The Overthinkers

by Lisa Portolan

  Was she even serious right now? She was ...

  But I couldn’t stop myself.

  I started laughing. Loud.

  For a moment, she just stared at me.

  And then she screamed, so very loudly.

  I’m not sure why she did that. Francesca Moore did that sort of stuff. Random shit. Unexpected shit. Crazy shit.

  That’s why she was different. That’s why she shouldn’t have been worried about being a nobody.

  She couldn’t be a nobody even if she tried.

  Her scream continued, and I just laughed louder, and louder, and louder.

  It occurred to me that someone might call the police if it continued much longer.

  Standard.

  Francesca Moore wasn’t my lover. Not even close. But I loved her anyway.

  She kicked me out before I had the chance to explain myself. But really, I had nothing to explain. Maybe she should have been explaining to me – that wasn’t going to happen.

  It was pitch black outside by then, and the streetlights and the headlights from passing cars kept weaving into my field of vision at strange angles. Too fast and sudden.

  I decided that I probably wasn’t in the state to be wandering around, so I ended up sitting down for a bit at the tiny park on Jersey Road with the wrought iron statue of a horse’s head.

  As I lolled on the chair, I thought about Maddison, and how she was only a couple of hundred metres away from me, but in reality – a lifetime. It was like our potential relationship was impossible because of some sort of time, space loop. Like we just didn’t exist in the same place at the same time. Even though we did.

  Our worlds had started off as exactly the same, but at some point they had deviated. There had been a fork in the road. She had gone in one direction, and I in the other. She had chosen to be boring and commonplace, and I had chosen to be a basket case, and now we occupied those two very different spaces. Hovering incredibly close to each other, but still unable to co-exist.

  The thing was, I knew Maddison was boring. Like Francesca Moore said, people didn’t say Maddison’s surname because she faded into the background. She did disappear. It was like nobody said her last name, because it was her father’s and he was a big deal, and she wasn’t.

  That surname was someone else’s.

  Not even her full name belonged to her.

  I knew there was something missing about Maddison. It was like she was a jigsaw puzzle, with the majority of the pieces removed. You could sort of get the gist of who she was, you just had to put in a lot of guess work, and you always knew it wasn’t quite right. There was a lot of squinting and distinguishing involved.

  The rest of the pieces just didn’t exist.

  I wasn’t quite sure what had produced this malady. The missing pieces phenomenon. If something in her had just broken at a certain time. Or if someone had forcibly removed them. Had something really bad happened to her? Had someone reached in and pulled those pieces out? I didn’t think she would ever tell me, or anyone for that matter. She wouldn’t even tell herself.

  Or maybe she had been born that way. Missing.

  I stared up at the stars from my park bench. We were in the middle of the city, so you could only see a couple of them, and even those were opaque and slightly obscured.

  Maybe there were just people born with missing pieces, and there were some born with too many pieces (to compensate), and then there were people who were born with just the right number of pieces. You could always sense those people. The ones that were whole. There weren’t many of them. They moved about with an inner confidence, like they belonged to every scene and every space, and they were never out of place. They never felt awkward, they never questioned their ability to deliver, they never missed a step.

  They just felt completely whole.

  Francesca Moore and I had too many pieces. It was like we were juggling a cacophony of colours and sounds ... and body parts too. We tried to control it all, but it was impossible. Who were we really? There were too many parts of our personality to order and tame. What were we actually doing? We couldn’t even figure it out ourselves. We kept skirting off in different directions – and then regretting that path after having taken a couple of steps ... It was always complicated and messy and distracting, and too much.

  We were too much.

  Maddison had more than a couple of pieces missing. It was like her innards had been yanked out.

  That kid with the long hair, what was his name? Benjamin. Benji, that’s what they called him. He was complete. I could sense it. Even though I didn’t know him at all. All his pieces were there.

  The thing about Maddison was – I didn’t really care about her missing pieces. It didn’t bother me at all. That strange absence, made it incredibly quiet when I was around her. Like all the noise in my head had been silenced. Like it had all been covered in bubble wrap. When I was near her, I got this sense that things were simple.

  Perfectly simple.

  And quiet.

  It was almost like we fit together. Like my too many pieces made up for her missing ones.

  But I didn’t think she saw it this way.

  All Maddison could see was how broken I was. And what people thought about me. That was the worst of it. She didn’t judge me based on what she knew, on how I’d behaved around her. She judged me on what other people thought. She aggregated all of those judgments together. Junkie, weirdo, dealer, trouble ... and put them together in some fetid pile of shit.

  And then she stood back, and assessed that pile of shit.

  And concluded that I was a social parasite.

  If you saw it through that lens, I probably was.

  But if you saw me separately, without all that judgment, I was someone else altogether.

  A homeless person entered the park. He was wearing a big floppy hat, and about ten layers of clothes. His belly protruded obnoxiously. He had a grey overgrown beard. I’d seen him before roaming down Oxford Street. He was a fixture in the homeless person crowd. Benign enough. He never said a word, and never made eye contact.

  He kind of looked like the pictures I’d seen of Ernest Hemmingway.

  He took a seat at a bench a couple of metres away from me.

  We didn’t acknowledge each other.

  I imagined Maddison walking past now. In a party dress and heels, heading out with Chloe, her equally missing friend. I saw her tanned limbs, and those soaring cheek bones, which took that otherwise average face of hers to another place. Her eyes would have connected with my own, and then she would have quickly averted them. She would have looked down.

  Like she did in the bar today, when she had cast her eyes down to the table and willed me to go away.

  That’s what she would have done here too.

  Looked down, and hoped that I wouldn’t approach her. Desperately wishing that I wouldn’t call out or acknowledge that we knew each other. She didn’t want other people to know that we knew each other.

  She only conceded that she knew me within the confines of her own home, and even then, it was shrouded in pretence. Even then we pretended to be different people, acting out different roles, to make her feel okay about what we did.

  I didn’t mind sharing the park with the bum. He didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. He knew his place and I knew mine. We didn’t get in each other’s way.

  We played on an equal playing field. Me and the bum.

  People didn’t think much of us. They regarded us with disgust, and sadness. We were the type of people who had tried and failed. We were crazy people. And people were afraid of that. They felt like if they spent too long with us, or even if they let their eyes settle on our very person, then we might contaminate them in some way.

  We might make them nuts too.

  The thing is, they recognised something in us. The craziness. The out of control element. It was buried, deep within them. They tried their best to hide it. To push it down, deep within. To conceal it from prying eyes. Someti
mes that craziness surfaced for them. And then they hated themselves even more.

  All the more for it.

  But acknowledging someone like me, or the bum, meant that they were also acknowledging that part within themselves.

  And then it was a steady slope. A steady slope downwards to where I was, or where the bum was.

  Like I said, I didn’t get here consciously. I didn’t make clear, aggressive decisions about it all. I didn’t have a plan or strategy, like Francesca had for her social climbing.

  I just slipped.

  Ever so slowly.

  Until I got here.

  In the middle of the night. In a park with a bum.

  I got up, and decided to head home.

  It was incredibly quiet at my place.

  We were well into the early hours of the morning before I got back into my apartment in Potts Point. By then all the other inhabitants were asleep.

  I wasn’t tired though.

  I rarely was. It could have been the combination of amphetamines which were usually in my system ... but then, I had no recollection of ever sleeping well. Not even when I was a kid and back at my parents’ grandiose old place in Vaucluse. Like Maddison’s. Just a different postcode. I used to lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling, and thinking about all of the other people, in that house, or on that street that were fast asleep. Then I’d start thinking about why we slept at all. It was actually kind of weird. That we closed our eyes and just drifted off to that place of sub-consciousness. Where was it? And which part of this reality was actually real, the awake version, or the asleep one?

  I had always thought too much. That was my problem. The thinking, and the anxiety that came with thinking.

  When I was a kid. I used to think about death a lot. About how it was inevitable – and there was actually no way for me not to die. There was no getting around it.

  And what happened after you died?

  Where did Hamish Chiel go to then? Was it the same place I went to when I was asleep? Or was it a completely different place? What was it like? Cold and dark? Lonely? And then it would occur to me that I would never know those details because Hamish Chiel, as we all understood him to be, and as the person trapped in my mind, would be gone. Absolutely gone.

  Non-existent.

  And then I would really start to panic. My palms would start to sweat, and my thoughts would race, and I would feel my chest constrict.

  Why was I even bothering then? With any of this? What did any of it mean? If I died today, or in fifty years’ time, none of those actions, feelings or thoughts that transpired in between would actually be relevant. Because Hamish Chiel was gone.

  And Hamish Chiel only ever mattered to Hamish Chiel. No one else gave a shit. Because here’s the truth. Everyone’s a narcissist.

  Yeah, I’d think all of those things. Usually while I was in bed. Trying to get to sleep. It was like that extra quiet, made time for those thoughts. Then, I’d get up and pace the room. Sometimes I would go to the kitchen, and get something to eat. Sometimes I’d just sit outside in our backyard, and wonder why more people didn’t sit outside in their backyard in the middle of the night.

  I was nuts before the drugs.

  Sometimes I thought I took the drugs to try and straighten out the thoughts in my mind, or even calm them down. They were always agitating about at top speed. They made me feel nauseous, and unhappy, and incredibly alone. The drugs muffled all of that ... and they made me feel invincible. Sometimes when you were high, you felt like the world was exactly like the movies made it out to be. Like you were one of those characters living an epic, important life.

  They erased all the other stuff.

  The stuff that made my life feel basic and intolerable.

  I sat in the dark for a couple of moments on the sofa in the lounge room.

  Darkness was strange too. How did it work? Why did it obscure everything? Did it just mean that certain things shouldn’t be seen at given times?

  Sometimes I would lean into that darkness, and just let it fill up my eyes. Like soup. Then sometimes it made me panic. Like it was filling up my eyes like soup right now, but in a bad way. Eating away at them and my mind. Like now, I felt like that right now.

  I stumbled to my feet and lurched towards the closest light switch, banging my leg against the dining room table in the process.

  The room was flooded with light. Still there.

  Poorly furnished, with a strange hole in the stucco of the right wall.

  I had put it there a couple of weeks back. The hole that is.

  No one ever came here anyway, who cared what it looked like?

  I rubbed the front of my leg, which I’d just smashed against the coffee table. There was already a lump forming there. Maybe it was a haematoma. Maybe it would kill me. Travel up my leg via the femoral artery, and block the blood flow to my heart. Or my lungs. Maybe my brain.

  I wasn’t sure if it could get to my brain. Surely, it would stop at my heart or lungs beforehand?

  I’d prefer to be dead than a vegetable. That would be the worst. Then Mum and Dad would have to take me back to the old place in Vaucluse. They would pretend to be sad about it. And there would be conversations about how I’d been off the rails for years, and couldn’t be helped. Lost cause, would be the phrase on repeat. Dad would explain how he had gotten me that expensive councillor. But I rarely turned up to the appointments. They’d tried, they’d say. And they’d suffered. Lord, they had suffered.

  Then Mum would hire some sort of live-in-care for me, who didn’t give two shits about me as well. They’d wheel me out on the veranda overlooking the harbour and leave me there all day. And then one day ... I’d just turn septic and die.

  Yeah, it was better to be dead than be a vegetable.

  Off the rails.

  Rails. Rails. Rails.

  Now all I could think about were rails.

  Those lines would make me feel better. Yes, they would.

  Briefly I considered calling Francesca. She would listen to me rattle on about this stuff. She might even say I could go back to her house, and sleep on their couch. Leo wouldn’t mind. He was just as fucked up as I was.

  I could see through his shit. His happy façade. Heck, I wrote the fake book. Takes one to know one, right?

  But who was I even joking? Francesca would be asleep.

  Instead I decided to do some rails in the bathroom. Like that was going to put me to sleep. I’m being ironic here. It wouldn’t. It’d keep me awake for hours. But it would make me feel better, yeah, I’d feel better.

  Rails done. I splashed some cold water on my face, and then ran a hand over my shaven head.

  I wasn’t sure why I’d taken all of my hair off. It seemed like there was a good enough reason to do it at the time. I was high, and I’d never shaved my head before. I’d been curious about what it looked like under all that hair.

  It looked like shit.

  I didn’t have a nicely shaped head. It was kind of cone like to be honest.

  Of course it was.

  I wandered back out to the living room, energy renewed, vibe revived.

  Anxiety tucked away.

  But everyone was asleep.

  I thought about messaging Francesca again.

  I thought about messaging Maddison again.

  I thought about messaging Dan. Maybe he would be awake.

  I thought about ice. Oh my dearest.

  No ... No ... I couldn’t go back to tweaking.

  Tweaking happened after you tried for the rush for too long and ended up feeling nothing. Then you hit this point where things got radical. Your skin crawled, and you itched, and you became obsessed with shit. Like one time I got so obsessed with the cleanliness of a window ... I washed it all day. Like no joke, 24 hours of washing, and scratching.

  I yanked my phone out – and stared at it for a couple of moments.

  I hated Dan. He was potentially the worst human being alive.

  I sat down and sta
rted scrolling through Instagram again.

  I found the photo that Maddison had been tagged in that day. In “missing Chloe’s” feed. I paused for a second. Maybe it was longer than a second. There she was, pretending to be someone else. Her cheekbones climbing ... and her smile, pasted to her face.

  I liked the picture, even though I knew she wouldn’t like that.

  Then I scrolled through the comments. Looking for something. But I wasn’t quite sure what it was. Something that would make her happy, I guess.

  I knew what that was, a comment from Benji.

  But there was nothing from him there. He probably wasn’t even following her. He had no idea that she cared, and if he did, he didn’t care that she cared. Not at all.

  He would have thought her so silly, so vacant, that she was insignificant. Not capable of thinking and feeling on the plane that he did. Of having real emotions. That hurt.

  That’s what whole people did. They assumed that the rest of us were kind of worthless. Imperfect humans. They didn’t even rate us.

  Maybe I was wrong, he rated Francesca.

  But why him Maddison? Why him?

  I looked him up on Instagram, and found his handle. Like his photos might reveal some sort of insight. Of course they wouldn’t, it was kind of like picking at a wound.

  I looked through his pics. He only had five of them up.

  He was the kind of guy that didn’t want to record every moment of his life for social media. The kind of guy that thought social media was kind of shit. He was too woke for that sort of shit. That level of phoniness. But I’m sure he used it to stalk people, just like the rest of us. I’m sure he’d combed through Francesca’s photos in detail. I wonder if there were any knots there that he had gotten caught on.

  He might be whole, but he wasn’t that perfect.

  Adrenalin was starting to surge through my veins.

  I called Francesca. It rung out and went to her voicemail.

  I sent her a text:

  Are you still awake? Can I come around?

  Nothing.

  She was asleep, but it felt like a rejection nonetheless.