“What are we, business associates? Have your people call my people?” Marisol smiles, tight-lipped. “I have some news to share with you.”
“Oh God. Is it about Jonah?”
“No. I’m going to kick you if you say his name again.”
“That was the last time.”
“This is serious. I got into Chicago.”
She delivers the news like a death, and it feels like one.
I suck in air. “Chicago.”
“They’re the first I’ve heard from. They have the best funding, though, and I think that’s where I want to go.”
“Congrats.”
“Thank you.”
“Chicago,” I say, graver, the entire scene shifting with that one word repeated.
“You’ve already moved on anyway,” Marisol says.
She’s so despondent, she looks like a child. Then she bursts into tears and I hug her. That’s how it is with Marisol: the storms only last a minute, and then they blow through.
“Sorry, I’m so periody and emotional right now,” she says. “But you have. You’re, like, suddenly a grown-up. Chasing girls and going to college and working and volunteering. I feel as if our friendship is over. You don’t even wonder how I am anymore. Or how anyone at school is. You marched forward and never even bothered to look behind you.”
“If I looked behind me, I thought I might . . . lose my balance. Fall flat on my face.”
“You have to at some point,” she says. “It’s not healthy to just forget.”
Talk to me about that when you’re in Chicago, sweetie.
We still text on a regular basis, but I know what she’s talking about. It’s hard to be close and discuss real things in text messages. It’s not the same as when we saw each other every day.
“I stopped taking my meds,” I tell her.
“Oh geez.”
“It’s okay. I’m fine.”
I hate how insistent my voice sounds. I want to be fine. I am fine, right? I hate that I live my life constantly doubting if fine is truly fine.
Marisol shakes her head. “I admit, I worry.”
“I talked to a doctor, okay? And my parents are worried about me enough, you really don’t need to take that on. I’m good.”
I can tell she wants to press on, but instead she asks, “You want a ride?”
“I’d love nothing more.”
She drives in her usual careless way, running red lights, almost clipping corners; she talks about the dorms, how cold Chicago winters are, and all the famous people who went to the same university. I nod, eyeing the side-view mirror, my hair way past my ears and heading for my shoulders, now a steely platinum blue with two inches of dark brown roots, palm trees and the blue sky passing behind me.
I don’t look back.
I must be a masochist, because I show up to my job as a human pizza slice on time every shift and stand out in the heat or darkness with diligence, holding a Crusty’s sign. Today is my fourth shift. I plug through it the way I plugged through the psych unit: with an end goal in sight, knowing I deserve better than this, and I will live through it, as humiliating as each honk and each expletive shouted from a random stranger’s window is.
“Dance, pizza girl, dance!”
“Pizzaaaaaaa!”
“Lemme get a bite!”
“Hey, pizza! OLIVE YOU!”
“You want some of this pepperoni?”
It’s weird to say, but standing on the corner during traffic long enough to trace the sun’s movement across the open sky, long enough to watch the Taco Bell and McDonald’s lights blink on, the gas station glow, the sky settle from periwinkle to ink blue to simply black, the nip of the SoCal winter on my exposed hands and face, my arms burning from holding up the godforsaken sign—all this, after the loathing and questioning of life choices passes, reaches a certain point where it’s nothing more than counting my own breaths again. I am not Journey. I am not pizza. I simply am. My soul leads me peacefully through my five-hour shift.
“Our last pizza slice needed to pee all the time, leaving gaps in coverage, so I truly appreciate your bladder control,” Tim-Tim tells me when I go inside to change from my pizza costume to my human girl costume.
Tim-Tim is grossly, relentlessly positive, to the point where I often wonder how long he had to rack his poor brain for a compliment.
“Maybe just think about a little . . . inspiration,” he says. Then he moonwalks in and out of the walk-in, freezer fog surrounding him in a puff that instantaneously disappears. “You know.”
“Yeah, listen, paying someone minimum wage to wear this crusty-ass costume and wave at strangers on street corners, eradicating any hope they ever had of human dignity, shouldn’t be, like, a thing you expect people to care about.”
Tim-Tim seems genuinely sad, stroking his soul patch. “I thought I saw a spark in you.” He backs up to go out to the floor, where a server is freaking out because the receipt tape has been eaten by the receipt machine. “My bad.”
I leave that night still smelling like the fug of the never-washed pizza costume that is my life two nights a week. I have regret. Tim-Tim has made me feel regretful. What is wrong with me that I even give a crap?
Truth be told, irritability is a symptom of getting off medication. But I can’t tell what’s my irritability and what is . . . entry-level fatigue. I hate that I don’t know what emotions I experience and what are pharmaceutical lies. I know my parents want me to keep them updated, but I don’t even know what is worth sharing and what is worth keeping to myself anymore.
Someday I’ll be gone, I think, passing the lake on my walk home, the dark, quiet lake full of ducks, crickets, secrets.
I don’t think it in a morbid way—it’s me thinking, surprisingly, for the first time I can remember, that someday I will not be here anymore. I’ll be elsewhere. Another city, maybe. Another job, for sure. Another person entirely. Because that’s what time makes of us.
Dear future self,
My therapist gave me homework this week (I know, paying someone for more homework, what horror is this?) and it’s to outline some goals. Which made me think there are so many future selves there. They’re lined up like paper dolls. They’re mashed together like a loud crowd. They’re two steps and/or a galaxy away from one another. None of them are real, though. There’s something scary about that, when I let myself think of you: you’re a ghost, a maybe, a thing I could lose if I lost myself again.
Is surviving not enough of a goal?
What is the difference, really, between surviving and living?
Wolf is an interesting human. He seems to have stepped out of an old-school film, from black and white to the shades of tan/beige/brown he is today. His office, as I’ve mentioned, is a hot mess. And his answer to everything is basically to ask more questions or urge me to pay attention to my body, be mindful. Isn’t that strange? That when we’re asked to pay attention to our bodies, that’s called being mindful? Shouldn’t it be called being bodiful? My mind races, and I don’t know if it’s a symptom of bipolar disorder or the human condition.
I wonder.
“I think I have a thinking problem,” I tell him.
He sits there, chin in hand, knee over knee, hunched like a judgmental man pretzel.
“Do you think I’m bipolar?” I ask.
“I think you have a big engine,” he replies.
A big engine that never turns off.
In my bed—the hard twin at Dad’s, with a black open window above me in the good-night darkness, the sound of wind hissing through the leafy wigs of trees—I have much to think about. My heart hurts with its drumming. I remember this intensity that lives in my chest. Has the medication fully worn off? Is this a reaction? Is this withdrawal? Is this me? Am I always like this? Big engine. Big feelings. But do I propel them, or do they propel me?
Tonight’s hotline shift is my sixth, and it’s the busiest yet: three phone calls in the first hour. I sit at my usual spot at the scuffed tab
le, my schoolbooks sitting in a stack in front of me, untouched.
I get one high school sophomore who cries about a recent abortion.
An entire shift flies by where our phones never even ring, hours spent playing hearts with a set of feminist playing cards Lydia keeps in her purse.
An older woman who feels guilty about not feeling sad her dad died.
A man who just keeps whispering, “Terrible. I did something terrible,” before I hear a click.
Shivers.
“Hey,” I say to the hotline three I share a shift with. “Decompress?”
And they always make me feel better. We’ve become total shift buddies.
“You’re a pro,” Lydia tells me as she crushes some vitamins on the desk with a paperweight. I half expect her to snort them but then she sprinkles them on her doughnut. Which is somehow way weirder. “You’ve got a career in counseling.”
Honestly, I’ve thought this myself lately. I never feel saner than when I’m here on the line with a stranger. Here, I’m my best self—I’m good advice and patience and forgiveness. I leave the Journey with big feelings behind me. This hotline is all kinds of magic.
“You do have a talent,” Beatriz agrees, folding origami.
“When I was your age, I was working at Arby’s,” JD says.
JD likes to talk about the seven years between us like it’s the difference between now and the Victorian era.
“I moonlight as a pizza slice,” I respond.
I make them laugh with this comment. I don’t think they realize I’m serious.
But a couple weeks later, I get my second call from Coco.
“Hey,” she says, surprised to hear my voice. “We talked last time I called, right?”
“Yep, we did,” I tell her.
“I’m glad I got you, actually, because it’s your advice that made my life fall apart.” She sounds broken up. My stomach drops. I lean into my headset, close my eyes. “I told my boyfriend about my . . . problem. And now he thinks I’m a basket case.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“He told me I should go to a psychiatrist and then he told my team captain I’m losing my mind and they should keep an eye on me. Then he dumped me—in front of his friends. Laughed at me. Got up and walked away from me.”
I am flotsam. I remember, in a wordless flash, the pain of Jonah needing space. The word space opening up inside me like a sickening chasm.
“It’s going to be okay,” I insist. “You’re going to move on from him.”
“It’s not just him, it’s everything,” she says. “Because even feeling that humiliation—it was better than how I feel normally. Like nothing. Like I’ve always been nothing, will always be nothing.”
“What you were talking about last time,” I say.
“You remember,” she says, softer.
Her voice is bittersweet. Again, I wonder if she’s been drinking. And this time I’m bold enough to ask.
“You been drinking, Coco?”
“So what if I have been?”
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Just want to make sure you’re safe.”
“You know what, right now, Journey—that is your name, yeah? Journey?”
“It is,” I tell her, touched she remembered.
“When I drink, I don’t care if I’m dead or not.”
Must be nice, I think, to not care if she’s dead or not. I care far too much if I’m dead or not—oscillating between fear of death in speeding cars or desire for it at dark moments where I dream up black holes. Unfortunately alcohol has the opposite effect on me. It just turns me into a weepy sentimental mess with even bigger feelings than usual.
She’s quiet, breathing in, out, in, out. “I don’t care that Clayton dumped me in front of everyone.”
Clayton? I rack my brain. Big guy, redhead, goofy grin. He was in my math class last year. Who’s he with again? Forgive me, but who is this girl? Stop, Journey. Focus.
Her voice climbs up a key. “Thank you for listening.”
“I’m so sorry you’re going through this,” I tell her. “I hope—have you thought a little more about seeing someone?”
“I don’t want to go to some psychotherapist or whatever. What if they lock me up in a psycho ward?”
“They won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve been locked up in a psycho ward,” I say, quicker than I can stop to realize it’s probably out of bounds to say that.
Coco is quiet. Then her voice curls up, curious. “What’d you do, Journey?” she asks. The way she keeps saying my name is strange, this stranger so familiar. “What’s wrong with you?”
“This isn’t about me,” I say.
“I’m glad we talked again,” Coco says, (I think?) giggling. She must be at least somewhat drunk. “You know what? For a few minutes here, I forgot. I actually, totally, completely, utterly forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“That I’m already dead.”
The click that meets my ears might as well be a gun’s safety releasing. I sit stunned for a moment at the silence in my headset.
She’s gone. Hung up.
“Decompress?” Beatriz asks as soon as I’m off the phone. The other two are hunched into their desks, murmuring softly to callers.
I roll over and accept Beatriz’s hug, surprised at the shake in my breath.
“She hung up. I didn’t really help her,” I say.
“You don’t know,” Beatriz says, patting my back. She smells stiflingly earthy, patchouli something. How bizarre to be suddenly this close to a person I’ve never actually even exchanged a handshake with.
I pull back and wipe my eyes on my sweater cuff.
“I heard you tell the caller you were hospitalized?” Beatriz asks.
“Yeah, was that—shouldn’t I have—I tried to kill myself,” I stutter.
Mouth, stop! Why do you have to say it like that, just lay the ugly truth out there for strangers to gape at and see? I want to take the words from the air and cram them back in.
“I was, too, once,” Beatriz says with a half nod, the way someone might say you shared an astrological sign or an alma mater.
“Really?” I ask.
“I was twenty,” she says. “My mom had just died. My mom was everything. I went through a grief spell that—well, it consumed me. I wanted to be nowhere.”
Nowhere. She says it like it’s a place, the same place Coco lives, the same place I dreamed of when I wanted out. Beatriz tells me this without blinking. As she adjusts her hands, folded on the lap of her broomstick skirt, her bangles jingle. She doesn’t ask me why I tried to kill myself. Maybe it’s not appropriate to ask.
“I only brought it up—you mentioning it on the call—” she starts.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” I interrupt. “I know.”
“It’s not that,” she says. “It’s just, in this work, you have to ask yourself how much of yourself you’re willing to give.”
She puts her hand on mine—bracelets clanging—and I nod.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You’re going to want to save people,” she says. “That’s not what this is about. It’s just about being here.”
I take the bus home, straight shot down Santa Barbara’s main drag of fancy restaurants and boutiques, State Street; it passes the Mission, the dark relic surrounded by gardens and lush lawns, through neighborhoods lit with bungalows and streetlamps, till it becomes Hollister Avenue and the houses shrink, and the lights get fewer and farther between, and the shopping centers, and the churches, and my dark hush of a neighborhood with cars parked and curtains drawn. As I walk past Crusty’s, which is closed, Tim-Tim dancing with a mop through the window, I wonder about Beatriz and her dark days in the mental hospital when she was barely older than me. How close does she still feel to that girl? Like an older sister? Like a stranger? Does the darkness live on in her, like a flame? Or does it go away?
Dear future self,
Freshman year, there was this girl named MacKenzie. She moved in from North Carolina, blew into school like a girl hurricane with her spiky strawberry hair, her raggedy jeans cut off below the knees, her eyeliner charcoal smudges. She was so pretty and yet so hard. We had bio together and I sat next to her, side-eyeing the anarchy signs she drew in the margins of her textbook. I found myself preoccupied with her in random moments throughout the day, chewing my lunch, maybe, or lying in bed at night, my brow furrowed, thinking, why does she think she’s such a badass? She thinks she’s, what—punk rock? What does that even mean? I found myself mentally outlining, in detail, her glossy scowl. Once, I caught myself drawing a picture of her on a napkin. My dumb pencil couldn’t capture what it was about her that enraptured me, though. Honestly, I didn’t know what to do with my preoccupation with MacKenzie. I thought I hated her.
This thing I felt for MacKenzie (who, by the way, never knew me, blew out of town as quickly and unexpectedly as she blew in, back to North Carolina or wherever) had no history within me; thus, it had no name. Maybe I envied her—maybe I wanted to give zero fucks like her. Maybe I wanted hair that strawberry, eyeliner that thick. Or maybe, just maybe—this thought sucked the breath from me—maybe I had a crush on her.
At the time, this thought was so foreign I shut it down. Me like girls? What? I’d loved boys all my life. Ridiculous. Me like MacKenzie? Pffft. No way.
One night, Jonah and I hung out in our neighborhood park. It was the same park with the horse swings we rode as kids. The twisty slide, the picnic bench maze where a million birthdays had been squandered. But now we wandered it in the dark, as teenagers, with phone flashlights and hushed conversations and a delicious sense of danger chirping in the background like cricket symphonies. I was talking some shit about MacKenzie for no reason.
This was before I made the dumb move of falling in love with him, back when we were buddies and life was simple.
Jonah turned to me, his long hair haloed by moonlight. “Can you just shut up and accept it already?”
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