question that at any other time may have got me to chuckle, but certainly not on this occasion. She did laugh, however, and explained that I was just a really close friend.

“We’ll take good care of her,” one of them said to me, with that big, plastic motherfucking smile on his face. I wanted to rip his fucking throat out. All throughout this time, I noticed their reaction to me. With their posture and the way they looked at me they seemed to communicate a million words. They seemed to think that she was ill and they had the cure, and they seemed to show an empathy for me and my loss, but only so much as a vet approaches a little boy about his sick puppy. They helped you with their bags and we all followed Anne and the two soldiers out the door.

She once claimed she never cried and that I’d never see it. She told me as she cried that day that she wasn’t scared. As she told me she wasn't scared, I saw the fear in her eyes. I told myself that I was prepared to see her go, that I didn’t hold her choices against her, and that I'd be right here waiting for her when she returned. As they guided Annie to their car, I thought that it might as well have been a hearse. I sat atop my shitty blue Mercury Topaz nearby and watched that car drive quickly out of sight. In the trail of dust behind it, I hated her for all that she had chosen. In the dust, I cried, and then I drove off the other way.

That day all the lies between us danced together in the distance growing between us.

I drove directly to Nathan’s house that day, where Claire called me. I ended up at her house, and the following two days proved to be quite interesting.

She answered the door with a smile - a fucking smile. She had terrified me when she’d called me over the phone at Nathan’s house. She’d sounded so upset, and went on to tell me that she just needed to be around people right now. I’d pressed her to tell me what was going on then and there, but she insisted she didn’t want to tell me over the phone and that she’d explain it all later. I’d rushed down to her house, expecting her crying - frowning - something of the like. No. Here she stood before me, beautiful and smiling.

I’d had enough of crying for the day, anyway. The day was apparently quite dedicated to leaving me uncertain as to which way was up and which way was down.

“Hey,” I said, just to make sure, “are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, as if it was a stupid question. “I’m fine.” Her tone really set me off. There were times that I was certain that this elegant creature thoroughly enjoyed toying with my mind.

“You didn’t sound fine over the phone,” I said. “But oh well.”

“So how are you?” She asked.

“I feel like shit.” I was in a rather blunt mood that evening. I was tired, and I still felt a bit hung over - maybe even a bit drunk.

It was around that time that I felt a foreign presence. There was someone else curled up on the couch, smoking a cigarette and watching a movie - a really bad movie entitled `KIDS’, which I’d seen a ways back. I sat down with my bottle of Pepsi and didn’t say a word.

Claire sat on the rocking chair on the other side of the room nearby the television set. She pulled out a cigarette and right then and there the urge hit me: I so wanted to smoke…

There was some girl there I didn't know. I didn't say anything to her. Out of the blue, apparently giving up on the idea that I may actually crack down, be a polite gentleman and introduce myself, she gave me her name. Rose. I extended my hand, and we shook.

I asked if they were going to go and do something later, and in a crabby kind of way Claire told me no, they had gotten a movie.

“Geez, calm down,” I said in defense. “Don’t bite my head off - it’s been a long day, okay? What other movies you get?”

“The Shining,” Rose answered. It was the first time I’d turned my head to actually look her way.

“Good fucking movie,” I said. “You seen this before?”

Rose had. I went about blabbing about how my favorite scene was when Jack Nicholson went about trying to chop the bathroom door down with an axe in the effort to get to wife and waste her away to lunch meat, and said, `Here’s Johnny!’

“Alright Claire,” I said. “You finally got a cool friend. Good taste in movies, anyway.”

“Yeah, I like horror flicks,” she went on, “all of Stephen King’s stuff, and anything to do with ghosts or anything like that.”

“You ever actually seen a ghost?”

“Once,” she told me. “I saw one at my grandmother’s house when I was younger - a lot younger.”

That sparked off a good conversation. She told me how her and some friends had spent the night at a haunted house, how interested she was in the paranormal, how she had practiced Wicca for some time. She seemed to be a very honest, open, and ultimately interesting individual.

Then came the question that I had been confident that I could strategically work around in all this - usually, people are too wrapped up in themselves to ask questions of their own. “So you ever see anything like that - like a ghost?”

I tensed and stuttered. “I’ve seen a few strange things…”

“Yeah,” Claire said, and I knew she’d make some reference that would make the situation even more awkward. “You still think you were abducted by aliens?”

I knew she was poking at my soft spots. Why?

“That was a long time ago,” I told her in a tone that I was sure clearly indicated that this was a sensitive topic I didn’t wish to delve into right now. “I don’t know what I saw anymore.”

“Well, what exactly did you see?” Rose asked.

“Nothing, really,” I blatantly lied.

“Tim’s in love with aliens,” Claire sang. She was enjoying this. I was not.

“Right,” I said sarcastically. “That’s why I lost my mind, got in a car wreck, and - ” I sighed: `-- and lost a relationship that meant everything to me,’ I finished in thought. I just smiled then, defeating my embarrassment. “Bite me.”

She seemed to rise to accept the challenge - but didn’t bite me. We did wrestle on the couch, though, and nearly squished poor Rose in the process. It was nice to be that close to her again.

I’d really missed that kind of thing.

As that movie ended and The Shining began, a few guys came knocking on the door. I didn’t say much to them, and they didn’t stay very long. I decided to get up and relieve myself of the remaining alcohol in my system as the movie came to a close.

Over the sound of rushing water in the bathroom, I heard Rose and Claire whispering to each other. Ever-curious and always paranoid, and at times exceptionally nosey, I did my best to listen in.

“You guys look great together… how long have you known him…?”

“Three years or so.”

“Three years? How come you guys aren’t together… ?”

“We went out a few times, but it just didn’t work out…”

“What happened?”

“Well, he…”

As can be expected, the volume of her voice dropped significantly as she was about to reveal what I, being quite the self-absorbed type, would consider to be the most revealing point of the conversation. As I zipped up, flushed, and washed hands, I felt extremely paranoid about what she thought of me.

There were days I’d give a leg for Clairaudience. Get it?

I’d gotten invited - it seemed to be at the insistence of Rose, rather than of Claire - to join them to go see Mall Rats a day or two later. We met up at Claire’s house and Rose drove. By the time we got to the movie theater and took our seats, it was already thirty minutes or so into the movie, Mall Rats. It was then and there, in the heightened state of uncomfortable silence between the three of us in the movie theater, that I became acutely aware of a prominent human tendency that was currently taking it’s toll on me.

For most people, I’d say, it seems to happen most often with music - we tend to apply the lyrics of the song to our own current life situations. We’ll search out for that song that is in deep resonance with our certain mood, or will find that a song reminds us of a former era in our lives. We’ve all experienced that feeling when that song comes on the radio that seems to almost speak to us, to reveal our condition through it’s melody and words. I’ve found this works the same for books, newspaper articles, other people’s situations and the crisis they present to you in conversation, or even those few words you hear come out of someone else’s mouth as you pass by them in a crowded restaurant or mall - we find unmistakable yet seemingly inexplicable likenesses and similarities. Often, they not only present the problem, but try and point out a solution. The song that describes our situation in the perfect way. The book that seems to draw out our present life’s conditions and present specific solutions at just the right time, even though we picked it off a bookstore’s shelf at random, and opened to a random page. The movie that displays our current situation comically, displaying our attitudes in an awkward format, and putting our feelings to words better than we ever could have. That last one there is what I got out of Mall Rats that evening.

No one else seemed at have noticed.

I wondered if she even had a clue as to how I felt about her. I wondered if she had any idea how much I wanted to hold her then, take her chin and guide her face to confront mine and lay it all on her. I wondered if she knew how much I wanted to show her rather than tell her. I knew it was irrelevant, though. I faced that in he movie theater, as I chanced a long, intense look at her eyes. I needed her, but I could never again have her.

I was still very quiet after we got in the car. I had been silent throughout the entire movie, and I had said little on our way through the parking lot to Rose’s car. I was reserved, paranoid, dwelling on my own past mistakes, and having one hell of a serious nicotine fit. Being in the car, in-between two smokers, didn’t make me feel that much better at all. The smell of the burning tobacco fed the urge in me, and I knew I had to give in sooner or later. I preferred later, but the force of my addiction wouldn’t allow it.

“Claire,” I said out of nowhere, “do me a favor.”

“What?” She asked in a curious tone.

“Turn your head and close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

She did. I took out a cigarette I’d been playing with on and off for roughly three hours. Rose looked at me, curious as to what the big deal was, but appearing otherwise unimpressed. As the flick of my lighter, Claire jumped in her seat and turned to look at me, eyes wide and mouth open.

“I can’t believe this…”

“What’s the problem?” Rose said, shrugging. “Anyone can smoke in here, I don’t care. You know that.”

“No, you do not understand,” Claire insisted to Rose in her dramatic, enthusiastic way. She always got a childlike look about her when she got excited, from the way she gesticulated to her facial expressions. Watching her this way never ceased to make me smile. “I have known this kid for over three years and he’s always bothered me about my smoking. He’s been against it since I’ve known him. When id this start?” She said, looking at me in piqued interest, as if I was some unusual stranger.

I’d expected a reaction of this magnitude. “A while ago.”

She shook her head. “All these years of complaining about my smoking, telling me how bad it was for my health, and here you are.”

“No, I always stood up for drug use,” I said. “I always supported the right for anyone to do whatever they wanted to their body, be it cigarettes, pot, LSD, whatever. I just always said it was never for me.”

She was thoroughly enjoying this, I could tell. She shuffled my hair as if I were a child, and continued the motherly mocking. “My little boy has grown up.”

“Funny.”

“So tell me,” she asked, pausing for a moment to look at me with a lit cigarette in hand, “why?”

I shrugged. I felt like a mouse who had been cornered by a cat. “I figured my parents seemed insistent that drugs were the route to me relinquishing my madness,” I rationalized, “so I decided that if I was going to do drugs I’d do it on my own terms. So I got off the medication slowly behind their backs, and tried smoking. I was of legal age so I thought - what the hell?”

“I cannot fucking believe this,” she said. She looked away for a moment, and then turned back to look at me again. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She almost looked hurt, and I found that rather amusing.

“I haven’t told any of my friends, save for Anne,” I tried to explain, “and I did spend a lot of time telling you how bad it was for you. I knew you’d have fun with this.”

It had fallen silent again - and I hate when that happens in cars at night, when the radio’s not on. It only pisses me off when you’re with someone who you want to say so much to, but suddenly cannot find the will or the way to bring up conversation. For awhile all I heard was the thumping of the car as it occasionally went over a rock or a hole on the road, with brief breaks of silence made by Claire, who would laugh, sigh, or shake her head, occasionally turning to me and saying, “I can’t fucking believe you smoke now… this I so weird…”

“I got a question for ya,” I finally said, after I’d decided the stretch of quiet had gone on long enough. They both rose to attention, as if I’d woken them both out of a doze. “What do you define as love?”

Rose was the first to comment. “Do you mean love between friends…?”

“No, no - hell no,” I said. “Love isn’t between family and friends, or-”

“I’d say it is,” she replied. “I think there’s all different types of love.”

“See, I don’t think so. That’s what I hated about that word for so long,” I said to her. “People tend to use it too much, almost habitually, to the point where it means nothing anymore. It looses it’s sacred meaning when it’s applied everywhere and thrown around like that; it looses it’s depth. People say they love everything - ice cream, football, booze, cigarettes, this country, their family, whatever - and they rape it of it’s special, almost sacred nature. There’s no impact with the word anymore. It’s been stripped of all meaning. I’ve all but eliminated the word from my vocabulary because I’m so disgusted how it’s abused. I refuse to ever use it until I’m entirely certain that it’s justified. Until there is no other means of expressing how I feel - that’s when that word should be used. It should be reserved. It fucking pisses me off.”

“Geez, calm down,” Claire said, apparently annoyed.

I sighed and caught my breath. I certainly felt better in a way, but I felt horribly anxious in another. I was thinking that the intensity behind that rant of mine revealed that I’d been spending a considerable amount of time dwelling on the topic of love. I also feared that they may believe that I didn’t see the word as holding any meaning - but to the contrary, I did, which is why I believed it should be reserved until it was appropriate. I recognized that I almost seemed to be unjustifiably attacking them with my angry stream of words when it was I who had brought the topic up in the first place.

It seems that holding back feelings for such a long time does two things. First, it adds stress and pressure to the will that pushes away or represses that feeling. Secondly, the will that feeling has to be expressed grows to match it’s resistance. As both forces grow, the person grows sensitive in regard to the repressed topic. Once the physical, emotional, social or intellectual environment is present, as soon as the right conditions are met, it blasts out of you with intense, expressive force - a force almost beyond one’s control. The relief you get when finally letting it go and releasing what you have been holding back from also does two things. First, you get back the energy that you had invested in that repression. Secondly, you get back all the energy or `force’ that the repressed item had grown. The sense of release you receive is indescribable. It feels as if you were Atlas, and had finally gotten the world off of your shoulders.

“Anyway,” I went on, after catching my breath, “what do you define as love - the intimate type?”

“I know you don’t like the idea, but I really think love exists between friends as well,” Rose said. “It’s just something that comes in degrees, you know? I really think that love is just a really close friendship between two people, plus extra benefits - and there’s an understanding of exclusivity. The girl or guy has to be your closest friend. Without that deep trust, I wouldn’t call it love, though.”

“Then do you believe in love at first sight?” Claire asked her.

“I dunno,” she said, “I don’t think so.”

“Can love be one-sided?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Rose said.

Claire shook her head in the affirmative, looking out the window and taking a drag off her cigarette. “I think it can be.”

“So what do you define as love, Claire?” I said, looking at her.

“Well,” she said, “I think the person has to mean everything to you - the world to you. It’s hard to explain unless you experienced it for yourself, you know? You have to commit yourself to that person, and only that person… You’d give up your whole life, sacrifice everything you had, sacrifice your whole world just top be with that person. You’d like, I dunno, even die for that person.”

“And you believe in love at first sight?” I asked.

“Definitely,” she said, “I love him.”

The silence returned for only a few moments, but with a clear vengeance - a lull that was both painful and penetrating. In my arrogance, I felt that it had been created for me, to allow those last words Claire had spoken to echo endlessly in my cranium.

“So,” Rose said, “what do you define as love, Tim?”

“Yeah, Tim,” Claire laughed. “I’ve got to hear this one.”

I swallowed. “Well,” I began hesitantly, doing my very best to choose my words carefully, “I think love is ultimately a spiritual experience. I think there’s four levels of human experience - the physical and social, the emotional, the intellectual and the spiritual. Love exists at the spiritual level - it’s a harmony that naturally exists between, within, around and beyond the inner selves of two individuals. Everything else on any other level can be fucked up - emotional separation, intellectual difference, physical location or whatever. All other channels can be clogged, all else can be wrong between these two individuals, but the spiritual harmony still exists, and that harmony is what I regard as love.”

Claire shook her head, and the tone of her voice and her selection of words expressed certain disgust. “So basically what your saying is that two people can be nothing alike, completely disagree on almost everything - basically two incompatible people - can be in love with each other?”

“No, I think I see what he’s saying, and it makes sense.” Rose said in my defense. “He’s just saying that love can exists between two people, but that it doesn’t always work.”

I don’t remember rest of the car ride back to Claire’s house. Like most people, I only recall what is of crucial importance to me, and ultimately meaningful in my eyes. After we got back, though, and I stepped onto her driveway and got in my car, Rose came up to me.

“Are you coming with us tomorrow?”

I was confused. “Where?”

“To the strip downtown,” she said. “It’s a cool place, you should come with us.”

I shrugged and agreed to go, and told her to have Claire call me tomorrow. I said goodbye to both of them and started up my car. Before I realized what I was doing, I called out Claire’s name and she came walking up to my car. “Yeah?” She asked.

“Remind me,” I said carefully, “I have something to tell you later.”

She gave me an odd, almost a worried look. “Okay…What’s it about? What’s wrong?”

“Later,” is all I said. Then I pulled out of the driveway, with her face beautifully painted with all my feeling for her in my mind, my beacon in a dark mind perceiving an otherwise hopeless, and ultimately helpless world.

That brought me here - and it all led up to here. It all came down to this car ride down to the Strip; it all came down to this moment here with her.

I started up the car with my heart in my head. Seeing her come out of the door of her cousin’s house, with her slender body walking across her driveway as she came to my car’s passenger door, I was reminded of every other moment that I’d ever spent with the beautiful girl. The fading dye that had left her hair amber as it worked it’s way back to it’s natural blond, and her ocean-blue eyes that poked out of that simple, delicate, and innocent face of hers. It sent electricity coursing through me. Whenever I felt a shred of doubt in what I’d come to realize - and it never seemed to extend passed that - all it took was being in her presence to remind me.

She opened it up and climbed in, searching her pockets, I assumed, for her cigarettes. I turned the tape player down and asked her what was new in her life.

“Nuthin’ much,” Claire said, letting the words hang mysteriously. After she closed the door and pointed the way for me to drive, she still waited a moment before speaking. “So,” she began, not hiding the fact that she’d had something on her mind for at least the last few minutes since she’d said her last words to me. “What was that you wanted to tell me?”

I suddenly felt as if I’d been cornered. As if I’d been put on the spot. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this; I was supposed to wait for the right moment. Though, I reminded myself, I’d been waiting how long to say this? I froze, though. I hesitated.

“I don’t know if it’s really relevant anymore,” I said.

“C’mon, tell me, what is it?” She said. “It’s not something bad, or…”

“No, no, it’s not something bad - at least not to me, I guess,” I told her. The conversation wasn’t going as I had planned, for she’d started it instead of me - but I had to do it. I had to.

“C’mon,” she said, “what’s this all about? What?”

What is this about? The question echoed in my mind. It was about so damned much, I thought. I felt a volcano in my chest, and it was doomed to erupt. It had to be here, I thought, the time has to be now. I had a moment of silence, reminding myself why I felt this was so crucial. In that moment of silence, my mind drifted back to a year ago.

I played with my box of Marlboro Reds as she played with hers. I pulled out a cigarette and held it with my hands, looking at it.

“What?” She repeated, growing a little agitated in the passenger seat of my crappy blue Topaz. She looked at me, sitting nervously in the driver’s seat, with just a twinkle of paranoia in her eye. “Just tell me. What are you thinking? What’s going on? What is it?”

I gripped the steering wheel. I gripped it hard. I swallowed, I breathed deep, I bit my lip, I heard my stomach gurgle, I felt my palms sweat and a lump form in my throat. Then I finally said it, after so many years.

“I love you.”

I was about to put fourth the will to pry it loose so it could flutter out my mouth when I suddenly realized I’d already said it. when it came down to it, the words just rolled off my tongue so effortlessly. The world seemed empty for the moment following me finally saying the words that have been fighting for freedom from within me for so many years - void of anything, save her and I. There wasn’t another living soul in the world - it was just her and I, and what could’ve been and what could never be again. It was just the love I felt, and the tool of self-destruction I now cradled in sight of my insanity, and the one she held in light of hers: it was just two cigarettes and the meaning of life.

The earth stood still. “What?” She said.

I took a breath and released my grip - on both the steering wheel and my fear of vulnerability - and said it again, this time listening to honesty and sincerity in my voice.

“I love you.” I told her again.

I wanted to elaborate. I wanted to tell her how much she meant to me, how long I’d been ignorant and how long I’d known, how sorry I was for how I’d been and who I’d been and how much I wished it would’ve been better and I would’ve been more together. I wanted to tell her about how I should’ve made it for Beef Stroganoff when her cousin had invited me to dinner. I wanted to tell her how sexy I always thought she looked in her Californian attire. I wanted her to know how much I’d regretted our last and final break-up, even before I finalized it with my words; before I hung up the phone and smoked the cigarettes I haven’t stopped smoking since.

I wanted to show her, not just tell her how much I really do love her. I wanted her to know that she was the only thing I cried over anymore, where I used to only cry over myself. Due to circumstances beyond my control, however, and my respect for her life, I had to limit it to those three words. Words I had never spoken to anyone else - and words that remained just as sacred, because I’d reserved them until a time when using them wouldn’t be abusing them. I spoke those words to her in complete and total honesty.

She paused a moment, staring at my dashboard. She lit up a cigarette and opened the window, and smiled broadly. I took out my zippo.

I looked over just in time to see her smile. “Wow,” she said.

And I lit up the cigarette.

 

[smileyfish]

Thankyou.

I feel honoured that you let me see so much of your soul in this peice. You have the gift of the story teller.

Smiley

 

[blahblahblah]

Good story...

Left me wanting to know more.

 

[SnowFrog]

This is truely amazing....by the end of chapter 9....i couldn't hold back the tears.....I know all to well what that feeling is like....holding so much in for so long....letting it eat at u and then....speaking ur mind....finally.....the pressure that is released....the.....

Ur words are truely amazing....and I would love to know what happened after the lighting of the cigarette.....

~B

 

[jeebus13]

Rewiiired, I just wanted to tell you that this story grabbed me by the ol' short and curlies. I have always held you in high esteem and respected your talent, but this is, in the truest definition of the words, the best love story I have read. I wish I could better express my admiration, but the word dumbfounded springs to mind.
Cheers. Thank you for all the feelings and the expressions that have now found their way into my daily vocabulary. If you ever need an editor, I would fucking love to.