The St. Ambrose School for Girls(40)
I consume light and matter. I consume time itself. I disappear into a cosmos of my own creation, taking everything into the void that is me.
I am so dense, so heavy, that I am the heft of the entire earth with a surface area one-tenth of the head of a pin, and the only way I can be measured and still preserve some of the structure of the universe is by pain.
Pain is what I am, no longer possessing features or form. I am the emotion that we all seek to avoid. And because this is my basis, and I’m hardwired the way I am, I feed my status like it’s a boiler furnace, shoving into the burning, intolerable suffering load after load of coals in the form of thoughts: I am crazy. I am insane. There is no chance of me ever becoming better. I will never be like other people and they will always know this. I am broken, I am bad, I am worthless.
I am the reason my father left. I drove him away with my insanity. He was a smart man, so he knew where I was going to end up well before I did, well before my mother did. He knew I was going to be an irredeemable failure on all fronts, and that I was not worth the investment of time and energy. Therefore, he got off at the next train stop, and never looked back. My mother, stuck with a malfunctioning freak for whom no one else would care, did the best she could with what little she had, and had to regress into the pretty pages of magazines to keep from losing her own mind. I am the reason all her dreams were denied. Without me, my parents would never have split up. My father’s band would have succeeded and she would have gotten more beautiful with age, instead of less so. Without me, they’d be living in Bel Air, and they would have a pool, and my mother would be in People magazine not only because she became a successful actress, author, and daytime talk show host but because my father’s band would be bigger than the Rolling Stones, the Police, and Genesis combined. He’d be touring his classics all over the world and she’d be the poor man’s Joan Didion, and they’d be Linda and Paul McCartney except with more leather and a harder, edgier sound. And probably none of the vegetarianism.
My birth cheated them of all of that. I was the anchor that didn’t secure them against the storm, but rather kept them too close to the rocky shore as the tide roared in and the waves got worse. I splintered and sank them.
And now I am sinking Strots. Driving her out of her room. Making her ashamed of something that is not shameful—
From somewhere within the morass, a thought occurs from a different dimension, a dimension of buoyancy rather than burden.
It’s a thought I have had twice before.
It’s what brings me back.
The thought, the pure, incandescent thought, returns me to the true present, to my bed, to my dorm room, to the dorm, the campus, this small Massachusetts town in the middle of the mountains. It resets everything, it returns everything, it resumes everything. And in the manner of my mis-wired brain, the thought, which unlike the others has absolutely no physical substance, which is just ether of the mind, comes with the sound of Tibetan singing bowls, a strike and then a resonance that calls me to lift my head. Or perhaps it is not an actual thought at all, it’s the sound of the singing bowl itself, and my brain, which speaks the basin’s melodic language, has translated the tone into a purpose that presents itself to me as a solution that is perfect.
As I look around, I am aware that the light in my room is different and I decide that it’s the tail end of my hallucinatory stroll into the womb of the cosmos. Except it’s not. According to my alarm clock, it’s after one o’clock in the afternoon.
I have been on this bed, in this position with my knees to my chest and my arms linked around them, for six hours.
Other things have changed, besides the angle of the sun: The drawer in Strots’s dresser is closed. Books that were on her desk are moved, and some are gone. She’s been here. Sometime during my lock-in, she’s come and gone.
The reality that she must have seen me, tucked in as if I were yet to be born, on my bed only in a physical way, which is the least significant manner of existence for any person, confirms that I must act.
Enough of all of this. This school and this roommate. My over-present mother and my absent father. My suffering that cannot be elevated no matter how much lithium I take, or group meetings I go to, or hospitals I am committed to.
Everyone will be better off without me. Except for Greta, of course, and as with my letting that football fly free of my grip, I’m emboldened by the idea of cheating her out of the pleasure she gets from hurting me.
It’s what Strots said as I first arrived here.
Do not give her what she wants.
The idea of releasing people, especially my mother, from the burden of me has long been a motivator, and further, the release from my own inner pain and the terrifying trips I take inside my mind is also a blissful prospect. But what truly motivates me to stand and get dressed is the idea that I can take me away from Greta.
I can take her toy away. I can break it so badly that it doesn’t work anymore and she’s got to find another, more inferior thing to play with and take her petty revenge out on.
I will not give her what she wants.
Spurred on by my anger and a growing, maniacal need for retaliation, Greta becomes the sole focus of my energy, the dark thoughts that collapsed me transferring onto her, tentacles attaching and tightening. I am moving faster now, eager to mete out a punishment the likes of which that pretty girl, with her flicked cigarettes and her nasty smile and her malicious ways, is wholly unprepared for. This loser, this freak that she so disdains, is going to even the score, and ruin her in the process: I’m going to blame my death on her. I’m going to leave a note that details it all, and I’m going to make it clear that my corpse is her trophy.