My Heart Insists on Letting Sleeping Dragons Lie
Hammill Library—the newest building on Western University’s campus—has fulfilled the promise of allowing me to disappear among the stacks. I know no one and no one knows me. Granted, it’s the first week of a new term, but my master plan is working just like I hoped it would. A clean slate. It wasn’t like I was known at my former campus (it was too big), but rather I couldn’t shake my own perceptions around my past and its influence on the new start I was attempting to make.
I’m surrounded by people: students, librarians, professors. All of us sit in a field of tables on the main floor, multiple seeded rows, growing crops of bodies bent over their light pine-coated surfaces and harvesting fruits of knowledge from books and computers. All strangers. No one knows Seth, the soccer player. No one knows Seth, that guy whose dad used to beat him up.Nobody knows Seth, the kid who almost died.
A girl at the opposite end of the table where I’m sitting looks up and catches my eye. She offers an inviting smile and tucks a strand of bobbed dark hair behind her ear before looking away. I return to the focus of my laptop and the book I’m perusing for my first history paper due next week. When I look up again, the cute girl catches my eye a second time. I offer her a polite smile, not really into the idea of meeting anyone, and focus on my computer.
There’s a couple across the room, heads bent together, working on something. It isn’t that I’m adverse to meeting someone. I’m like any guy, I suppose. I want to fall in love, find a partner, and have amazing sex, but historically, I haven’t had the greatest track record where relationships are concerned.
In high school, I messed around not thinking about the emotional harvest I was reaping, until Abby. She was my first friend and my first love that ended with her falling for my best friend when we were seventeen. That sucked, but it was exactly what I needed too, weirdly enough. Then there was Hannah senior year, and I’d wasted the year pining instead of acting on my interest in her.
Even if I had though, I was in no emotional place to offer anything to a relationship as an eighteen-year-old recovering from a suicide attempt, which my next relationship taught me. I met Jenny freshman year of college, and I thought I loved her, but she broke up with me because she said she couldn’t deal with how closed-off I was. Dr. Bethany and I have spent a lot of time talking through that.
After Jenny, I sampled hookups but always walked away dissatisfied with how temporary and ultimately lonely they were. How easy they were to reinforce being as closed off as Jenny accused me of being.
During my sophomore year, I met Amber and fell for her, but as it turns out, I had more feelings than she did, and she moved on with a guy named Ivan. I heard they are living together now.
I told Dr. Bethany the worst part about the whole Amber thing wasn’t that she’d broken things off, it was knowing that I’d gone all in, and I still hadn’t been good enough. The next guy had been. A shot to the old self-confidence. Again. It felt a little like revisiting the Abby debacle in high school, dredging up all those insecurities.
Dr. B had asked, “Do you truly feel you went all in?” Her question had pissed me off, and she knew it. She followed that up with this gem: “Why does that question make you upset?” which she does all the time.
I knew what she was getting at, because anger is a secondary emotion even though it’s often my primary setting. I was lying to myself that I’d gone all in with Amber. Typical me. I might have had all the feelings, but I hadn’t gone all in with Amber about my past. Instead, I gave her a glossier version, just like I had with Jenny. Dr. B responded to that by saying, “Perhaps when you find a true partner, you won’t feel the need to reserve those parts of yourself? You will go ‘all in’ as you say by being completely open even about the parts of yourself and your life you try so hard to hide.”
Dr. B is always calling me out like that.
Things ended with Amber over nine months ago, and now I’m starting over in a new place, new faces, new beginning.
This new start is what I want, but then I also wonder if in some ways that clean slate is another way for me to avoid the shit I can’t escape. I carry the past in my head and body. The Seth who betrayed his best friend over a girl because of his own ugly insecurity and jealousy. The Seth who faced down his father’s dragon each day and usually lost. The Seth who wrecked his car because he’d lost hope and thought death was the better option. My seventeen-year-old-self haunts my twenty-one-year-old, upgraded version. I may have moved towns, transferred schools to shed my old skin, but I can’t seem to shed that old shame coating my insides. Sure, I’ve done a ton of work with Dr. B, and I hear her voice guiding me even now: Are your historical experiences—good and bad—the only ways to define this current version of you?
Of course not. I logically know that.
It isn’t the rational that clogs up the plumbing of my life. It’s the irrational emotions I wrestle with. She knows that too, of course. That emotional part of me who is trying to cleanse himself of the pain, the shame, and his own latent dragon he’s working so hard to keep asleep.
I return to my paper resolved to focus on what I can control: the outcome of this assignment.
I’ve decided that this isn’t running away—the shedding of my past for the clean slate of this new start—but it is me looking ahead. It’s me redefining Seth Peters without all the baggage. That is what I need to move forward.
My phone vibrates.
I look at it.
My mom’s calling.
So much for a new start, I think, and decline the call. I turn the phone over on the tabletop and decide I’ll call her later. A part of me is avoiding her and by extension, him, but another part of me says that’s okay. Dr. B would say it’s okay to set healthy boundaries and honor what you need. What you need to start this term at a new school without the baggage weighing you down.
Except it’s my mom, and we’ve always been a team.
I pick up the phone, open a message and text her: Can’t talk. In the library working on a paper. Everything okay?
Mom: Why wouldn’t it be?
Me: Still on the wagon?
Mom: Yes!
Me: What’s up?
Mom: Just missing you. The house is too quiet. I got spoiled having you home.
I’d only left home a couple of weeks ago. I text: Tired of 80’s reruns?
Mom: Stop. We have new programs we watch. Just started a new police show.
Me: From this decade? Dad branched out?
Mom: [smiley face] He even tried an episode of Downton Abbey with me.
Me: And?
Mom: He said it was “okay.”
I’m surprised, but I text her back with: Did he agree to watch another episode?
Mom: LOL. No, but at least he tried one. Progress.
I’d like to say he’s a walking antithesis to progress, a one step forward, two steps back kind of guy, but that isn’t accurate. This last year was his fourth year sober, so that is progress even if I don’t always trust it, or him. I text her: That’s good.
Mom: How’s your roommate?
Me: He isn’t a serial killer.
The day I’d moved, she’d thrown the what if your roommate is a serial killer at me.
Me: Trace is great.
Mom: You should bring him home for a visit.
I don’t comment, putting my phone down. I don’t want to subject anyone to my parents. I return to the paper I need to write. The phone pings with another message.
Mom: I love you.
Me: Love you too, Mom.
Her: Don’t be a stranger.
I send her a thumbs up and put the phone down again, then stare at my computer screen with its blinking cursor. I reread the last sentence, but my mind wanders back to my mom.
The day I’d left she’d been different, panicked. It made me wonder if something was going on she wasn’t telling me. Dad wasn’t drinking. He hadn’t been violent and was diligent about attending his meetings and therapy. He seemed to like his new job—he drove a truck for the UPS now. He’d lost weight. While he’d gained weight when he first stopped drinking, which I figure was probably normal for someone who’d been managing his nutrition with alcohol and now wasn’t, that had seemed to stabilize when he’d started walking. He and mom walked together. All in all, in the time I’d been home, things had actually seemed… perfect.
But I can’t shake the nagging feeling that something is off. That feeling makes it impossible to concentrate any longer on the paper. I close the book, shut the laptop, and prepare to return to my new apartment where I’m sure my new roommate is immersed in a video game tournament of epic proportions. It’s good, this newness, everything different and unrecognizable. It’s exactly what I wanted.