And forget about going to Wycliffe for food. That’s like asking me to bench-press the dorm.
As I contemplate the hundreds of steps ahead of me, the weight of my backpack, the glare of the sun on my aching eyes, I feel heavy inside my skin and not from lack of sleep. My bones and my muscles throb and so does the base of my skull. It’s as if I have come down with the flu in the space of a minute and a half, my immune system caught unawares, my corpuscles overrun and defeated by a microscopic invader. Except this is not really anything physical. This is an infestation of regret.
All I can think about is how I messed everything up and ruined my living situation. Last night, I should have run after Strots and told her right then and there it was okay, it was no big deal, it didn’t bother me, I was only surprised. And all of this is true, not a constructed reality I discipline myself to believe in.
I am not bothered or freaked out. I have other things to worry about. Besides, I like Strots, and nothing changes that.
If only I had caught her before everything solidified overnight, I might have had a chance at undoing it all. At first she maybe wouldn’t have believed me, but I could have pressed the issue, and revealed to her how cool I actually am. She could have been surprised, relieved, perhaps we would have had a short, hard hug to put it to rest, never to be thought of or worried about again. And then we could have returned to the split sugar maple, and she could have stared at Greta some more, and I could have supported my roommate in some way, and we both could have condemned all three of those litterbugs for mistreating the river with their ashes and their filters. After the girls finally left, Strots could have made a joke and we could have sauntered back here, feeling superior to those negligent pretties, Strots because she actually is, me because I’m with Strots. We could have become closer, even if Strots continued to go up to see Keisha every night after dinner, because whenever my roommate and I found ourselves together, we would have two secrets that bound us, my being pranked by Greta, and her having a crush on the girl.
Except that’s not what happened.
Instead of being cool, I fumbled the ball, and this time, it was not on purpose.
I just can’t get along with people my age. I can’t get along with grown-ups, either, but that’s not a value judgment against a person when you’re fifteen. It’s the relating with our peers that counts, and I fail across the board. I’ve always failed. I was the three-year-old in the sandbox who couldn’t understand how the games were played and why. I was the six-year-old at my cousin’s birthday party who no one wanted to get stuck sitting next to because of a rumor I wet my bed. I was the ten-year-old in gym class in mismatched socks and orange shorts because that was all I had to wear. And now I’m here, at fifteen, facing the prospect of being alone in this two-sided room, having driven away the most charismatic girl on campus.
In retrospect, I was stupid to think this Ambrose experience would go any other way, even if I’d been assigned to room 214.
And I will always fail. I will never have friends, and as I age, I’ll just increase the breadth and scope of the categories of people with whom I cannot manage to engage. I’ll be an eighty-year-old in a nursing home who no one wishes to sit next to because, even though we’re all wetting our beds, my bladder’s incontinence is the only one that is seen as a referendum on character.
As I contemplate my bleak, lonely future, my thoughts become tangible and they increase in weight geometrically, not just subject to gravity, but linking hands with the force that keeps all objects on the earth to pull hard, lock tighter. I gather tonnage at an incalculable rate, my thoughts leaping past the laws of physics, going quantum, absorbing dense energy that makes them infinitely solid. Unable to sustain the load, I warp in on myself, a black hole forming here on my bed, on the second floor of Tellmer Hall at the St. Ambrose School for Girls. With this change in my form, the momentum accelerates even further, and the more darkness I collect within the boundless funnel of my mind, the faster I increase the concentric circle into which all things are sucked and never released.
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.