Humanity has an inherent obsession with naming things. A name implies ownership. It suggests dominion.
My urge to arrange everything arises out of a need to control. Not a negative, restrictive type of control. The control that I pursue desires order and understanding, not manipulation. For example, I arranged my G.I. Joe’s by color. It made them easier to find at the time, and later caused me to question my sexuality. In either case, Rubbermaid is a good investment.
I knew that someone had been in my room. The objects that I had so meticulously arranged and memorized had moved. My journal had been read.
Instead of asking me questions, my father had taken answers. He concluded that I was depressed and suicidal. He wan’t wrong, but he forgot that I was a teenager. My hormones lacked aim as they ejaculated on those coffee stained pages. That’s right. I wrote shitty poetry. That’s fine. We all write shitty poetry. The problem is that I wrote these pubescent bubbles down in a poorly guarded notebook. Even worse, I shared these premature denouncements of culture out-loud to over-caffeinated, captive audiences of disinterested and dysfunctional adults. Coffee shops and open mic nights gave my adolescent meanderings a false sense of grandeur.
In a tangible (more than a prayer), and in retrospect good-intentioned, effort to save me, my father, the doctor, prescribed me Prozac. The prodigal son, wanting a seat at his father’s side, swallowed the little green and white capsules.
I’ve never felt so alone in my life. Felt isn’t the right word. The problem was that I didn’t feel anything. Empty. Flat. Quiet. I didn’t feel sad or happy. I felt nothing.
Before I took my medicine, my mind would never stop. Billie Holiday and her black coffee were the only ones who would stay up with me. I was too young (and innocent) to drown the voices in self-administered relief. I needed a prescription. I trusted the man offering me solace. He had saved me before. Even his violation of my privacy was out of a desire to help me. He told me that he could quiet my thoughts. He offered sleep to a lifelong insomniac. A pill a day, I followed my script. I never expected to be alone on stage, delivering a soliloquy to an empty theater.
The death was slow and sudden, like waking up and realizing that the leaves have changed color. I didn’t notice. I didn’t care. All of the beautiful details around me smeared into a nice, neutral beige (“This will go with anything!”).
Two weeks into the medicated regimen, I was willing to go with anything. The random thoughts would still come by, slip past the moat. They were decreasing, but the ones that remained had a loudness and an echo that hadn’t existed before in the cacophony.
I was driving down a Missouri highway when one of those thoughts t-boned me. I recalled a simple fact that I’d consumed and filed who knows how long ago: Automobile accidents at 70 mph or greater are 100% fatal when not wearing a seatbelt. I was doing 75. I slowly and intentionally pushed my foot down on the accelerator. 80. 85. 90. 95. (I know it’s dramatic. I was a teenager. On anti-depressants.) Fuck this. 120.
The Swedish engineering of my Volvo 780 turbo station wagon was starting to shake. I had yet to even tremble. I’d run out of numbers on the dashboard. Then, I saw the tree. It was huge. Old. Wise. I drifted. Casually aligned with its center.
It didn’t take long to close the distance. I mustered an emotion of destined fate to hold my aim and grip on the wheel as I bounced over the shoulder and into the field. 1,000, 800, 500, 200 feet. It won’t take long. You won’t even feel it. And you certainly won’t remember it.
I hit the brakes. Pulled the wheel. Punched it. And swerved around the tree.
I hit the brakes again as I maneuvered my family car through a 360° spin that moonshot me back onto the road.
I continued down that road as if nothing happened. When I got home, I stared at the gelatin capped arrangements on the surface of the toilet bowl water. Sometimes, flushing everything away is for the best.
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