Definitions of Indefinable Things

by Whitney Taylor

  “So you’re going to leave me? Is that it?”

  “It’s going to happen eventually. Might as well save ourselves the melodrama.”

  He raked his fingers through his hair, trying to process. He was going to cry the unforgivable tears. Maybe they weren’t so unforgivable.

  “You’re such a fucking coward,” he said, watching me angrily. It was sad anger (see: depression anger). “You’re so terrified of being left that the second something good happens to you, you destroy it. This”—​he motioned to the two of us—​“this is real. I’m not Bree. I’m not Alex from geometry. I’m standing here promising you that I’m not going anywhere, and you won’t let yourself believe it. You won’t be satisfied until you’re alone. What, do you think loss is easier when you choose it?”

  “We could have never made it work,” I whispered, the sun beginning to rise over the houses across the street. A beam glowed behind Snake’s head, the tips of his hair lit orange. “We’re too much alike. All we would have done was prolong each other’s unhappiness.”

  “I never believed in happiness, but I was wrong.” One of those newly forgivable tears escaped from his eyes. He bowed his head so I wouldn’t see. “It’s not only for stupid people. I was happy whenever you were around. And whenever you told me you hated me. And whenever we kissed. I was non-Prozac, fully aware, smart person happy.” He looked at me with an intensity that was disarming. I thought I was breaking up with him, but I wondered whose heart I was breaking. “I was happy because you were unapologetically you, no matter how much it hurt me. You probably never knew that hating me would make me fall in love with you.”

  It was the stupidest thing he’d ever felt. The absolute greatest mistake he would ever make. There was no defending it. And by the aching sincerity in his eyes, I knew he wouldn’t try.

  I felt it too. I was in love with him. In love like fireworks and lightning and drunken desire. In love like windows and Ferris wheels. In love with the obligation to want love. In love with the beautiful futility of humanness.

  But above it all, I was in love with the idea that I was the only one he ever needed. The only one he ever would.

  “I’m not the first girl you’ve said that to, Snake,” I whispered. The sun was fully shining, reflecting off the hood of the cars. “I’m not the first girl you’ve loved, and I won’t be the last.”

  “Carla? That’s what you were talking about yesterday on the ride, wasn’t it?” He shook his head in frustration. “Yes, I told her I loved her. Yes, at the time I thought that maybe I meant it. I wanted to mean it. I wanted her to be the one I felt this way about. She’s having my baby, the least I could do is try to fall in love with her. But I couldn’t. I can’t. Is that what you need to hear? I don’t love Carla.”

  “You don’t love her now,” I said, knowing that I needed to end this before I broke down. Before he did. Before the wreckage was unsalvageable. “But she’s your family, whether you like that or not. And you’re going to have a baby to take care of. Together. You could easily fall in love with her, and where would that leave me? Where is any of this going to get us? I can’t be with you, Snake. I’m sorry. I just can’t. The truth is, we have too much on our plates. And we’re too young. And we’re too depressed to hurt each other any further. So why don’t we leave it at that, all right?” I took a step away from him, succeeding in creating a world of distance in the asphalt between us.

  He stared at me, all of the needing and wanting and Snakeisms I’d come to love crushed and tarnished behind his eyes. He nodded like he was giving up, like he’d done everything in his power to repair the damage and was being forced to leave it unfixed. I wished I could have told him. Not everything was meant to be mended.

  He ducked into his car, fumbling for his keys with shaking hands. He turned the ignition key, revving the engine. I backed up, unable to watch him drive away knowing it was the last time, knowing this absence was the permanent kind. I hated a world where absence was permanent and nothing else.

  “Reggie,” he called. I glanced over my shoulder as I was heading back to the building. He was preparing to drive off, one hand on the wheel. “I think I finally have a trigger.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I DIDN’T GO TO SCHOOL THAT week. By the time Wednesday rolled around, I’d missed two tests, one Spanish project, and a horrendous choir sing-off that proved to be the sole benefit of being hospital-bound. Work wasn’t much of an obligation, either. I called Peyton to tell her I wouldn’t be able to make it in that week. She grieved my unthinkable situation, promising to help via praying and fruit baskets (see: phony concern).

  My days were rubber spaghetti platters in the cafeteria, my drooling nephew spitting milk gunk on my lap, and afternoon talks with a dad who couldn’t hear me. It almost made the stages of depression seem like warm-ups for the real depression, the overpowering sense of being wholly, inescapably alone.

  I hadn’t talked to Snake since our rom com–style breakup in the parking lot. That’s not to say it wasn’t the only thing I thought about, even when I tried to imagine happier unhappy memories. It was always his eyes. His pained eyes, half sparkling in the sun, half hidden in the shadow of his hair. His eyes were all I saw when I looked at Killian’s chubby cheeks or stirred the gross hospital coffee in my Styrofoam cup, or listened to my mom read Bible passages aloud to my dad as the bars on his machine arched and fell.

  I saw Snake’s eyes and imagined rain. It should have rained. There should’ve been a drenching downpour and begging pleas and a sappy goodbye kiss that left the audience inside our minds weeping at what could have been, grasping at hope for that notorious happy ending.

  But it was a cool day. It was cool and sunny, and the weather was pleasant. The birds still sang in grating pitches, and the cars still drove by, paying our slow deaths no mind. It was like every other day. It was no respecter of its victims, of the nonliteral hells we suffered in and the very literal pain of being nothing. Nothing to anyone but ourselves.

  Therapy was rescheduled for Friday. The start of the weekend. The day nondepressed teenagers hung out with their friends at the movies or threw sketchy parties that ended in police visits and wasted vomiting. Friday wasn’t the ideal day for my version of vomit, for rehashing old feelings on a green couch while a woman with two PhDs scribbled self-destructive and emotionally unavailable in my evaluation file.

  When I got there, I sprawled out on the couch like I did every week. She started with the simple questions. How did my week go? Where was I on the theoretical emotion scale? What was I doing to bridge the communication gap between myself and others?

  Then it got tough. And uncomfortable. And we talked about my mom. And dad. And hearts. And how unfair it was to be alive.

  The way she looked at me in that particular session was so different from what I’d grown used to. Her eyes were heavier, her breaths slow and carefully drawn. Maybe her dad had a sucky heart. Maybe she could relate. Or maybe it was just me needing someone. I probably needed someone to understand so badly that I convinced myself she did. I guess there was no way to know.

  She laid her glasses on the floor beside her, leaning forward to generate an environment of welcoming, or whatever it was the doctors called it. And then she didn’t say anything for a minute. No inspirational speeches or exaggerated psychotherapy terms or pretend reassurances. It was just her eyes, which I had never noticed were brown, and her careful inhales that sounded sharper than most, and silver-painted nails tucked under her chin.

  “Let me tell you something I wish someone had told me when I was your age,” she said, her tone peaceful and honest. Genuine to a fault. She reached for a piece of paper and a pen on the table next to her and drew a mark. “This is life. We exist on a straight line. There’s point A, the beginning. Point C, the end. And point B, all the crap in between. And this tiny line, a drop of ink on paper, this is our line. This is all we get. It’s our one shot. And it’s terrifying, isn’t it? Because it ends. It’s not a c
ircle that will loop us back around for another chance. We get stuck in point B, where we grieve and cry and get scared and fall in love and get left and wish that we could outlive our line or draw a better one.” She pointed to the center of the mark, her finger lingering on the page. “But that’s the beauty of point B. No one’s is exactly the same. This is the only line you’ve been drawn, Reggie. And it’s unfair that one line is all you get, but it’s all any of us get. The only way to waste it would be to not live it. And to not love the people who walk their own.”

  “Like a tightrope,” I said.

  She stared at the page, her expression puzzled. “Huh. I guess it is.”

  Monday, I returned to the gossip-fueled bane of my existence (see: school). Karen had suggested getting back into my usual monotonous routine to help me cope with what she called this “spiritual hurdle” I was jumping over. It was funny, because it felt more like a crushing boulder the size of a very familiar house by the pond. But I wouldn’t dare insinuate that my “spiritual hurdles” were linked to more than physical forms of dying.

  A girl named Taylor in my U.S. history class told me her family was praying for my dad. My chemistry teacher gave me an article to read that felt a lot like Coma Facts for Dummies. Here and there, someone who knew a guy who knew a guy told me how sorry they were and promised to do anything they could to help. I wanted to tack a banner to my locker that said LEAVE ME THE [non-Karen-approved expletive] ALONE. I wanted to scream and beat the desks with baseball bats and kick the walls because my dad was dying, and the guy I hated in the best way was having a baby soon, and my chosen hobby was quickly becoming staring at the cracks between hospital tiles and hating the mere act of inhale-exhale. But people needed to feel like they were helping, I guess.

  Carla didn’t show up to school that day. It kind of made sense. I wouldn’t have gone to school either if my friends abandoned me the way hers did, and my baby’s dad didn’t want to be with me, and my stomach was heavy enough to sink me to the bottom of the pond. The more pity glances I got, the more I wondered how Carla had done it all this time. I hated to consider it, but maybe she was stronger than I’d ever given her credit for.

  Polka sat with me at my house that night while my mom and Frankie stayed at the hospital. Karen made me take the home-alone teenager oath that I wouldn’t party it up with my extensive group of friends (see: Polka), and that I would finally get around to typing my paper. I could hardly argue. It was due Friday and the only words I’d typed were my name.

  And I did work on it. Sort of. I typed random thoughts that kept me up at night, random thoughts that wouldn’t shut up. English enthusiasts like myself called it “brainstorming.”

  Not everything leaves

  Point B

  The only life we’ve got

  Wild hearts

  Twizzlers

  “How’s your paper coming?” I asked Polka. After I typed Twizzlers, I knew I was getting nowhere.

  “Done,” Polka said, smiling behind his MacBook. He sat in my dad’s recliner, propped so far back he was practically lying down.

  “Did you go with freedom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I bet that was hard to define.”

  “Not really,” he said, wrinkles appearing on his forehead as he studied the screen. “It make sense to me. Easy to write when it make sense to you.”

  “I still don’t know what to write about,” I said, clicking my fingernail against the mousepad.

  “Well, what make sense to you?”

  I leaned my head back, watching the cursor blink on the page.

  Nothing made sense to me. I had so many thoughts I could have drowned in them, but they all felt betrayed when I tried to force them into words. I didn’t know how to grab ahold of one and define it so simply. All of my thoughts felt vast and infinite, like the thousands of stars shining above the Ferris wheel. That night, the only thing that had made sense to me was that I was holding Snake’s hand. And that I was scared of dying. But more than that, I was terrified of being alive.

  “Polka, can I ask you something?”

  He sat up and looked at me sideways. My mother’s shag rug separated us, and it seemed weirdly coincidental that something always did. Whether it was a picnic table, a desk, or a rug, we were always close enough to reach out and touch each other, and distanced enough not to. I didn’t want to upset the delicate system we’d created, but I wanted to know why Polka was so content with being less than a friend and more than an acquaintance. It was strange that he didn’t demand more the way most people did.

  “Why don’t you sit with your friends at lunch?” I asked.

  “I don’t have friends at lunch.”

  “Yeah you do. The other exchange guys who eat in the cafeteria. I’ve heard them invite you, and you never go.”

  Only briefly did he look up, and just as briefly did his dark eyes reveal a sort of unusual softness. “Because I want to sit with you,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because if I don’t, you sit alone.”

  “It’s just lunch.”

  The corner of his lips quivered, but didn’t move. It was the closest to smiling he’d ever come. “Then why it matter if I sit with friends or sit with you? It just matter that I sit somewhere.”

  I looked out the window and thought about pills and letters and lunch tables and things I could never define. But it might not have been about defining anything. It was about recognizing that pain existed and deserved to. That everything I felt, from loneliness to hatred to fear, existed and deserved to. What I tried to understand wasn’t the point. The point was that I tried to understand it.

  “You can sit with your friends,” I told him, after typing The Definition of Depression across the page.

  He shot me a rare Polka smile. An extraordinarily comforting sight. “Who said I don’t?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  CATFISH WERE THE UGLIEST CREATURES TO ever move on the earth. It was like God made them as a joke just to say, Hey, I can make really beautiful things like flowers and Ryan Gosling, but I can also make the ugliest possible creature any mind could ever have the displeasure of imagining. I watched the slimy excuses for marine life blow bubbles on the surface of the pond, ignorant of their own hideous misfortune. The dock was wobbly underneath me, like the hundred pounds of ugly (see: catfish) were forming an anarchy to take me down. If I’d still been talking to Snake, I would have demanded that the elusive pond committee fund a restoration project immediately.

  Carla had texted that Tuesday morning to ask me if I would meet her on the dock after I left the hospital. Once again, she’d been a Hawkesbury no-show. Like the Snake standard, she’d better have been dying, dead, or having a baby for her absence to be permissible. If I had to suffer through seven hours of busywork, social drama, and hardly edible grilled cheese, so should she. But she was Carla Banks. She had money, an intimidating dad, and a giant ginger squash stuffed in her womb, so she could pretty much get out of anything.

  I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to see her. And I sure as hell didn’t want to brave the pond knowing that Snake could come down at any minute and confuse me. I didn’t want to hear his voice, and see his much-too-pretty eyes, and listen to one of his arrogant speeches that was actually kind of endearing, and forget why I left him in the first place.

  However, there was always the grand but. And that particular one was that there wasn’t much left to lose. The afternoon could turn out to be a hormonal tearfest or plot for revenge or battle of the ex- and sorta-ex-girlfriend, and it would amount to nothing. I couldn’t get hurt any worse.

  She made it to the pond only five minutes after I did, her red hair tied back in a curly ponytail. She wore a pink sundress that swelled her up like a pregnant peach. Her stomach was abnormally huge, so much so that I worried about her getting near any sharp objects for fear of popping. That would have been a mess I wasn’t willing to clean up.

  When she saw me, she grinned like
we were old friends who hadn’t seen each other for a stretch. I thought it best not to mention that we were in no way friends and that not seeing her for a stretch would have been what got me grinning. She waddled to the dock and wasted a minute attempting to sit down gracefully beside me. There was nothing graceful about it.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said, straining to catch her breath from the grueling sit. “I didn’t think you would. I know you have a lot on your plate, with your dad and everything—”

  “I thought if you saw my disinterest in person, you’d get the hint that I’m not your BFF.”

  “I got the hint when you didn’t answer my first fifteen calls.” She smiled. “Thanks for that.”

  “Anytime. And for the record, calling someone fifteen times in thirty minutes could be considered harassment. It’s unethical.”

  “So is stealing a pregnant girl’s boyfriend, but I didn’t fault you for it.” She smirked at how well she was keeping pace.

  “Touché. But I didn’t steal him. We were never dating. I’m sure he made it sound that way, though.”

  “Don’t worry. I know he’s very skilled in embellishment.” She caressed her stomach with her hands. There was a solemnity in her eyes that seemed like too deep a feeling for her. She didn’t look like picture-perfect Little Miss Flashburn. “How come all of our conversations end in Snake?”

  “He’s the only thing we have in common.” I shrugged and tore off a splintered piece of wood from the dock and tossed it in the water.

  “Is he? Because we knew each other years before we met him.”

  “Yeah, but we weren’t friends. You were captain of the prissy posse, remember?”

  She smiled, embarrassed at the reminder of her seventh-grade self. “That lasted one month. Tops.” She gazed across the lake, the water bobbing in her eyes. “We should have been friends.”