The sneaky sun was just spying over my shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of what i was furtively typing down tucked behind my absent boss’s desk. Nothing special, i assure it, and clack away.
Last night was a peculiar sort of emptiness that i have every so often, and even though i feel that same vacancy inside of my life today i do not feel that same desperation. That’s what makes my misery so very complete — the desperation of knowing that nothing matters at all and that i can’t seem to change any of it.
I’m sorry if i offended anyone yesterday by saying that no one’s concerns about me mattered … i’m not trying to belittle your emotions, i’m just pointing out that not even concerned loved ones were really making a dent in the place where i was. Or, where i am. But, things about today are subtly different … suddenly, those hard fought papers and tests began to mean something to me again, because one of my teachers went beyond just assigning me a grade and a number. I suppose that’s the difference between something mattering or not … whether or not i have any context to go along with it.
The sun set back behind some clouds, so i can get back to work. That sneaky thing… brightening my day from just over my shoulder.
My life has circled me back around to September. Back to my pre-Boston daily drudgery of depression. Really, what was the hospital other than an anti-Boston?: a place i have known as a part of my daily map for years, a place where my mother holds sway over everything i encountered, a place where i was left utterly disconnected from all that i am used to, and a place where i was utterly alone. Just as i was finally beginning to feel purpose and motivation, now i’m just as suddenly stuck. I feel like i don’t know anyone, or maybe that no one knows me. Or, maybe that no one knows it. One by one everything is ceasing to matter to me: theatre, class, friends, guitar. They are the slivers that slip through, and i can’t infer anything with what i’m left with. Not anything at all.
At twenty i should have a motivation, or a love, or a desire. Right now all i want is to have that sleepy black back from Friday, like an eclipse on anything else that might catch my attention. I am twenty, and i know how to get A’s; that’s all anyone ever bothered to teach me. In fact, i don’t even know how to care about them. I studied endlessly for today’s two final quizzes and felt absolutely nothing when i passed them each without much hesitation. I got my paper back with a B+ and it felt like a failure, but it wasn’t because of the B+.
Two decades and i don’t think one damn thing matters to me. My songs echo hollowly inside my head just like me voice did in the theatre tonight; i can’t seem to pick up my guitar.
I am going to sleep; tomorrow there are more motions to go through.
I have been hearing the Beatles my entire life — first on the record player as a baby, and then on long trips to the shore on our cruddy Past Masters tape, and then on shiny new see-through cassettes of Abbey Road and The White Album. There are constants in my life; everyone has constants. Even the most unstable and unable people i know have things they can always turn to, or that they will always turn to.
The parking lot at Kiddie City Toy Store, and Ringo sings “Octopus’ Garden.” I am playing “Name That Beatle.” We are crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge to New Jersey and Paul and Mom and I are wailing “Oh Darling” so hard that our voice is cracking around the edges as one. We are zooming down the Atlantic City Expressway and Lennon croons out from carefully nested speakers “I’m So Tired” as i lazily stick my feet out of the window.
“I’m so tired.”
The wind dug between all of my toes as i laughed and sank my head back into the seat. The drive to WildWood was always longer on the way there than coming back. I was always so busy trying to decide if it was John and Lennon singing that half the time i missed George. George: the quiet one. My mom loves Paul with all of her teenaged heart, but on the way home she would confess to me conspiratorially that she’s always had a soft spot for Mr. Harrison. “The ugly one?,” i would ask? “With those cheekbones?” “Does he play the second guitar?”
My mother denies the existence of Middle Beatles and will glare at you icily if you mention Let It Be, so she first was eyes at George Harrison with his bowl cut and then sliding around in the midsts of his delicate guitars as his songs grew more and more central to the end records. My entire life it has been just the two of us, and just the three of them: Paul, George, and Ringo — because we didn’t have poor dead John around anymore.
At fifteen i got my guitar, and it never occurred to me to play anything by the Fab Four. The Beatles were more than the sum of their parts, and to this day i still can’t quite distill any of their songs to a single guitar and voice. But, my guitar was a door to things i had never heard before. Paul’s deft bass lines. Lennon’s funky solos. Ringo’s amazing drumming on the back half of Abbey Road. George’s stunningly simple “Something,” and Clapton adding to the throb of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” I listened to the Beatles for my entire life as a phenomenon … as if they would walk into a room and music would just happen. It wasn’t until i got to college that it occurred to me that they all brought their own distinct musical merits to the table, and that you could pick them out one by one if you listened closely. A McCartney song, but a Harrison Riff. A Lennon vocal with that twelve-string chiming in the background.
I never owned a Beatles record of my own before yesterday other than the sad red #1 that exists as a placeholder for albums i’ll eventually have to own as an adult, and for two albums i know as well as “Lucky Star” or “Still Rock and Roll to Me.” I know them: the songs, the lyrics. I never knew the music before, though. Yesterday i locked myself in an empty house, in an empty room, and i turned my headphones as high as they would go. And listened.
At twenty I heard the Beatles for the first time.
At twenty i have suddenly found myself with only two of them left. I will always remember sitting on Michella’s couch in July and seeing TWA 800 emblazoned across the screen of Good Morning America, and i will always remember sitting in admissions desperately trying to load up CNN’s website this September. And, i will always remember myself curled into a ball on that rubbery hospital bed, trailing IV tubes and sniffling back tears because i didn’t want anyone to think i was crying about me.
I wasn’t.
I’m wondering if i was really ready to leave. The Hospital. High School. The Womb. I am at once an intellectual being of savvy motivation and a blubbering mess — a mess of white noise and disorientation. Talking doesn’t seem to be working. I open my mouth and words come out like twisting kudzu vines, intent on covering over my tone, intent, and meaning. My words twist themselves in fumbling green shoots spreading out from me, at once repelling and rooting me where i stand.
My associations are tangled. My mother is floating on the periphery of my life again, wheedling her way in as best as she can down my through, into my stomach, twisting my insides into hard knots that do not come undone. But i am tugging, pulling my guts this way and that hoping that something will give. No one makes sense. I can’t explain my weekend to anyone in anything but stuttering halting words. They all blankly tell me: “We were so worried.”
We. Not anyone in specific, really.
Plenty of people were worried sick about me the whole time, but i wasn’t … wasn’t worried about me, or about them, or about anything. Everyone who said that all blended into each other today. Not one of them were specific. That same wall that i thought was keeping me away from my city is suddenly all around me. I am in an aquarium tapping on the glass. Or maybe not. Maybe i’m finally outside, or maybe i was always outside. Every conversation i slide into i am separate from… the smart one, the sheltered one, the childish one, the one going absolutely fucking nowhere as fast as he can.
I want to find a way to be as numb as i feel, but there is nothing like it that i know. Except — on Friday i was coming back up from a haze of Diprovan sleep, and it was a perfect numb; i have slivers of seconds cupped in my memory while others have slid from them like mercury. Last night i wanted to feel that obscurity, that disconnected. If all you have are a scattering of pieces, you can put it back together any way you’d like.
I could actually pretend to be somewhere where i wanted to be.
Today i woke up and was back here, with my vision fuzzed and my balance a smear and several shades off of my normal self. Class was a blur, like the roadside seen from a car window. I spent five minutes of class just sitting in a bathroom stall trying to figure it out. I hung on to my perfect score in Theory class, and it didn’t feel right. I hemmed and hawed over auditioning and i did and it didn’t even seem to matter.
It was like i wasn’t even on the stage.