He’s also got the flowers thing down.
My mom once told him that she hated flowers. She couldn’t understand why anyone would kill something so beautiful and give it as a gift only to watch it die slowly over the next few days. So Paul got creative. He bought paintings of flowers, had origami flowers made, bought her earrings in the shape of flowers. Once he even bought her cooking flour (which I used), and it made my mom laugh.
Mom does little things for him, too. She’ll leave notes in the pockets of his clothes and slip chocolate into his lunch.
They’re disgusting to the point that it is probably uncomfortable for people to be in their presence. But it can’t be denied that they have something beautiful. It must be nice having someone to come home to every day. Someone to be gross with.
My mom is the kind of person who makes you feel important. No matter how tiny your problem is, she listens like it’s a major crisis, and she wants to make everything okay. So she’s great, but she is also the kind of person who stores soy sauce packets in the utensil drawer and forgets whether she left the garage door open. Every day. And Paul is the kind of guy who doesn’t mind secretly throwing the soy sauce packets out and calling our elderly neighbor across the street to check that the garage door is closed. I’m glad he’s patient.
I’m glad they have each other, but sometimes I think about how much happier everyone would be if I weren’t around. That’s when I feel sad and guilty because if anything happened to me, my mom would be devastated, but as long as I’m in her life, she’s always going to worry about whether or not I’m okay. I don’t know which is worse.
There are days I just wish I weren’t me.
But if I weren’t me, Maya would be texting someone else every night before she goes to bed.
Yesterday it was this:
Maya: Hey. Just thought I should tell you that I really like kissing you.
Me: I like that you like kissing me too.
Maya: Barf.
DOSAGE: 2 mg. Same dosage.
NOVEMBER 21, 2012
It was somehow decided that Dwight and I would play tennis on Monday nights. I do not play tennis. Nor have I ever expressed any desire to do so.
This is what happened.
During last week’s Academic Team match, it only took a few minutes for my mom to make eye contact with Dwight’s mom to see if Dwight was okay after his nosebleed. She walked over with Paul in tow and proceeded to rummage through her bag for wet wipes to help mop the blood off Dwight’s face.
My mom still keeps wet wipes in her purse. They usually dry out before she has the opportunity to use them, but on the rare occasion that she can bust one out and wipe something sticky off her hands, she’ll turn to me and raise an eyebrow as if to say, See? I told you they’d come in handy.
Whatever transpired between the two moms in that moment, I will never know. By the time I got in the car, it had been decided that I would spend more time with Dwight. I tried explaining that that was basically impossible, since he was already in almost all my classes AND on Academic Team, but my mom liked the idea of me hanging out with friends outside school. There was no dissuading her.
Being set up on a “playdate” in high school is not beyond the realm of behavior for my mother, but I still pretended to be shocked and outraged. Even though Paul tried to intervene, my mom was resolute. I would play tennis with Dwight.
So on Monday Dwight and I met at a tennis court near my neighborhood. The first thing I noticed was that he looked skinnier in tennis clothes than he did in his uniform at school.
“Have you ever played before?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Have you ever seen a tennis match before?”
“Nope.”
He was unfazed. Dwight taught me how to hold a racket, and for one hour we hit balls back and forth to each other. He was actually really good, way more coordinated than I thought he’d be, which is probably pretty jerky on my part. When we were done, we sat on the edge of the tennis court for a while, drinking Gatorade. I noticed he was really quiet. It was weird.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Did you just come here because your mom told you to?” he asked. The question was awkward. I’d put it in the same category as Will you be my friend?
“No,” I lied. “I’ve never played tennis before. It sounded like fun.” His face split into this big, goofy grin.
“Same time next week?”
“Sure.”
He picked up his bag and walked off the court, leaving a heavy scent of his sunscreen in the air. SPF 500, I’m sure.
And that was it. I don’t know if we’re just both so completely pathetic that our moms felt the need to set us up, or if Dwight and I were always meant to venture on this awkward journey of friendship together. But it’s okay. I guess.
—
It is not generally my prerogative to bum anyone out. I don’t want them to feel like they have to carry my problems around as if they don’t already have shit of their own festering inside them. It isn’t fair. That’s why I always say “Fine” when my mom asks how I am and why I always return Paul’s awkward smile with an equally awkward smile of my own. I do not want to be someone’s problem. I don’t want to be the reason someone has to change their life.
Today at school I thought about you. Not in a creepy way. I just wondered about the other people you’ve treated. The other schizos with their disjointed speech and soapy spit bubbles and tinfoil hats. The ones who aren’t on ToZaPrex and who no longer see the line between what is real and what is batshit crazy.
About a year ago, when my mom first took me to see a doctor, I was in bad shape. It felt like my brain had been dumped onto a dirty sidewalk, then poured back into my head with bits of garbage and broken glass. It was surprising how quickly it happened. I was fine, and then I wasn’t. The doctor’s waiting room was like purgatory: everybody knows they’re already dead, but it’s such a depressing afterlife it’s actually a little scary if you think about it too hard. Exactly like being stuck in line at the DMV for all eternity.
The waiting room is a place I still have nightmares about. Except when I do, I’m chained to one of the chairs and trying to ward off the punches of another patient while my mom watches from behind a glass window because a man in a white coat is trying to explain that I’m too dangerous to approach. I’m screaming and crying, but no one hears me or, worse, no one cares. It’s the loneliest I’ve ever felt.
Anyway, the waiting room only had two or three patients in it. All men. Unless you counted Rebecca, who was sitting quietly and playing at the Lego table. One of the men was my age and with his mom. He looked like he was in worse shape than me, which was comforting for some reason. Of course, that made me feel guilty. Why should the fact that he looked worse off make me feel better about myself? It doesn’t matter. There’s no escape for either of us. Even our moms know this is true, which is probably the worst thing about this situation.
I’d rather suffer alone.
So the other kid in the waiting room was rocking back and forth and humming to himself. It wasn’t a song I recognized, and the tune seemed to change sporadically. His mom wasn’t saying anything to him about it. She was reading something on her Kindle and acting like her son was just sitting there not doing anything odd. It was like she knew her kid was being weird, but she would be more than happy to kick your ass if you brought it up. She had this Xena: Warrior Princess attitude about her that made it perfectly clear that she had been fighting for her son his entire life. It was only when he started pulling at his sleeve that she snapped to attention and pulled the sleeve back, but not before I saw the deep red gashes in his forearms. They looked like he’d been digging for something up to the crook of his elbow.