Its thirty-two days since you last talked to a person. I mean a real person. The lady at the grocer's counter, the mailman, the pizza guy, customer reps for your credit cards and the picture of your ex-girl friend don't count.
It all started as a plan for a few days- brief hiatus to figure out what you want. You kept away doctors, X-rays, pills, shrinks, bosses, Microsoft Office, friends, and family - you escaped from your embarrassingly predictable life to figure out what you really want.
The last familiar voice you heard was your brother's.
“I've become a father today. Call me back.”
Oh great! He was married eleven months back, promoted a few weeks earlier and now a baby? May be he should go for twins by next year. Whatever to make you look more wasted. While he was busy filling picture frames for your parents to put on display for every prick that visited their house- lets see what you did. You moved to New York, lost your girl friend, took a job writing for a magazine on mattresses, visited two therapists and added a new wrinkle at the edge of your right eye.
Demons in your head were like vultures on a wounded wild horse - they kept you alive, while they killed you.
You had to do something. Three more years and you'd be one of those thirty year old fat bastards who jerk off on their web cams pretending to be twenty-nine.
“Not everyone gets what they want. Accept what life has to offer,” your best buddy told you after all these years.
You're a loser. Face it - that’s what he really meant.
You had to do something.
Your cell phone broke the same day you began the mission to save your life. It wasn't a coincidence after all. It was a signal from Christ - you were doing the right thing.
“Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.''
But when was the last time you listened to Jesus? He is the Son of God only for hypocrites running to church every Sunday to conveniently cover up the sinful week that went by. Four years at an East Coast University and a couple of years of New York on top of that, Jesus was now a big fat lie.
Forget Christ. It's just you now - no one else for a while.
What went wrong? That was your first question. How could you fix it unless you knew where it all began?
“By your own admission you almost killed yourself when you were sixteen. Maybe you were clinically depressed from a very young age. It's a medical condition, it can be treated,” Dr. Gordon explained. “It's not your fault, maybe it’s your incoherent childhood.”
Some ridiculous screw up when you were a kid, and you're excused even if you turn out to be Ted Bundy - it stinks.
You took thirty-two pills and were in coma for two days not because you had an incoherent childhood. You flunked Math and needed an easy fix.
That can't be the reason for everything that went wrong.
“You should've never moved that far away from us,'' your mom cried the last time you talked with her, “I knew you'd screw up your life, if you're on your own.” Yeah right, as if she really knows you.
You always wanted to move away from home, from a town where you couldn't do coke without getting caught, couldn't get laid without becoming a news story. Hell, you wanted to get away from pseudo-moral middle class watchdogs who fornicate with their own hypocrisy.
You loathed pretending to be ordinary, being one among them. It no longer made sense to feel guilty for not being your brother, for not being able to live by the script. You didn't want to hear your dad tell you anymore, how horse-shit was more useful than you. You didn't want to put up with your mom's melodramatic garbage on how she failed to raise you properly. You definitely no longer wanted to see the faces of those aunts with kids your age - bitches who gossiped on others' failures to divert the attention from their own infidelities.
You decided to move away as far as you possibly could - even if it meant falling from the face of the earth. It was your choice. It was the best thing that had happened to you. That's not what went wrong.
Look at everything you achieved since you left home. You found out you could write. Your heart effortlessly drifted into your fingers. You were to writing the way Magic was to hoops. The words engulfed your mind the way sex would for a sixteen year old.
“You will make this institution proud one day,” the Dean at Penn State predicted, naming you the best grad student second year in a row. Masters' in journalism and additional masters' in business, internship for a national newspaper and several published articles. You were ready to change the world even before you were twenty-five.
Was it Megan?
How could she possibly be the reason?
For three years in college she was all you had. She in your arms, you could finally walk into a party feeling you mattered. She made you look cool. Sweeping her arms around your naked shoulders, breathing under your face, she would say ``I'm with you...I want you to remember that.'' Nothing was ever more real. Her hair, her eyes, and her smell, everything was purer than kissing the pope. What's more, sex was fine with her by all means. It was heaven.
“How did you feel when you lost her?'” Dr. Gordon asked you at one of the recent sessions. Every time you see him, he makes you feel like a moron.
That “you can't even piss without wetting your feet” look on his face - you pay him $100 an hour for that.
“Aftermath of a solid relationship...'' give me a break.
It was not like she dumped you. No way. You left her.
“I want us to get married, move into a nice suburb with a front porch and a backyard,'' Megan declared a week before your graduation, “I want us to have kids to buy presents at Christmas, to attend school plays when they're six and stay up worried all night when they're away for sleepovers.''
Marriage, kids, black Toyota Highlander and mortgage for twenty-five years - finally you'll be welcomed at your parent's thanksgiving dinner.
“We always knew he wouldn't let us down. He is a fruit from our own backyard after all.''
What a charade that'd be.
You couldn't believe Megan had already planned the rest of your life.
At seventy-five you'd be dispatched for assisted living, your name appearing only in medical bills until you live, and on an unattended stone when you die. Your children would go back to work the very next day. It's not like it's a shock. Your death was long overdue.
You weren't going to throw away your life for a couple of kids who would turn out to be ungrateful jerks.
“Why can't you be happy the way we are?” you protested her idea, “Why do we have to live like everybody?”
“What's wrong with living like everybody?'' she pleaded.
“I want to be different. I want to make a difference in this world,'' you made it clear to her.
But the world was a bitch after all. Cosmo magazines for girls on how to look like bamboo sticks and Hallmark greetings with little boys in suspenders and girls in flowered hats, drawing out their chubby faces to kiss each other - that's what sells. You can't survive writing reality. Write about silicon implants for fifty-year old spinsters, you'll be filthy rich.
“Foam, Latex or Spring - Mattress That's Right for Your Sex Life.” You couldn't write without feeling like a shit head anymore. You quit.
What went wrong? What's wrong with living like everybody? Why can't you wake up in the morning feeling glad for being alive?
Don't ask me. I am only you when you're fucked up.
Your body is blazing like an Arizona sun on a July afternoon. You're dizzy. You can't even keep your eyes open. You're breathing as if you just had your best orgasm ever. Your heart is racing, eager to burst from your mouth. You can't even remember your own father's name anymore. It seems like the bottom of the ocean, but you still can smell the three-week old pepperoni pizza under the couch.
Is it the shit load of questions with no answers? Or is it because I made you cut your wrist a few minutes back?
Don't worry. You're not going to die. I won't let you.
