One of those mass shooters could have been me

Trigger warning: mentions of violence against others, suicide, and graphic ideation.

And that is why we need tighter gun control laws in the United States.

I have Bipolar Disorder and OCD. And by OCD I don’t mean the kind you see in movies, where I wash my hands 800 times a day. I mean the kind no one talks about, where you get obsessively violent and sexual thoughts in your head. You don’t want them and you don’t know where they come from and yet it is almost impossible to realize that these aren’t actually your thoughts. Your brain is hurting.

And by Bipolar Disorder I don’t mean the kind you see in movies either. I mean the kind where you have short hypomanic episodes and extremely long depressive episodes; even worse, I spent much of my time in something called a “mixed state.” A mixed state is where you are so depressed and yet you have all the energy of hypomania. And mixed states are incredibly dangerous to yourself (and potentially to others) because you are hurting so badly mentally and yet (unlike “regular” depression, where there is a lack of energy) you have all this agitated energy coursing through your body. Mixed states are where you’re most likely to kill yourself and they are the reason Bipolar has one of the highest suicide rates out of all types of mental illnesses. It’s also the time where you could have the energy to take your pain out on others.

I have severe mental illness and I’m here to argue that you shouldn’t allow me to carry a gun.

When I was 19 years old, I started to have intrusive thoughts, fantasies almost, of killing everyone around me. Before that, I often thought of hurting myself. But one day, out of the blue, it started extending to those around me. I frequently sat in my classes freshman year of college and, instead of paying attention to the lecture, planned how I would take a gun to class, which person I would kill first, and how I would take each one out. I fantasized about people cowering and blood spattering. And then, at the end, I knew I would take that same gun and put it to my head and pull the trigger. We would all go out together. This vision repeated itself everywhere: walking down the hallway, on the bus, out on the campus mall, in discussion groups, when out with friends. It never seemed to stop.

Despite what the above paragraph seems to suggest, I am not a violent person. I’ve never fought anyone, injured anyone, even shot a gun. So why was I, an attractive 19 year old girl with a loving family who was in the Honors program at her state university, fantasizing about murdering anyone I set my eyes on?

Because I’m crazy. (And yes, I know there are issues with the word but I have no problem applying it to myself. I’m here to reclaim it.)

I was in so much pain for the first 25 years of my life, I just wanted out. And I wanted to take other people out with me. Sometimes, I felt that I was honestly going to be doing them a favor – preventing them from having to spend another minute living. They didn’t know what I knew, that every moment alive is unnecessary pain, but they would be grateful when they were dead. And so would I.

Does that sound crazy? That’s because it is. It makes no sense at all. Yet before I was properly diagnosed and medicated, there was nothing you could have done to convince me that these thoughts were not the only real, logical thoughts. To me, they were how the world worked, they were the truth, and so what if only I could see it?

That’s the thing about people with mental illness – our brains aren’t working properly. When we aren’t medicated and/or in some form of therapy, we are subject to our brains working the way they work. And what that means is that, in some cases, we literally live in a different world from everyone else. It was only after starting anti-psychotics that I realized that not everyone gets dizzy because the flat ground is moving, that actually the edges of everything were not pulsing, and that the world was indeed three-dimensional. You read that correctly: I could not perceive the world as three-dimensional. It was all fake to me. If you opened a door and walked me out and showed me that the only thing out there was black empty space, I wouldn’t have been shocked. I didn’t feel as though my physical body was connected to my brain; sometimes, it did things and I would stare at it, surprised. Sometimes I would find a mirror and slap myself, hard, so that I could see that the hand was making contact with the face and the face was hurting and therefore that face was mine. I didn’t recognize myself in mirrors. That’s the world I lived in.

And that is not a world where guns should be allowed.

Because here’s the thing: I could have done severe damage to a lot of people, just like those shooters you read about on the news. But I didn’t. I didn’t because I have a great family, supportive friends, and good health insurance. I didn’t because I was able to get into therapy, and even though it took another 6 years to get a proper diagnosis and proper medication, I had at least one professional looking out for me and checking in with me every week. And most importantly, I had no access to a gun. I wasn’t even sure how to go about getting one. My family didn’t use them growing up, I didn’t have friends who had them, I didn’t know how one worked, really, other than that you pull the trigger and it (hopefully) fires and kills.

Far too many mentally ill people in the U.S. are not as lucky as me. They do have access to guns. They’re able to get their hands on them and they know how to use them. And then they do terrible, terrible things. Every time I see a report of a new mass shooting, I feel a deep rooted sadness because this is preventable. We can minimize the incidences, if not stop them altogether, just by making sure that people with some forms of mental illness are not allowed to legally purchase guns. By making sure that a psychiatrist has to give a clean bill of health first. It’s required for airline pilots. Why isn’t it required for gun owners?

And there’s an even bigger problem we could be minimizing: suicide. Most of the deaths by gun that occur in the United States are suicides. I was speaking with my therapist the other day he asked me, “If you had access to a gun, would you be sitting there in the chair across form me today?” Without a moment’s hesitation, I responded, “Absolutely not. I would have killed myself a dozen times over by now if it was that easy.” Because other forms of suicide are hard and not always successful. Cutting your wrists, for example, is extremely difficult to actually complete. Overdosing doesn’t have any guarantee of success – believe me, I’ve Googled it a thousand times hoping for a different answer. Throwing yourself in front of a bus or a train just inconveniences other people, and I didn’t want my death to get in anyone else’s way.

So, I’m imploring the people who govern this country, please take away my right to own a gun. Take it away so that one day if my meds stop working I can actually stay alive long enough to get help and be put back on track. Take it away so that my 19 year old self can’t hurt anyone around her. Take it away because there is a tiny voice in the back of my mind that doesn’t want me to argue for this. And take it away so that we stop seeing new mass shootings every single day.

I have severe mental illness. I’m medicated now. I have a psychiatrist and a psychologist, I’m a fully stable human being. But that still doesn’t mean I should be allowed to own a gun. For the safety of ourselves and for the safety of others, please require mental health examinations before gun ownership. Let’s give everyone the chance to live.

Next Time Will Be Better

I tried to kill myself at a party.

Everyone thought it was because my boyfriend left me.

I didn’t bother to correct them.

The party was full of the type of people you know without really knowing. Friends who are more like acquaintances; united in our shared experience of smoking weed and graduating from the same public high school. I wandered from room to room, looking for alcohol, weed, anything. People waved, “Hey Sloan, how was your first year of college?” “Sloan – your shoes are so cute!” “Oh my god, it’s Sloan!”

And in my wake trailed whispers, side glances.

“Sloan got dumped, did you hear?”
“I heard it’s because she’s crazy.”
“She begged him to take her back.”
“God, she’s pathetic.”

“What happened to her…”

“Do you see how thin she looks?”

I tuned out the whispers into a fine white noise and concentrated on playing my part: the cool girl. I was there with him, the guy who wasn’t my boyfriend anymore, even though we continued to sleep together. He promised me we would get back together. He promised me it would happen if I just behaved better. So I tried. To behave the way a girl he desired would behave, someone who was worthy of being with him. I played it cool, behaved, and watched him ignore me until he’d had a few drinks in him. That was the point when he seemed to forget we’d broken up.

“Wanna be my beer pong partner?”

Yes.

I proceeded to play a terrible game. He laughed, it was so cute how bad I was. Skunked, I was forced under the table to play the troll, handed drink after drunk until the next loser took my place. I pretended like this was fine. I concentrated hard on laughing when I thought the others would expect me to laugh. This is natural.

I hadn’t eaten dinner or lunch, so a few drinks were enough to get me past tipsy. I knew this, so when I was under the table I drank slowly, pretending to finish drinks while actually hiding them in the corner. I managed to keep from getting actually drunk. I couldn’t afford to lose that control. It took so much effort to hold myself together and alcohol allowed the cracks to appear.

After crawling out from under the table, flashing at least one person on my way up, I sat next to his friends. They used to be mine, too, but he didn’t like me hanging out with them and we stopped seeing each other. After a year of letting myself drift from their lives, I found it hard to bridge the divide.

“Hey, Tom, how’s it going?”
Tom responded with a few meaningless phrases, it’s fine and yeah, I’m good, how’s your drink?

The conversation petered out after we’d gotten as far as small talk could take us, at the line before anything real begins. We awkwardly tried to hold onto the thread of conversation until it was clear we had repeated the same stock questions and answers more than once.

He came over and sat next to me, then made a show of talking over me to Tom. They joked about other girls, trying to sound cool. They pumped their party personas, trying to appear hardcore, even though the most they’d done at this point was along the lines of drinking too much Natty Light or getting so blazed they ate all the food in their parents’ kitchen. They didn’t even smoke cigarettes, although some smoked hookah and felt this made them sophisticated. One had tried shrooms, but he had been designated the “pothead” of the group and doing shrooms only fueled their idea of his personality. I sat there, smiling and laughing when everyone else smiled and laughed.

Being the person I wanted to be that night was both difficult and easy. There’s a certain science to creating her: sip your drink but pretend to be more drunk than you are, wear a sexy dress but still be down for anything – streaking, beer pong, wrestling – you don’t mind getting dirty. The juxtaposition drives them wild. Be unafraid to talk about “guy” things, like sex positions, masturbation, how hot that girl is over there. Oh my god, everything is so hilarious you just can’t stop laughing. You laugh, smile, reach out and touch the person who was funny. Just a gentle touch, on the shoulder, lingering just half a second, long enough for them to imagine you touching them somewhere else with those fingers. Touch everyone so they all feel jealous. Shots! Shots! Shots! You love this song, can’t help swaying your hips, slowly. Make eye contact then quickly look away, smile to yourself like you’re thinking of them.

You’re so fun! Somehow they’d all forgotten how fun you are but this made them remember. Not only are you fun, but you’re hot, too. You’re thin, wearing the right bra and a dress that’s sexy without looking like you tried. You’re wearing makeup, shaping your red lips to words about giving head and how much you like to get it.

Checking each item off the list was easy. I maneuvered my way through the conversation, flitting my attention from guy to guy so they all thought I liked them, touching their arms and laughing the right laugh at the right time. You have to put your whole body into it like you’ve never heard anything funny before, throwing your head back and opening your mouth. But I was exhausted. It took so much energy to be this girl that I saved her exclusively for occasions like this. I longed to be by myself so I could peel her off with my dress, crumple her into a corner as I collapsed into the numb, unsmiling self at the bottom of all the paint.

For an hour or two I held it together nicely. The whispers had changed.

“Can you believe she got dumped?”

“Sloan’s so confident.”
“She’s clearly over him.”
“That dress is so hot.”
“Why would he dump her?”
“Bet he’s regretting that decision now!”

Even his friends, my old friends, were starting to warm up to me again. Remembering that I was a person outside of being his girlfriend and that I was no longer “off-limits.”

The night and drinks progressed and the room became more and more fake. I felt as though we were all two-dimensional characters sitting on a stage, that if you went around the corner you would see nothing behind the wall but lights and a camera crew. If I kicked the wall, it would be revealed as a set prop, held up by cheap two-by-fours and wood glue. The fabric of the couch underneath me felt increasingly strange, foreign. The more I touched it the less familiar it felt. I was sitting on it but it was like I wasn’t actually touching it. I started rubbing my fingers along the couch, trying to remind myself what “real” feels like. Here, Sloan, this is a real thing. You can touch it. I rubbed my fingers against themselves to remind myself that they were real, too. That I had a body. If I can touch it, it must be real.

Then why did I feel the only real part of me were my eyes, trapped and staring from this alien body?

I heard a girl talking about how she loved her college, how it was so fun and she’d made so many new friends, and felt the façade cracking. There’s a moment when you can feel it, the sudden realization that you can’t be a person anymore. The trick is getting away from everyone else before the tipping point. After the tipping point, you embarrass yourself.

I made excuses and found my way to the bathroom in the basement, praying that it had a lock on the door. Although that practice is standard in most homes, my parents had removed our bathroom locks after my sister and I managed to lock ourselves into one when we were toddlers, so I never assumed. I reached the door, a peeling white painted slab of wood set in bare concrete block walls. So far, so lucky. No one was here and the door locked. I slipped in and locked the door behind me, barely remembering to flip the light on before everything went dark.

The tipping point had come, I’d just barely made it. Unable to stand on two legs, I folded to the floor, knees hugged to my chest. After a few moments, I slid sideways so that I was laying in a fetal position. My cheek rested on the cool floor tiles and the only thing in my line of sight was the base of the sink, a white porcelain tower. I lay there as the panic spread. It started at my toes and slowly, slowly flooded its way through the rest of my body until I was drowning in it. I tried hard to get control of it once it reached my shoulder blades, but I couldn’t manage it and soon it had spread over my lips and up to the top of my head.

I started to cry.

I tried to sob quietly so as not to alert anyone, because although I just wanted to be held at that moment, I also didn’t want anyone to see me like this. I was supposed to be strong. I was supposed to be happy. I was supposed to be successful. I was not supposed to be a sobbing mess lying on the bathroom floor of an acquaintance’s house during a party.

And yet here I was, a sobbing mess lying on the bathroom floor of an acquaintance’s house during a party.

Thoughts started running through my head as a lay there alone. Please, I begged silently to whoever was listening, Please I just want to disappear. Please can you kill me? Please. Everything inside me hurt with an ache so deep I was sure it would never go away. My body felt wrong, it didn’t feel like it was part of me. I felt trapped inside it. I imagined myself cutting deeply and neatly down my left arm, from my wrist to my elbow. I imagined myself taking a knife and slicing a deep line between my breasts, from my collar bone to my stomach. I would take my hands to either side of that line and pull as hard as I could until I had ripped all the skin from my body and freed myself from it. I wished more than anything that I could shed my body like a snake sheds skin, floating up up and away from it and everything else. I started shaking involuntarily, clawing at my wrists with my fingernails. I dug them in as deeply as I could, breathing into the pain, and although it helped me feel more calm, it wasn’t enough. Nothing would be enough.

I knew right then and there that I just had to die. I had to. I couldn’t imagine spending another second alive, living my life trapped in this body, trapped in my mind. I had to get out. The idea of ceasing to exist felt delicious in my brain. It felt like the only right thing in a sea of wrongs.

My nails weren’t going to cut it, though, and they were all I had. My bag was upstairs, and there was nothing sharp in it anyway. Then I remembered I was in a bathroom, and I took a few deep breaths to calm myself enough to stand. Slowly, I pushed myself to my feet and, using the wall as support, stumbled my way towards the cabinet above the toilet.

Inside were a few rolls of toilet paper, some cleaning products, a hairbrush. Nothing useful. I started to panic, worried that even this would not work out for me. My hands searched the wicker baskets on the bottom shelf, sifting through hair binders and bobby pins, a random toothbrush, until I found it. A cheap disposable razor. The edges were sharp enough that I knew they would cut me. I didn’t know where it had been and for a brief moment I worried about infection, but then reminded myself that infection wouldn’t matter to me anymore.

I stumbled back to my corner opposite the sink and sunk to the tiled ground, clutching the razor tightly in both hands. I steeled myself for pain and pushed it deeply into my left wrist, not on the vein just yet, I was practicing. I slide it lightly and felt the blades scratch my skin. When I removed the razor, there were three thin raised lines on my wrist, raised and extending a few inches towards my elbow. But I hadn’t even managed to break the skin. It would take far more than this.

I started to cry again, knowing in that moment that I was too scared of pain to follow through. I tried again, pushing harder this time, hard enough to draw a little blood, but still not hard enough. My tears were making it hard to see, and my hand shook as I panicked, worried I wouldn’t be able to see this through.

And then, someone knocked on the door. I froze, and wondered whether I should turn off the light and pretend I was alone.

He spoke softly through the door: “Sloan, I know you are in there.”
I said nothing.
“Sloan, you’ve been in the bathroom for 45 minutes. What is going on?”

I said nothing.

I heard a soft thud as he sat down on the floor, back leaning against the bathroom door.

“Look, I just want to make sure everything is okay. I can hear you crying. I know something is wrong. Please tell me what’s going on.”

I didn’t know what to say, except hello. So I said that, trying to keep my voice from quavering.

“Sloan just open the door.” At that moment there was a pounding of footsteps heading down the stairs and I heard Tom’s voice, asking him what was going on.

“She’s locked herself in the bathroom, I don’t know what’s up, but she won’t unlock the door,” he said, worry punctuating each word.

“Hey!” Tom said loudly through the door. “Please open up! You’re worrying everyone. Come on Sloan.”

This last bit scared me. Everyone? I asked. Who is everyone?

Tom realized he had made a mistake and stumbled through his clarification, “I mean me, and Nate, obviously, and we have told Matt. But only the three of us. I didn’t mean everyone everyone, you know?”

The panic was growing. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it with two people just outside the door. I knew then that I wasn’t going to kill myself that night, but I couldn’t unlock the door and let them see me in here. Involuntarily, a keening noise escaped my throat. I put both hands over my mouth but it was too late.

“Please Sloan!” He begged. “Please just open the door. It will be fine. Everything is going to be fine.”

I whispered to him, I can’t.

“Yes you can,” he replied. Then, a moment later, “Come on, Sloan, we can’t be down here all night.”

I knew he was right, I knew that. I knew that it was over now, and that I would have to open the door and face the consequences. I knew that. So why couldn’t I get my hand to move towards the door, to turn the lock? I was frozen, unable to move my limbs outside of a limited area around my body, stuck in fetal position.

A few more moments passed, with continued pleading from outside the door. I tried once more, futilely, with the razor, before pushing it away across the floor. With all the courage I could muster, I started talking myself into turning the lock. It was as though I were in the last miles of a marathon, convincing myself that yes, I could make it to the end. Come on, Sloan, I told myself sternly. You can do this. Just lift your right hand up, just like that, and crawl it along the wall. Good, good job. Now bring it to the lock, and twist. Twist a little harder. There you go. You’ve done it. You’re done now, you’re okay. The lock turned with a gentle thunk.

It took a moment, but Tom and Nate realized the door had been opened. Nate pushed his way in, saw me in the corner, and got down on the floor right next to me, cradling me in his arms, pulling my head towards his chest. I turned away.

 

Love Letter

Today I looked at photos of you from when we first met. You are smiling and the smile reaches your eyes. I see you leap off the screen and into spontaneous nights out. You are laughing the kind of laugh no one can fake and everyone’s eyes on you are just as adoring as mine. You are beautiful. I am still in love with the man in those photos. I want to kiss his lips, hold his hand, skip down the sidewalk with him. I want the whole world to know that he is mine.

And whenever someone asks to see a photo of you, I show them a photo of him.

But you are not him, anymore. I flip through the years of our relationship and I see your face get more tired. Your smiles these days never make it past your lips. That laugh is nowhere to be found. In its place there is instead a realization that life is not as beautiful and good as you were promised. Instead, it is hard, and unhappy and it never seems to end.

I am not in any of those photos but I am still there. In the emptiness of your eyes and the set of your smile. In the increasing isolation. There are no more adoring eyes, just mine behind the camera, sucking you dry.

I was in love with you. But I took that love and I took your beautiful self and I chewed it up. I clawed out all of your beauty to keep myself alive. I stole it, chunk by chunk, and the you that I love gave it to me, too. But unlike you, I can’t hold on to sunshine. I take it and I crush it between my teeth, I grind it up, and I swallow it and even though it keeps me alive, it dies inside me.

I am sorry I ate your sunshine. I am sorry I turned you into a shell. You have no more sunshine left to give.

I loved you. And so I ate you. Now we are both alone.

Three’s Company (Part I)

Tom pushed his glasses further up on his nose and eyed the paper in front of him. When he reached the bottom, he sighed in annoyance, got up from his desk, and grabbed his coat.

“I’ll be out the rest of the afternoon,” he announced to his secretary, who barely glanced up from her computer screen. She was in the middle of a particularly juicy chapter in the latest romance novel she had downloaded, and everyone knew Tom wasn’t really a conversationalist anyway.

The sidewalk was damp; it must have just rained. Tom thought maybe he should have grabbed his umbrella as well, but he didn’t want to take the elevator all the way back up now so he proceeded on without it. Anyway, it didn’t rain much here so it was probably done.

Walking down the street, it was impossible to pick Tom out of the crowd of white middle-aged men in suits, hair greying, walking without glancing up from their email. The only differentiator was the grey felt hat with the thick black ribbon he wore on his head. The hat was Tom’s one eccentricity, the slight silliness he allowed himself to indulge in since business was going so well.

He was very proud of his hat.

Today, however, the hat was the last thing on his mind. He didn’t even read his email while walking as he usually did, he just plowed on ahead with his brow furrowed. An observer could tell he was agitated because although he wasn’t using his phone, he was distractedly popping it in and out of its case repeatedly as he walked. He was also muttering to himself angrily.

“I can’t believe I’m cleaning up his mess again,” he muttered,”that asshole is going to get me fired; I swear this is the last time I’m…never again. No, absolutely not again.”

And with that, he stopped in front of a brand new apartment complex and rang the bell for apartment 423.

“Yes, hello?” said a voice groggily through the speaker.

“Miked, goddammit, let me in!” Tom yelled.

Miked didn’t respond and Tom was about to yell a stream of expletive when he heard a soft click and then the buzzer signaling that the door was unlocked. Shaking his head, Tom shoved the door open and clomped his way to the elevator, jabbing the up button as though this were all its fault.

When the elevator finally arrived, Tom had to wait for a woman and her dog to get off. To make matters worse, it was one of those yappy little dogs. In Tom’s view, they were already useless, and this one just confirmed his opinions when it refused to exit the elevator, scared of stepping over the slight gap in the floor. The woman was refusing to pick it up, instead attempting to cajole it out in an irritating, high-pitched baby voice. Fed up with this nonsense, Tom walked onto the elevator without waiting for them to get off and pressed the button for the fourth floor. The woman gave him an angry glare, picked up her yappy dog, and finally walked off. Good.

It seemed to take forever to make it to the fourth floor, but finally he did. Tom got off and took a left, barely glancing at the blue-grey walls of the hallway. He walked past one…two…three doors before reaching 423. And when he got there he didn’t even knock, just opened the door and strode right in.

Mike was sitting in the living room, which was visible through the kitchen. Although there was fairly nice furniture, he had chosen to sit on the floor. The coffee table was shoved haphazardly to the side, wobbling unsteadily with one leg off the rug. The wobbling did not seem to concern Mike in the slightest, nor did Tom’s abrupt entrance.

“Hey Tommo,” Mike called happily, turning his gaze towards the door finally.

Tom stared at him for a moment. Then he strode over and grabbed the half empty wine bottle from the floor on Mike’s left, and the packed bowl from the floor on his right. Mike followed with his eyes as Tom took these items and placed them far away, on top of the kitchen countertop. He was still smiling.

“Get off the floor,” Tom commanded.

“It’s much more fun down here though,” Mike laid down instead of getting up and started to stroke the carpet. “I’m like an ant – I’m seeing the carpet like a giant burgundy jungle. You should join me down here!”

He started making loose snow angels in the carpet, humming as he did so.

Tom did not join him on the carpet. Instead, he sat down on the black leather couch and surveyed the scene in front of him. He knew that interrupting Mike now wouldn’t yield any positive results, so he just waited.

And waited.

It was 2:33 pm according to the clock on the microwave, and it was clear Mike hadn’t done anything productive yet that day. A patterned bowl sat next to the sink, filled with an assortment of dirty spoons and forks. A pile of t-shirts lay discarded on the floor next to one lone sock. Through the open doorway, it could clearly be seen that the bed was unmade. All of the lights were turned off, with the effect that the front half of the apartment was very sunny but the back half was so dark it was hard to see.

At 2:37 pm, there was a timid knock on the door.

“It’s open!” Tom yelled, not moving from the couch.

“How’s it going?” asked the man who entered, nervously adjusting his glasses. He walked halfway into the kitchen and then just stopped, waiting for a response.

Mike kicked one foot up in the air as greeting.

“As you can see,” Tom said, “everything is just great.”

“It really is, isn’t it?” Mike sighed. “I’m so glad you can finally see it. Does this mean you’ll join me on the floor now? I’m making a snow angle that fits just perfectly inside this sunbeam.”

Tom looked imploringly at the newcomer.

“Please Bill, just do something, give him his meds or whatever it is you brought with you.”

An outside observer may have been slightly confused at this point, because inside the small apartment there were now three men who looked exactly identical. The only way to tell them apart was by their clothing, which in truth was actually fairly easy. Although their faces were the same, their personalities clearly were not.

“Look Tom, I think we just need to take a step back,” Bill took a couple more steps toward the living room. He stopped again.

“I received the same letter you did,” Tom replied. “He’s quit yet another job. He’s drinking in the middle of the day. I can’t keep leaving work to clean up his messes, I have responsibilities.”

“And so do you,” he added off hand, looking down at his phone as though something important had happened. It hadn’t.

Bill walked all the way into the room and situated himself cross-legged on the floor, halfway between Tom on the couch and Mike, who was still making his snow angels.

“Heya Mike,” he said pleasantly, “how’s life these days?”

“Bill!” Mike leaped off the ground and folded Bill into a very tight hug. Bill’s arms were pinned to his sides and when Mike kissed his cheek he started to worry, but in the next instant Mike had rocked back on his heels and was surveying Bill happily from the distance of a few feet away.

“He’s been here for ten fucking minutes already you idiot,” Tom muttered through gritted teeth. He was still looking down at his phone, clicking importantly through his apps.

Both Mike and Bill ignored this comment.

“I’ve quit my job Bill,” said Mike cheerily.

“So I’ve heard,” Bill nodded. “Now what?”

“Well the thing I realized the other day is that life is too beautiful to waste doing something practical,” Mike began. Tom’s brow furrowed but Bill nodded him on. “And anyway how much money do I really need?” Tom scoffed.

A few steps away, on the kitchen table, there lay heaps of paper in all different sizes and compositions. Some looked like parchment, some were loose, some were bound in journals. There really was no more room on the table, so thoroughly was it covered. Underneath several of the sheets one could pick out a pen, a couple of erasers.

“Let me show you, let me show you!”” And in an instant Mike was at the table sorting feverishly through the pages. There didn’t seem to be any order to his search. Pages shifted and what appeared to be an entire novel fluttered to the floor. After several more minutes of this, Tom got annoyed.

“Jesus Mike, just show us whatever’s in front of you now! It’s not like we care.”

Bill gave him a warning look, but it didn’t seem to matter to Mike, who was still sitting feverishly, occasionally making small exclamations like “Ah yes, this!” or “Oh no, no not that.”

He turned back to the living room with a handful of papers and an excited grin.

“I’m going to write novels!” he announced.

“No,” said Tom. “You aren’t.”

“Yes I am, what does it matter to you anyway Tommo?”

Tom stood up. “Look, I’m done. I can’t support you anymore. You’re bleeding me dry and you’re a grown man! For once just be practical, just one fucking time.”

“Tom,” Bill started, “He is family – ”

“Family I didn’t choose,” Tome cut him off. “Just because he happens to be my brother doesn’t mean I have to carry him my whole life.” By this point he was shaking slightly, trying to conceal it in tightly clenched fists. “He doesn’t have to be so fucking stupid, we just let him get away with it. Not anymore. And Bill, you’re done too – when I stop, you stop. He needs to learn.”

Bill said nothing. Several of the papers that had fallen to the floor had landed next to him, so he picked them up.

“You,” Mike retorted, turning to face Tom, “have no idea how to have fun.”

“You live in a fucking fantasy!” Tom exploded.

And they were off, Tom’s voice increasing with each sentence until he was practically screaming, Mike alternately sticking his fingers in his ears and yelling back.

Thank God it’s the middle of the day, thought Bill. Hopefully everyone around us is at work. He grabbed a few more papers off the table and slipped into the bedroom. Neither of his brothers notice.

{to be continued}

Plastic Barbie Girl

Today, I was a Barbie. The whole world was fake. I cut my wrists and it felt like cutting through soft plastic; the blood was red paint. I knew that I could cut and cut and no matter what I could just stand there and watch it bleed. I knew that if I was hit by a car while biking I would skid into the middle of the intersection and I would lay there, still, plastic arms and legs akimbo, plastic smile in place. Eyes blinking but otherwise perfectly still. And nothing would hurt. I would lay there, plastic but alive, feeling nothing at all.

Everything was fake, like I was in a little diorama and after I slid into the intersection I would be picked up by whoever was playing with the diorama and I would be put, plastic arms and legs still twisted, into the box and way.

I wanted to lay face up on the concrete in front of the library with my arms and legs spread wide like I was going to make a snow angel. I wanted to lay there with the half grin playing along my lips that just won’t leave and let the light rain fall down onto me with my eyes wide open. And everyone would ignore me, they would just keep walking by my plastic body and the buildings and the sky above would spin because right now, they are trembling, but the spinning is coming soon.

And I wanted to climb up to the gargoyle head on the roof lip of the library and wave to it and tip myself over the edge with my arms spread wide, flying down until I crashed into the concrete and then through it.

Everything was so fake today I knew that no matter what happened to me, I wouldn’t die. I would just stay plastic and frozen and plastered with a half smile, blinking wide and feeling nothing.

And because I knew that, I wanted to cut myself and watch, to crash my bike into the intersection, to jump off the building, or a bridge. I wanted to die and be revealed as the plastic Barbie doll I am. Besides, feeling nothing and everything is nice. I was numb and yet I stared at the raindrops in wonder and relished them hitting my skin, as though they were the most curious thing I had ever seen. I wanted to be soaked through.

But we don’t always get what we want, do we?