No One Asked for This

by Cazzie David

  I took a deep breath, thanking God I was left alone with him again.

  “You’re really mean to your sister,” he said.

  What? No! What the fuck? She was only there in the first place because I wasn’t mean to her! “Excuse me? No, I’m not. You don’t understand.”

  “She is who she is. You can’t change that by acting like that toward her.”

  I stood there in a state of shock until he walked away. Fifteen minutes later, I saw him in the corner making out with two blond sisters. I called us an Uber immediately.

  The next day, as I was doing my morning ablutions, I decided I was going to reflect on myself to find out why I was, in fact, such a mean sister.

  “CAZZIE! I NEED SOMETHING FROM THE BATHROOM!” Romy screamed even though she was right next to the door.

  “I’m about to pee,” I said calmly, like a nice sister would.

  “CAZZIE, LET ME GET THE THING I NEED BEFORE YOU GO, I REALLY NEED IT, JUST LET ME IN RIGHT NOW TO GET IT!” It was in verbal caps.

  I pulled my pants back up and opened the door. If I were mean, I would have ignored the yelling and taken my sweet time.

  She came in and opened the mirror cabinet so slowly it was as if she was in A Quiet Place and had to make sure it didn’t make the slightest creak. In addition to being insanely neat, and clean, and annoying, my sister is also the slowest person on the planet. Not mentally; she’s smarter and quicker than I am. I could have maybe been smarter if I hadn’t “accidentally” smoked weed every night for the past eight years or didn’t have an addiction to banging my head against the nearest wall anytime I felt a rush of shame, but my body, my choice, I guess. Anyway, things that take me or any normal person one minute take Romy thirty. Everything is treated with a preciousness that I’ve seen exhibited only by Cinderella when she was making dresses with the cartoon birds. Washing her face, putting on pajamas, rinsing fruit/vegetables for dinner, applying sunscreen, doing laundry, packing—Romy does it all with meticulous leisure. My father and I have both driven off with her only halfway in the car, assuming she must already be sitting and buckled up because it’s taken her so long to get in and close the door.

  After opening the cabinet, my sister ran her finger in slow motion over every row, looking, looking, looking. Her finger finally reached the deodorant and I could hear her unhurried thoughts aloud: Ah, here is the thing I have been looking for. I am going to grab it now. Here we go. My hand is now reaching for the deodorant.

  “That’s new. What is it?” she said, pointing at one of my products.

  “Moisturizer.”

  “How did you know about it?”

  “This facialist I went to.”

  “Wow, fancy, a facial. With what money?”

  “My own.”

  “That’s expensive . . . how’d you afford that?”

  “CAN YOU PLEASE GET OUT!?”

  So I’m mean. Whatever. Why couldn’t she have waited five minutes to put on her deodorant? Because her purpose here on this earth is to annoy me in such trivial ways that no one will ever be able to sympathize with why I am such a mean sister. For anything ever to change, my sister would have to meet me in the middle, at the very least by moving a bit faster.

  Exactly a year later, I was sitting on my floor alone on a Saturday night, drinking wine from the bottle and smoking a joint, which I was pretending was something more intense as a fun mental game. I had turned twenty-five a few days before and was in a slight existential depression over it, the kind that always exists inside of getting another year older, coupled with general nonsense. But twenty-five was different. Your brain stops developing at twenty-five. Your face and body never stop developing, but when you’re twenty-five, they stop changing for the better and start heading for the worse, even though it feels like you had only one year to appreciate being a young adult without acne, and of course you didn’t. So you’re looking in the mirror thinking I guess that is my face . . . for now, and I guess these are my thoughts, forever, when I could have read all of the classics, or learned Spanish, or at least the rest of English. I know twenty-five is young, and anytime someone who is under thirty-­four says they’re old, every person over that age telepathically hears it at the same time and dies a little inside. But I had decided to indulge in self-pity. At that point in my life, I was well aware that there were only four things that were capable of pulling me out of depression: a text from a very specific person, fucking someone, a near-death experience, or someone else having a serious illness or dying. And just as I was thinking about who I should go fuck, I got a call that snapped me right out of it. Romy was getting emergency abdominal surgery for a perforated ulcer and she was all alone in New York.

  The one thing Romy and I do have in common is that we have always lived with the same neurotic spiral—knowing anxiety can cause sickness but still unable to help having daily anxiety about sickness. This was our worst-case scenario come to life. We panic at the onset of a stomachache. Neither of us had ever even been to the hospital, gotten the flu, or broken a bone. My sister would scream “Ow” when I would just brush by her, but that was probably less about pain and more about her being annoying.

  The next morning, I got on a flight to New York. Every time I get on a plane, I experience a confusing juxtaposition of an intense fear of germs and an indifference toward dying in a plane crash. I’ve always been fine with dying on a flight because I think it’s chic, in how tragic of a way it is to go. Like, honestly, I could only be so lucky. The plane death cements you in this legendary essence for eternity. It makes everything you once wore seem stylish even if it wasn’t and makes you look beautiful in photos even if you weren’t. However, on this particular flight to New York, I really didn’t want to die because the Jonas Brothers were on it. Yes, I didn’t want us to go down because they, I guess, serve a purpose in society, but also because if we did, I would get literally zero attention. Your death day is the best birthday you can have and I need a special death day because (1) I’m clearly a bit narcissistic, (2) I’m not comfortable with getting attention any moment that I’m alive but I feel like I could definitely appreciate it once I’ve died, and (3) because I foolishly believe I’ll be recognized only after death, like van Gogh but with zero talent. That said, if we were to come to the worst-case scenario of this plane going down, I decided I would be remiss if I didn’t ask Joe and Nick to have a sky-high threesome while literally falling from the sky. What’s one more rejection before I go? I’d apologize to Kevin for not being interested but I think he’s more tired of apologies than he is of not being thirsted over at this point.

  I landed and went straight to the hospital from the airport. Normally I’d be too anxious to even stand outside of one, but I figured if my sister was brave enough to go through emergency surgery without her parents and have a tube down her throat and drain attached to her stomach for multiple days, I should probably be brave enough to enter a hospital.

  A nurse led me to my sister’s room; I kept my eyes on the floor, knowing that the sight of someone on a gurney would at best stick with me forever and at worst make me faint. My mother greeted me at the door and walked me inside the hospital room that contained the energy and spirits of five hundred thousand terrifying past scenarios and one terrifying current one. There she was, weak and adorable, attached to tubes and liquids and other things I didn’t know the names of because I was too afraid of anything medical to watch Grey’s Anatomy. I gave her a gentle hug like she was made of glass as I wondered if it was possible for me to go the rest of my life without ever getting a tube put through my nose. She told me the whole story of how she had a back spasm and couldn’t move for days. How she called her doctor from home, and she told her to go to the emergency room and get an X-ray. How the emergency room doctor refused to order it for hours because he was sure she was being dramatic and that it was muscle pain and finally agreed to it only so she would go home. The X-ray showed air beneath her diaphragm, so she was transported in an ambulance to
the main hospital to get emergency surgery, where they patched up a perforated ulcer that had apparently been bleeding for a week. If she hadn’t forced the doctor to order the X-ray, they would never have found the ulcer and she would have gone home and internally bled out. At this point in the story my mom leaned over and mumbled to me, “You would have felt so guilty the rest of your life for being so mean to your sister.”

  Yeah.

  All my sister could talk about was her gratitude. How lucky she was to have a doctor she could call in the middle of the night who knew what to do and how so many people went through something like this or worse, something completely unpreventable, and were left in debt for the rest of their lives. Remember two nights ago when you were depressed to be twenty-­five? I thought to myself. You fucking piece of shit.

  After Romy spent six days in the hospital and then another week recovering in a New York hotel, she, my mom, and I flew home. We got out of there just in the nick of time—my mother and I were ready to break down from a mixture of sadness, exhaustion, and being trapped in a small room together for the past two weeks. Seeing my mom on the brink of complete sorrow was what made me almost lose it. There’s nothing more unsettling than seeing one of your parents afraid. The fear in their eyes is unrecognizable. They’ve been pretending for years to have it together and the moment you realize they don’t, it’s like being let in on a dark secret. Like how the government won’t reveal to the public that they know aliens exist because there would be chaos. If everyone knew parents were constantly afraid, it would be mayhem. If even one parent is scared, no one is safe.

  Romy’s recovery included going on very slow walks, slowly eating, slowly getting up, slowly sitting down, and drinking water . . . slowly. She was slower than ever.

  As I’m writing this, we’re a little over a month into her recovery and our relationship has never been better. I check in with her every day because I’m now more worried about her than I am about anyone else in my life—definitely more than any friend going through a breakup. I do everything I can for her, not only because she physically can’t, but because if I do it, I don’t have to watch her do it so slowly. I think we’ll probably continue with these habits even once she’s fine. Perhaps all we ever needed was an emergency surgery. Although I do look forward to the day where I’m genuinely annoyed with her again. That will be the moment when I know she’s okay.

  “CAZZIE! You’re so mean!” It will be music to my ears.

  * * *

  Do Not Disturb

  You know the first ten minutes of Spider-Man—or any superhero movie, for that matter—where there’s that scene right before the hero gets his powers and all of his senses become heightened? Everything he does hurts, his skin feels like it’s getting ripped off, everything he hears is loud, even if it’s coming from miles away? He falls to his knees, grabs his head in his hands, and screams up at the sky, “WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME!?” Well, that’s how I feel all the time—perpetually facing that moment of accumulating powers without ever getting them.

  A dream superpower would be the ability to touch someone and make them feel the exact pain I’m in. I would do it to doctors all the time. “Am I okay?! Do you feel this?! What is this pain?!” I’d plead as I touched the doctor’s arm.

  “Yes, I feel it. You’re fine. Your jeans are just too tight.”

  A nightmare would be feeling the pain everyone else is in, which is what I do have. I’m aware that this is something many people say, probably most. Maybe not that their empathy manifests in the form of feeling like they’ll soon be able to throw lava out of their hands, but I don’t think there is anyone who would admit to not being empathetic. Who would confess that the suffering of others doesn’t break their heart? But I’m not your average person claiming to be an empath—a concept justifiably reacted to with eye rolls. And I’m definitely not saying my freakish level of hypersensitivity makes me some kind of superhero. In fact, what’s the exact opposite of a superhero? An incompetent, cowardly loser? Yeah. That’s me. That’s exactly me.

  It’s strange when everything in the world emotionally affects you and none of it literally affects you, at all. But alas, my body thinks I am a method actor and I must experience every feeling I read about or see, from burning alive to getting a brain freeze. Even human suffering in PG-rated movies can incite mental disturbance and nausea for hours, sometimes days. I’ll feel like I’m going to pass out from seeing a woman get a corset laced up in a period piece. As a kid, I had to stop reading Little Women the second Beth got scarlet fever. When my mom asked why I couldn’t finish it, I told her the girl being sick freaked me out too much.

  “Oh, it freaked you out reading about scarlet fever? Imagine having it, Cazzie!”

  “I am imagining it! That’s the problem!”

  By this point, my friends and family have all gotten used to my hypersensitivity. They’ll continue on with their conversation as if nothing is happening, already moving on to a new subject as I pace, inhale for five, exhale for five, get into a fetal position on the floor, moan, and hold my numbing feet all from hearing the word tingle. I’m still mad at my ex-boyfriend for thinking I could handle the Amanda Knox documentary, even with my face buried in his armpit and a pillow over my ears. He was equally mad at me for the lasting impact it had. Sorry I’m not a robot! I can’t just have sex with you two weeks after fake-experiencing Italian jail. I often wonder what it would be like to be the type of person who can talk about anything, hear anything, without embodying it. But for me, the world is Thirteen Reasons Why and I am a triggered, unhappy teen.

  Given this hypersensitivity, I’m better off staying at home; I know that if I go out into the world, I’ll see things that will disturb me forever. Yet I’ll go on the internet from the comfort of my own bed and willingly expose myself to my worst nightmares on a regular basis, sights that are thousands of times more haunting than anything I could find outside or in a movie. On your phone, there is no safe place . . . and I can’t stop looking at my phone.

  The internet is just one constant onslaught of unpredictable misery. You never know what will pop up right in front of your eyes: “AT LEAST 17 DEAD”; “THESE PARENTS KEPT THEIR 12 KIDS IN CAPTIVITY FOR YEARS”; “PERSON DIES FROM EATING A SANDWICH”; “HOLDING A BOOK IS THE NEW BAG ACCORDING TO THESE MODELS”; “THIS BABY DOLPHIN DIED WHILE BEING PASSED AROUND FOR SELFIES BY TOURISTS”; ­“ FLAUNTS TAUT TUMMY”; “THE US GOVERNMENT LOST TRACK OF NEARLY 1,500 IMMIGRANT CHILDREN”; “20 TIMES JUSTIN AND HAILEY BIEBER WERE GOALS.” The mind-numbing headlines and terms float around in my brain like a never-ending carousel. “AND YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.” “THEY SAID I COULDN’T BE AN ACTRESS TURNED DIRECTOR . . . THEY WERE WRONG.” “CLAPS BACK AT INSTA TROLLS AND WE ARE SO HERE FOR IT.” “A WHOLE FUCKING VIBE.” “GETS CANDID.” If only I could force myself to throw up all of the words, usernames, videos, tweets, and photos I just ingested, I could feel normal. Bulimia for phone use.

  It feels like the internet was built to desensitize us. Like it’s part of a bigger scheme to make even the most sensitive among us tolerant of mass destruction and televised death so we’re more naturally able to cope with the world being destroyed in front of our eyes. Humans can grow accustomed to deteriorating situations as long as the principle of pleasure remains. We’re all Pavlovian dogs for little red hearts, no matter how nightmarish the landscape in which those hearts appear. Our mouths start watering at the sheer anticipation of digital attention. Therefore, we have no choice but to desensitize ourselves to its horrors in the name of the great dopamine rush. And honestly, if the world is being destroyed in front of my eyes regardless of how I feel about it, I’d rather be brainwashed by my phone so I can handle it.

  Going on your phone is easily the most effective way to dissociate and forget you’re a person, which I am on a quest to do at all times, considering what I feel when I am in my own body. When I’m on it, I forget everything I’m doing, like how I accidentally drank the entire Frenc
h press I made even though I’m also acutely sensitive to coffee and will now spend the rest of the day shaking. I’ve spent so much time on my phone and killed so many brain cells that if and when the end of the world hits, my only knowledge will be what I’ve extracted from social media. I imagine enduring the apocalypse with a few others on an island, each one of us bringing something to the table in order to survive, like in Lost. Or at least, I think like Lost; I didn’t watch because I don’t want to secondhand fend for survival on a remote island. Anyways, one of my fellow survivors will ask me to help make a fire or something, and I’ll be like, Yeah, no, I can’t help with that, but do you want to know tips on boosting your self-esteem from nine famous models?

  We’re all so addicted that if real life were a dystopian film, and the bad guys decided they were going to use iPhones to brainwash people and turn them into an army to destroy mankind, that army would consist of almost everyone. The scary thing is, life right now is that dystopian film. Our reality was taken over, only no one had to use force to control us—we turned ourselves over willingly to a pocket-size slot machine. Even when we’re told that our phones come with incessant government surveillance and unknown psychological and physiological damage, we’re still like, Nah, it’s cool, as long as I get to look at memes.

  In totalitarian regimes, you’re forced to look at a reality someone imposes on you. Our phones have recalibrated our behavior in a similar way; the internet tells us whom to hate, whom to like, what to be offended by, what to post, and what to say. Is it possible to keep track of your own opinions when someone writes something and then someone writes something about what that person just wrote and then people write things based on that thing and it ends with everyone collectively agreeing on Twitter what is right and wrong? No, because the internet is a shithole and nothing makes sense. What makes less sense is why I continue to subject myself to something that makes no sense when I thought I valued sense above all things. Of course my head is going to spin when I see an article about why Camila Cabello doesn’t talk about her relationship with Shawn Mendes and then an interview with Shawn Mendes about why he’s keeping his relationship with Camila Cabello private and then another article with quotes from both of them about why they don’t talk about each other and then an article two weeks later titled “Camila Cabello Is Finally Ready to Talk About Shawn Mendes.” Every time I go on my phone, I feel like I need to get a brain scan. Why do you go on it, then, Cazzie? you ask. Because I don’t have a choice!!!