“Baby clothes.”
“For who?”
“My baby someday.”
“This is what I mean. You are just so . . . much,” Marisol says. “It’s why I love you. Why everyone does. You’re such a damn flame, we all want to be around you.”
I smile weakly, eyes welling up.
“Keep the flame, but please, JoJo,” she says, holding my hand. “Don’t burn the goddamn world to the ground.”
After she leaves, I bawl into my pillow so badly it’s soaked. Feels good, in a way, letting it go, like bad weather doing its thing, washing the skies clean. The old refrain circles back in my brain like a hellish nursery rhyme—I don’t know how to live. I wish I were dead—even though I know, I know it’s a lie. What I really want is to get past all this.
Dear future self,
How did you survive?
How did you do it?
Are you even there?
Do you even exist?
If only there were a pill I could take to stop me from thinking about Jonah.
I haven’t been back to school since it all happened last week. Usually Jonah would have been messaging and coming over. He called me twice, asking how I was, but seemed distant, made excuses for having to get off the phone. He didn’t laugh at my dark jokes. At the end of phone call number two, he told me I was his best friend, but asked me for space. He said it would be good for me, like he was doing it for my benefit. He sold it to me so well I believed him, until I got to thinking later, and decided, wait a second, I don’t want space from him. I want the opposite of space.
Hey . . . can we talk?
I don’t want space.
Really? Two hours and not even a response? I can see you read my text.
Never mind, fine, you’re right, we’ll have space.
Sigh.
Space is stupid.
He said he still loves me when we last talked. I know he still loves me. I don’t want to screw up any hope I have of us getting back together. So I don’t send any more texts after that, even though I really, really want to.
Texts I didn’t send:
Last I checked “best friends” text their friends back.
That was a proper use of quotation marks by the way, WHICH YOU SUCK AT USING.
Remember when you ghosted Carla after dumping her in ninth grade? Don’t even think about pulling that crap with me.
Saying you want space from someone is just a nice way of saying you want nothing.
I wish I had succeeded in killing myself.
No I don’t. I know I don’t. I remember vividly the panic right before the world went black, and I was so scared to die. But why does my mind keep going there; why does it keep thinking these “screw it all” thoughts? Lithium dulls the feelings maybe, but it seems like it does nothing for thinking the thoughts. It tires me, it makes my brain a snail, it makes me sleep longer. And is it me or are my hands trembling?
I’ve been home from the hospital two days. I tried to kill myself on a Friday. I spent a lovely weekend getaway at the lie that calls itself View of the Sea and came home yesterday. It’s only Tuesday. I feel a decade older than a week ago.
Since I got home, Dad shuffles around me somber as a monk, accommodating as a butler, observing heavy silences in my presence, ordering me whatever food I request, suggesting hot baths. It pains me to see him like this, but his sympathy for me is so loud. I do appreciate the quiet of his house, but I miss my sisters. Mom took them for the week and it’s weird to be here without them. I’ve been texting with my mom since I got here. She asks me how I am, tells me we should sit down and talk about the future soon, sends me pictures of the dog, fills me in on boring details around my makeup homework she emailed me, asks me how I am again. I can tell she doesn’t know what to do with me. It’s like she wants everything to be fine so bad she will insist fineness into existence. I tell her I’ll return to school Monday, November 1, which is in thirteen days. I argue I need this much time to let the medication stabilize. Thirteen days seems an eternity away right now. Thirteen days, a mini forever. The whole world could be gone by November.
In truth, I wish I never had to go back to school. It’s such a charade at this point. I’m knee-deep in senior year; I’ve received warnings from three of my teachers that I might not swing Cs. Before I decided to off myself I was planning to take a gap year, get a job, maybe travel, find myself, figure out what’s next. Going back to high school and faking like I care sounds like such a pointless endeavor. But I won’t think about it now. I can avoid the world for thirteen more beautiful days.
I check my phone again. And again. No text from Jonah. But there is a text from Marisol. It’s the longest text I’ve ever seen. It says I LOVE YOU so many times I get bored of scrolling.
Now I’m worried for YOUR mental health, I text back.
“Watch some TV with your old man?” Dad asks, poking his head in the doorway of my room. He’s asked me to keep my door open these first couple days back, and, humiliating as it is, I oblige.
“Sure,” I say, putting my phone down with a clack.
I sit wrapped in an afghan on the couch in the living room, watching nature in HD, Sprinkles perched between Dad and me. Right after my parents separated, both of them went out and adopted their dream dogs. They each claimed the other had been the one standing in the way of their dream dog for years. I have no dog in the dream dog fight, nor do I care, but I do find it amusing that we now have two dogs in our lives. Sprinkles, the one on my lap currently, is an older three-legged chow, and I would amputate a leg of my own for him. Mom and Levi’s dog, Chewbacca, is a Newfoundland, one of the world’s largest breeds, and dumb as a brick of cheese. Dad sits brushing Sprinkles’s fur, eyes glued to the nature show. The man is a live-action thesaurus of complimentary adjectives.
“Marvelous,” he says when a giraffe outruns a lion.
“Brilliant,” he says about a snake that finds solace from the blistering desert inches below the sand’s surface.
“Isn’t it so breathtaking?” he asks me when the bird of paradise performs its ridiculous mating dance. He watches me for a reaction so eagerly.
All right. Okay. I get where this is coming from. Dad’s trying to get me to join the Life Is Good Club. And I see it, I see what he sees. A bizarre, full-color splendor of creatures and landscapes so unique they transcend imagination, and yet are real. But what I see much more clearly is a bleak, never-ending game of predator versus prey; weather that is downright unlivable due to man-made climate change; and a boring, pathetic song and dance everyone and/or everything does in the name of sex.
But the last thing I want to do is bum my dad out. This is the first day since I came home that he hasn’t cried.
“It is . . . breathtaking,” I say.
Not a lie, either. Technically life does take your breath away. Eventually, it takes it all.
That’s what Wolf told me to focus on during my first day of therapy with him: my breath. It’s Friday, my one-week suicide attempt anniversary . . . and yes, I have a new therapist now, named Wolf. I tried to call him Dr. Baumgartner but he said, “Call me by my first name, Wolf.”
“Wolf?” I asked, leaning forward in my leather armchair.
“It’s my first name,” he insisted.
He looked very . . . square. Especially for a person with a moniker so lupine. Like some guy who stepped right out of a Life magazine from 1958. Buddy Holly glasses, a corduroy sports jacket, graying, slicked-back hair. A Dennis, maybe. A Norman. A Henry.