HERE ARE MY STUPIDS
• Lucy leaving
• Mom making me babysit her friend’s kid for three weeks
• Having face blindness and not being able to recognize people
• Being lonely and alone
The last two kind of went together, like peanut butter and jelly.
Weird problem + alone = unhappy forever
It was a sad sandwich.
Prosopagnosia—that was the peanut butter, and it was stuck with me forever. It was invisible, it was stupid, and I could hardly even pronounce it. Plus it was something no one had ever heard of. Whenever I tried to explain it, I could tell that people thought I was making it up. And I couldn’t blame them. If someone told me, If I see you tomorrow and act like I don’t know you, it’s only because my brain doesn’t work right and I won’t recognize you, I’d think they were crazy too.
Finally I was done eating and feeling sorry for myself. I picked at the last few crumbs and rolled the wrapper into a tube. I looked through it, pretending I could see Lucy. What was she doing? I imagined her on the bus, heading to camp, all alone. How did that feel? I crumpled up the tube. I didn’t want to know, but it was too late; I was already thinking about it, and now I felt guilty.
I’d started my good-bye to Lucy three weeks ago. It was my plan. Each day I made myself see less and less of her, so that now, on the day she was really leaving, it wouldn’t be as bad. It was like giving up sugar—you start slow and build it up—only I wasn’t quitting food. I was quitting Lucy. But it had been a mistake, because now that today was here, I still felt terrible. The good-bye hadn’t been easier at all. Today was the worst day ever.
And there was more; those five times she had called last week, I had lied on purpose. I wasn’t too busy to talk. I was just grumpy.
Angry and grumpy.
Jealous and grumpy.
Selfish and grumpy.
Worried and grumpy.
Sad and grumpy.
Grumpy is like ketchup—it goes with a lot of things.
This was a lot to make up for, and too much to write on a postcard. Plus, it wasn’t fair. It might make me feel better, but it wouldn’t help Lucy. And she was probably already sad anyway.
She wasn’t a camp kind of person, but there she was on the bus, heading off into the woods. Lucy’s parents were going to Oregon for the summer to fix up the new house, so the choice had been go with them to Oregon or go to camp. Lucy had picked camp, because of me. We were going to spend the last month of summer at Red Oak together. It was something I should have been looking forward to, but it was hard to be really excited about it. It seemed more like a final countdown to total unhappiness—the last thirty days until I lost her forever. How can you look forward to that?
I had to find something else to do—a distraction. I needed to feel better before I wrote to her, so it could be a happy, positive letter; she deserved that.