“I’m sure if we explained the real circumstances of your absences this semester and made it clear to the administration you were hospitalized for a suicide attempt, they would make an exception.”
“I don’t want anyone knowing what I did,” I say.
Even the words suicide attempt flood me with shame. It’s like the farther we get from what I did, the more unreal and horrific it becomes. The more I want to hide it, hide from it.
“Honey, people would just want to help you,” she says.
“I don’t want people’s help. I want to do it myself.”
Mom’s eyes dance for a moment, even as her lips form a frown. “You know, when you were tiny, you were the same stubborn thing. Buckling you into the car seat, you’d smack my hand. ‘I do it myself.’ Getting dressed in the morning, I’d try to help you pick out your clothes: ‘I do it myself.’ Of course you’d end up in a tutu and pajama pants and a witch hat, and couldn’t be talked out of it. I couldn’t help you tie your shoes. I couldn’t do anything for you without a fight.”
“I’m sorry.”
She reaches out and touches my cheek, looks at me like I’m a little thing still wearing a tutu and a witch hat, not a grown person with faded purple hair and heavy eyeliner. “Don’t be sorry you are the way you are.”
Mom and I have had a lot of tension since the suicide attempt. She navigates around me like I’m a grenade with a pin missing. I fear, sometimes, that I lost her respect in a way that I don’t with Dad. Hearing these words coming from her right now means a lot.
Her face softens. “What’s your plan?” she says. “Pitch me.”
I sit up straighter, turning the catalog and the flier around so they face her. “So ASAP I’d segue into this interim program where I’d do a bunch of makeup work at home until January, when next semester starts. That way I could salvage my grades this semester and knock out physics, which I got a D in last year. I’d take college classes next semester and maybe even get a job. Maybe by June I’d have money saved up and could move out on my own.”
“That’s ambitious. All that stress. Do you think you could handle it?”
“I’m ready for it,” I say. “Mom, I want to move on so badly. I want to grow up.”
“I have to wonder if this is mania talking.”
I roll my eyes. “Everything I do shouldn’t be reduced down to symptoms you WebMD’d. I’m sleeping fine. I’m eating fine. Taking care of myself better than I ever have, actually. Have you ever seen me exercising before? Enjoying fresh air? Meditating?”
She bites her lip. “I don’t know.”
“I made a huge mistake. I know that, and I’m trying to piece myself together again. You need to trust me. If I thought I was manic, I would tell you.”
Outside, Levi pulls up into a disabled parking spot in his enormous white Suburban, honks the horn extra long.
“He is so obnoxious,” I say. “Can’t he text?”
“He’s old-fashioned,” she says.
We get up and go to Levi’s gas guzzler. I get in the back, sitting next to Chewbacca, who pants and smiles even though he smells like halitosis and dirty laundry. Not his fault he stinks, though. I give him a hug and ask how his day went. He moans me a story. Chewie and I always have the best conversations. Levi is listening to Hank Williams, of course, who croons about being so lonesome he could cry. Talk about a depressive. The entire genre of country music could use a Prozac prescription.
“So,” Mom says to Levi as we pull into the street. “Journey’s going to go to college next semester. She’s thinking of getting a job, too.”
She says it like she’s proud of me. Holy mother.
“We could use another pair of hands at the boot store,” Levi says.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say, while thinking hell to the no.
“College already,” Levi says. “You’re pretty stellar.”
“She really is,” Mom says.
When I notice my reflection in the mirror, I sit up straighter, finger-comb my hair that’s growing out. And I realize that at some point, while I was busy pining after a boy who hurt me, or thinking of dying or scared of dying or trying to die, I became a grown-up.
Roll with it, self. Keep breathing in.
There’s no way to make what has happened un-happen.
Dear future self,
If I dared to have a dream for you, it would be this: that you go to college, even if you don’t graduate; that you get a job and your own place, even for just a little bit; that you fall in love again, even if that person breaks your heart.
Dear future self, I hope you live.
Wolf, who I’ve begun to think of as the Wolfman for no apparent reason, did some spring cleaning randomly in November, and today I actually get to both see and sit on his couch for the first time. Now that I am aware of just what a neon shade of orange it is, I can guess why he didn’t exactly mind when it got buried in clutter last time. From here I can read the spines of the books in his library much better. Bunch of holy books from every denomination, beat-up and faded. He tells me he was a monk for thirteen years before he became a psychologist. I can imagine the charm of a monastery, the minimalist rooms and uniforms, the quiet solitude and early mornings, chanting and prayer. But I can also imagine my brain eating itself alive.
“I thought I went there to serve God,” Wolf says, knocking on his leg like a door, which is a weird thing he seems to do when he’s pondering something deeply. “But in the leaving, in the breaking away and realizing everything wasn’t . . . what I thought it was—leaving the monastery is how I found myself.”
He seems uncomfortable talking about himself. But fair’s fair—I’ve been spilling my guts for weeks now.
“Soooooo, why did you leave?”
“I don’t know what your beliefs are,” he says quickly. “I’m just saying, for me, it didn’t pan out. Once I unraveled a single thread in the story, it all seemed to unravel along with it. The teachings no longer made sense to me.”
I’m not thinking about monks or the Wolfman. I’m thinking, of course, of myself, of the structures I live within. I’m thinking of the idea that everyone should graduate high school and go away to college. I’m thinking that if you have big feelings a pill will fix it, that if you try to kill yourself you’re crazy. All the things the world tells me that I feel doubt about. There’s so much passion inside me, a fire I don’t know what to do with. I, too, want to “find myself”—a phrase said so much it lost its meaning.
Wolf agrees the middle college idea looks promising.
“Should I do it?” I ask him.
“Do you want to?”
“I mean, can I?”
“Are you asking my permission?”
“I’m asking your professional opinion.”
“I think you should do what makes you fulfilled.”
“I won’t know if it fulfills me until I do it, though.”
He cleans his glasses with his plaid shirtsleeve. In the silence, my own words ring in my ears. I hear the word fulfilled. I hear the words do it.
“I’m going to do it,” I say.