This Is My Brain in Love

by I. W. Gregorio

  I can’t wait to tell Jocelyn, but she only left for her interview an hour ago. I look down the rest of my to-do list for the day. I already did a deep dive into the past week’s numbers, isolating the catering and online orders as the sources of increased revenue. Next up is some website stuff I wanted to do so people could select the Healthy Choices option for individual items.

  A little more than halfway through my coding, I hear Mr. Wu and Jocelyn get back. Charged up with the good news, I head into the kitchen only to see the door swing shut as Jocelyn goes upstairs. My heart drops.

  I turn to Mr. Wu, who’s muttering in Mandarin. “Did it not go well?”

  “She very moody.” He frowns. “So, probably no go well.”

  I turn to stare at the door leading up to the apartment upstairs. It’s just a piece of wood with a few bits of metal, but with no one upstairs to chaperone and Mr. Wu glaring at me with his best “don’t you have work to do” scowl, it’s impenetrable.

  I walk back to the front and grab my phone to text Jocelyn. I can already feel my heartbeat pounding with worry in my ears.

  You okay?

  I stare at my phone for two agonizing minutes before it’s obvious she’s not going to respond right away. Briefly, I consider pulling a fire alarm to clear the building or going out to buy a grappling hook so I can scale the outside wall up to her room, something smart or heroic that’ll pull her out of whatever funk she’s in. Then reality sets in as my thoughts shrink down to a realization that’s small and sharp: Obviously, she doesn’t want to talk to me.

  I’m dizzy with disappointment for a moment, unmoored, and I try to find steady ground by piecing together what must have happened.

  The interview didn’t go well. Was it my fault? Did I set her up for a fall by forcing her to meet with Grace, whose level of perfection was probably unattainable? Did the omelet I made for her give her indigestion? Should I have walked her through my breathing exercises this morning? I must have failed Jocelyn in some way for her to close the door on me like that.

  I go back to my laptop and consider sending her an e-mail, even though it’s unlikely she’ll check her e-mail if she’s not responding to texts. I’ll give her the good news about the catering business to try to cheer her up. And I’ll apologize for whatever I did, or whatever I didn’t do.

  As I type through the message my hands start shaking, and the typos build up. The edges of my vision start to blur, and I close my eyes.

  Five seconds in, five seconds out.

  When I open my eyes my vision’s gone back to normal, but there’s still the slightest tremor in my hands, and my back feels like I’m a strung-up marionette. I continue my e-mail, only to be interrupted by a text chime.

  Don’t want to talk about it, is all Jocelyn writes.

  It’s like being sucker punched. I look down at my watch. I’ve been sitting on my ass for the past ten minutes, but my heart rate is 120. Another cramp hits then, as if someone’s stuck a fork in my liver and twisted. For a moment I struggle to breathe through cement-filled lungs. It’s been a long time, but I know what to do. I put my hands around my mouth and nose like a baffle and force my shoulders up and down, squeezing and releasing the muscles, willing them to relax.

  Then, when I have a modicum of control over my body, I open up a new message and type slowly, reluctantly:

  “Hi, Dr. Rifkin. Do you have any emergency slots this week?”

  It turns out that Dr. Rifkin had a cancellation, so I slide into an open appointment at three thirty. Mr. Wu gives me permission to leave for a while after I promise to come back for the dinner rush. Jocelyn still hasn’t woken up from her “nap.”

  When he opens his door to let me into his office, Dr. Rifkin has a gentle look of concern on his face. “I’m so glad I could get you in, Will.”

  Left unspoken is the fact that it’s been years since I’ve called for an acute appointment. I’d been doing so well, in fact, that I’d cut down from weekly visits to twice a month, and now monthly. It just made more sense with how many commitments my parents had to juggle.

  He leads me to the familiar couch, with its array of textured pillows. As always, I pull over the one covered in flip sequins, smoothing them down so they’re all green then drawing patterns in them to change them over to their blue side. I stare at the pictures on the wall of Dr. Rifkin with his husband and their two kids. They had just adopted their oldest daughter when I started therapy. It is wild to think that she is in grade school now.

  “So, how can I help you?” Dr. Rifkin asks.

  Well, might as well go with the headline. “I almost had a panic attack today.”

  “Almost?” he asks.

  “Well, not almost. I had one—the abdominal pain, the elevated heart rate. But I was able to control it with some relaxation techniques and mindful breathing. So it didn’t… I didn’t feel like I was going to die, or anything.”

  Listening to myself, I think: That’s a pretty low bar.

  Dr. Rifkin seems to agree, his forehead creased in concern. “Did you feel like you needed any medical attention?”

  “No, not really. It was exactly the same symptoms I had before, and it went away within five minutes.” My doctors always reinforced to me that panic attacks are almost never dangerous, no matter how frightening they feel.

  “That’s fabulous, Will. You’ve done an incredible job working on a lot of exercises and techniques to help you in this situation. I know that you know that, if this becomes recurrent, or if you have any new symptoms that you can’t explain, you should call me or go to the ER…”

  I’m nodding before he even finishes his sentence, because I’ve been to this rodeo before. The next thing he’s going to do is offer pills.

  “… and you know that if you ever get to the point where you don’t feel like you can control your physical reactions,” Dr. Rifkin says, right on schedule, “there are medications that might help to decrease the frequency of these attacks.”

  I nod, because God, I’ve wanted those meds before. There was a point in middle school when I could barely go a week without getting another panic attack, when I wanted nothing more than a pill I could take to make me able to step on a school bus without fear of hyperventilation.

  My mother had been frank about her opinion. “Those drugs, William, they can be good, but they can also be very, very bad.” She ticked off their evils on her fingers. “They can give you headaches, they can disturb sleep patterns, they can make you wish to harm yourself. Some of them can make you an addict.” She didn’t expressly forbid me to take them, though she warned me, completely unnecessarily: “You know that if you are thinking about taking drugs, you should not mention it to your nne nne or to your cousins, right? It’s better to keep these things private.”

  In the end, I’d held off on the meds, and to this day I’m not sure if it was out of pride or because of my mother’s warning.

  “Thanks, Dr. Rifkin. I’m good for now.”

  He gives his usual nonjudgmental nod. “All right. Were there any triggers that you can think of for this most recent incident?”

  The AC in Dr. Rifkin’s office is on full blast, and it’s nice when you first walk in from the August heat, but it creeps into a chill the longer I’m here. I look down at where I’ve tucked my hands in between my legs to keep them warm, and stretch my shoulders, preparing for the heavy lifting about to begin.

  “I told you about my summer job at my last appointment, right?” He nods again. “Well, there’s this girl.…”

  This Is My Brain, Powerless

  JOCELYN

  When I wake up to the pounding at my door, I look over at my alarm clock, see that it’s four thirty, and almost go back to sleep. Then I see the little red dot lit up by the PM, and I realize it’s my dad hollering something about how I need to come down now because Will had to leave for a doctor’s appointment.

  “All right, all right, I’m coming,” I yell, not budging from my bed. Five minutes later the knocking s
tarts again, and I can tell by the knock (softer, but regular like a metronome) that it’s my mom, whose knocking is not to be denied. When I open the door, my mom looks me up and down, expressionless, before she motions to our bathroom. “Kuai yidian, shu tou, xi lian.”

  I look in the mirror, and I’m a living, breathing “Hangover” trope. My hair is a rat’s nest, and the makeup I had put on is a ruddy, streaky mess from my post-interview cry. I’d made it up to my room feeling a calm numbness. I’d told myself that I was okay, that I wasn’t going to freak out until the decision e-mails were sent out, and then my phone had buzzed, and it was Will, and he asked me if I was okay, and I realized with an ugly flash that, no, I was not okay.

  And I’m still not.

  After Will’s text message I cried myself to sleep, wallowing in a freaking tsunami of disappointment and self-loathing. Now that I’m awake, as I survey the wreckage, I have no idea how to rebuild. I have no idea what to hope for anymore. I’m not going to be able to fulfill my dad’s contract. And what then? Do I wait for college? Do I sneak behind my family’s back (again)? Do I strike another bargain?

  Or maybe I do nothing and accept the things that I cannot change, like that stupid motivational quote that every teacher posts on their wall that’s supposed to be inspiration, but in the end just reminds you that you are, in the end, powerless over a lot of the things that matter most.

  I grab a bar of soap and scrub all traces of my interview off my face, but there’s nothing I can do about the slight puffiness around my eyes. I comb my hair, scrape it into a ponytail, and slink downstairs.

  It’s a strange relief to get back to A-Plus, to the knowable repetition of taking phone calls, checking orders, and packing take-out bags so the containers don’t spill in transit. At around six o’clock Will comes back.

  “Hey. Something wrong?” I ask. There’s a stiffness to his walk, a flatness in his face. “My dad said you had a doctor’s appointment.”

  “Nah, just a checkup.” He rubs his wrist and doesn’t meet my gaze. “Hey, can I help you with some of those orders?”

  We work in silence. Even though part of me is grateful that he doesn’t ask me about the interview, a bigger part wants to spill everything like a confession, as if he could pardon me for my ineptitude. Then, when Will leaves to make some deliveries and we still haven’t said more than three sentences to each other in a row, a niggling voice in my head asks, What if he doesn’t even care if the interview went well?

  My mom goes into the kitchen once she’s relieved of her chaperone duties, and once I’m alone my thoughts continue to degenerate. It’s my fault Will’s acting weird. He did ask me if I was okay, and I said I didn’t want to talk about it. I know how sensitive he is, and I still blew him off. How did I think he would feel? Maybe he’s finally seeing what a bitch I am.

  The truth of it all cuts through me with a howling sort of pain, and my hand spasms over the plate I’m clearing. It’s so obvious what he must be feeling: his coolness, the way he held back and couldn’t look me in the eye, how quickly he volunteered to go on a delivery and leave me behind.

  My throat closes up and my still-swollen eyes prickle again. I want to take the plate and do something dramatic with it, like smashing it into the ground only to collapse keening into the shards like the actresses in the Taiwanese soap operas my amah watches.

  The door opens. A customer comes in. And I don’t do anything, just swallow and say, “How may I help you?” like always.

  That’s not true: There’s one thing I do for myself. After a few minutes, I call up and make Alan come to finish up my shift and close out the register. He whines, of course, but he comes down because he will owe me until the day he dies, and by the time Will comes back I’m safely in my bed upstairs, trying not to cry, and not succeeding.

  This Is My Brain, Helpless

  WILL

  The next day before I get to A-Plus Jocelyn sends me an e-mail telling me she’ll be out most of the morning on a supply run, then going out right away to drop off one of our catering orders.

  Could you go through Priya’s most recent footage from the restaurant and see if you can come up with an Instagram video or a YouTube channel idea?

  When I reply, I say that I’m happy to do it, because of course I am. After that, though, I’m stumped. I think about adding, “I miss you.” Or, “Are you avoiding me?” But I chicken out, because I’m almost certain that she is, and that my pushing her will only drive her away.

  In my session with Dr. Rifkin yesterday, my story started with, “There’s this girl,” and ended with, “I think she has depression and I don’t know what to do.”

  Dr. Rifkin responded with a question, the way he always does. “So how does that make you feel?”

  Because we’ve been through this before, I started answering almost before he finished asking.

  “I feel responsible,” I blurted out, “like it’s somehow my fault, that I pushed her to this point. I’ve been trying to, you know, get her to acknowledge her own feelings and maybe talk to someone, but it’s like the blind leading the blind. How can I help her if I can barely get my own issues under control? I feel so helpless.”

  Dr. Rifkin hummed and nodded in the gentle low-key affirming way he always does, then asked, “Why do you feel responsible for Jocelyn’s happiness?”

  “Isn’t that what the Little Prince said we should do?” I said, half joking, half not. Maybe “responsible” is the wrong word, but of course I want Jocelyn to be happy.

  Dr. Rifkin took his own calming breath and shook his head. “You’re talking about the line where he says you’re responsible for the things you’ve tamed? That darn quote is the basis of more unhealthy relationships than I can count. It probably single-handedly paid off my graduate school debt.”

  “So, what you’re saying is I’m being codependent?”

  “I’m not the biggest believer of codependency as a negative trait, actually. As you know, I prefer to frame relationships in terms of attachment theory.”

  I’ve been working with Dr. Rifkin long enough to know what he’s referring to. Essentially, attachment theory started with the study of the interactions between babies and their caretakers and then morphed into a way that psychologists can categorize relationships into four main styles of attachment: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant.

  You can guess which one I tend toward the most.

  I’ve always felt like it’s unfair that there are three insecure types of attachments and only one secure one. It’s as if the deck is stacked against us from the beginning.

  Security is the anxious person’s Holy Grail, and I’m no exception. What Dr. Rifkin’s worked on with me for years is how to trick my brain so that I don’t automatically respond to insecurity by overthinking things. He’s taught me—well, if I’m honest, he’s still teaching me—ways to establish closeness in the face of panic.

  The journalist in me understands the idea that most brains are really, really prone to confirmation bias. My head is a veritable fake news factory: Hyperbolic statements of distress. Unconfirmed catastrophes. Thinly based assumptions that things are all about me.

  So, every once in a while, I need someone to help me with some fact-checking. Someone to give my brain a Pinocchio rating of five so I can laugh for a bit and see things more clearly. There’s only so much you can do in an hour, but yesterday Dr. Rifkin did help me sift out one central truth from the tangle of my emotions, which was that I can’t fix Jocelyn, but I can support her. For today, that means giving her space and helping her family’s restaurant.

  It doesn’t mean I can’t miss her, though. As I go through Priya’s footage I keep forgetting myself and looking over to where Jocelyn usually sits to share each clip that grabs my attention. Without her, A-Plus is depressingly quiet except for her father’s incessant throat clearing and the occasional phone call.

  The sensation that I’m missing a part of myself takes me by surprise. I’v
e always been an introvert, confirmed by every stupid internet permutation of a personality test I’ve ever taken. I’m a Ravenclaw. C-3PO. Ned Stark. Vision. I like my friends, they keep me grounded, but I’ve never been lonely when I’m not with them.

  What I feel now, though, is more than just loneliness—it’s a restlessness, an itchy desire to move from where I am, to find her, to be with her. I spend an hour looking through videos, and after each one, my default thought is to try to guess what Jocelyn would think about them.

  It’s become impossible for me not to see the world, at least partially, through her filter, so my favorite clips are the ones I know would also resonate the most with her. One is a single shot of her grandmother deveining shrimp with knife work that would make an assassin proud. Another is time-lapse video of the checkout counter over the course of a day that animates the literal dinner rush, making me appreciate the number of people we feed on a daily basis in a whole new way. But maybe my favorite one is a single moving shot Priya did where she circled around the staff sitting down for their evening meal long after the doors were locked. The camera pans fast enough that you get an almost dynamic sense of how much food is made and shared family style, but slow enough that you can see the fatigue in the slope of Mr. Wu’s shoulders as he props his head up with his hand, in Miss Zhou’s distant stare as she sucks the last threads of chicken off a bone. Not much is said during the meal, and it would be easy to watch the shot and find it depressing, but there’s something about the way Priya frames it that captures how it’s almost a sacred ritual, this last breaking of bread of the day.

  I tag the best clips and, instead of just uploading them to our Facebook site, I share them with Jocelyn in an e-mail, just to make contact. Just to create an electronic link between the two of us, a digital lifeline to remind her of me. Maybe it’s pathetic. Maybe it’s exactly what she needs. I guess the fact that I only spend ten minutes freaking out about it is a sign that the thousands of dollars that my parents have spent on Dr. Rifkin haven’t gone to waste.