Sometimes when I walk home from school it feels perfect. Timeless. Impossible. I don’t know how else to explain it. The trees are green and tall, the air light and crisp, or pure and hazy, even the weeds choking the sidewalk have a sort of ethereal quality that makes it seem like they belong, like they’re necessary, like they’ve always been there, like somehow I am part of them, reaching up from their cracks in the pavement and stilling themselves in eternity. Sometimes I stop and listen to the insects buzzing in the grass, listen for birds, or hear the wind blowing through the trees, and I feel like a part of something much, much larger than me. Like I don’t exist and I don’t need to. Like I’m just a minor detail in a painting — just a bystander standing far away on the acropolis, rendered in heavy oils by some top-hatted Romantic in the nineteenth century.
I like that feeling — a kind of annihilation.
Being emptied out, in the best way.
I feel closest to Evie when I’m in that mood. I imagine she is so much nearer to the earth, to its rhythms and mysteries. Her problems are larger than mine, but they feel easier to solve.
It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid.
But it helps me to imagine that I could solve everything that’s wrong with me, feeling ugly and having parents who don’t like each other and spending too much time alone and thinking too hard, through a single thrust of a dagger. And not even my dagger — Evie’s. Evie’s dagger.
It’s easier for me to believe that I could fix things with a tool of Evie’s than my own. Sometimes I let myself believe that everything would be better for me if I found the right guy. Like I could pour out my heart to him and he would fix me somehow. I’d feel whole, always. I know that’s wrong, but a much larger part of me than I’d like to admit believes it. Maybe I’m not even sure I know it’s wrong. Maybe it would be better — how could I know either way? I’ve never had a boyfriend. Not even close.
It seems pretty good.
But I’m also afraid that even if I did find the right person, I’d ruin it by being too honest with them. Like there’s a limit to how much you can share before you betray your true self. And I know my true self isn’t any good.
No one would love it.
That’s why, right now, it’s much easier to be interested in guys I never talk to. To watch them from afar. To imagine they are daggers, daggers I could use in my own hands, when the time is right, if that time ever comes. Mostly they are infatuations that I can comfortably nurse for months. Jess once told me that if I talked to them I wouldn’t find them as interesting, and maybe that’s true. She also said I should get a boyfriend and that it is easy to do that because guys are fucking stupid, and that’s the reason they’d be less interesting to me if we talked. Maybe that’s true, too.
But if so, what’s the point?
* * *
In grade nine there was a boy in one of my classes whom I used to dream about regularly. I mean, all the time. I didn’t even really want to, because I didn’t think the happiness that I felt in my dreams would ever come true. Maybe sometime, vaguely, in a future that, to be honest, I still have difficulty imagining. Not with him, in any case. But I couldn’t help it. Before I started dreaming about him, we’d spoken, really spoken, maybe one or two times. This was before my face broke out. In geography. He was in my gym class, too, but we never talked there.
I don’t even remember our conversation — something about pickles. I’d said “pickles” was a funny word, I can’t remember why — though, yeah, it’s a funny word. Then, afterward, when he saw me in the hallway he’d say, “What’s up, pickles?” In a kind way, though it made me nervous. I thought he was probably confused about me, like he thought I was someone that I wasn’t. I knew I was going to disappoint him. I felt like I was disappointing him all the time, when I said my shy hello and disappeared into the crowded halls.
Richard. He had an unusual name, too grown-up, like he was already an accountant or something. I still don’t know if he had a nickname or anything. Probably, though I’d never heard anyone call him “Rick” or “Dick” or “Ricky” or whatever. I might have even made fun of him for his first name, the way everyone I knew enunciated every syllable — eventually, if we ever got closer.
In my dreams he was always waiting for me — at the entrance to rooms, underneath tables, somewhere far away where my dream would never reach. It was like fireworks going off when we touched, if we ever got there, fireworks and like something in me was turning something in him, or vice versa. We never had sex in my dreams — not really, even if it was probably a sexual feeling that I woke up with. It felt like it. But just entering his aura alone was a feeling of completeness, of satisfaction. It was so euphoric that when I woke up in the morning I was almost afraid to face the day, knowing that I would be without that feeling that I knew I couldn’t have on my own.
Knowing I might run into the unwitting object of my love. Or whatever it was.
Those dreams were confusing. Sometimes I would wake up and realize I was wet, ashamed because at some point in the dream Richard had turned into Jess, which felt weird and made me worry that I was gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay. I just didn’t want to be. Not for any good reason. Now I don’t know. Probably I’m not. Sometimes I woke up afraid — gasping for air, struggling against my sheets — because Richard had turned into something else. A kind of shadow — tall, gangly, with long hair, that would stalk me through my dreams. Familiar — something I knew but couldn’t quite catch. It was a fear that felt big, and primal, like it had always been there, vibrating at my very core.
In the morning after each of the dreams I would sit with the two feelings — the euphoria I had felt with Richard, the fear that came in the other dream.
I didn’t know which one to trust.
I couldn’t trust either.
It felt rude to see Richard in the hallway and to know that he was going to talk to me, and that despite everything I told myself it was going to mean so much more to me, even if I startled and ran away. Even if I startled so much and so often that that’s probably what he’d come to expect, forgetting his original object, instead content only to say a few words and watch me gasp for breath and turn my four knotty limbs against each other on the cheap tile.
In any case, before the end of grade nine Richard started seeing someone named Noreen. I saw their love blossom in the halls, and they became a serious couple, one of the few that have stuck, a union of two names that seem older, like they are fated to be, Richard and Noreen, and by the next year we were strangers again in the hallway. It was even worse seeing him then, with my face blemished — not only because it changed something he once might have liked, but because it felt like what had been in me the whole time, that he hadn’t seen, but I’d known was there, what I’d been afraid of, had finally made its slow, oozing way to the surface for everyone to witness.
* * *
When my dermatologist prescribed the pills that began to tame my acne he asked me first whether anyone in my family had a history of depression. We were sitting in his second examination room on the third floor of a nondescript office tower just off of 89. It was September and felt like summer still or maybe it was early October and unusually hot. I remember my bare legs sticking to the plastic of the little bed they make you sit on, even though he’d also pulled a thin, paper cover over it. The window was open and the heat was oppressive and it smelled like car exhaust from the highway, and the fluorescent lights were burning my eyes. He had been both dismissive and efficient, authoritative, when looking me over: itemizing my condition, asking me whether I had any acne on my back or anywhere else. “Yes,” I said, to all of his questions about the location of the outbreaks. “Yes, yes, yes.”
A history of depression, he had said. It rang in my ears.
No one had been hospitalized or ever tried to kill themselves. At least not that I knew. His question had made me kind of scared — like to answer it I would be revealing myself in a way I wasn’t prepared for, even though I’d given him everything else he asked.
I said no.
“Good,” he said. And he asked me my weight and then took out a pad and started to write out a prescription. “In certain cases, the pills I’m going to give you have been known to exacerbate depression. To make it a little more intense. Let me know if that happens to you and we’ll switch you onto something else. But this is the most effective stuff.”
I nodded. He kept writing, then turned back to his computer and fiddled with his charts.
“You should know, there have been some claims that that kid down in Florida was taking this, but it’s not entirely true. He stopped treatment about a month before he killed himself.”
“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t heard about him.
“In other words, don’t worry about it,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“There’s no significant evidence.”
I nodded.
“It doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”
I didn’t care. That was the price of a smooth face.
And back, which I hadn’t even considered before, though of course.
He finished whatever he was doing on the computer and explained the dosing schedule. Then he sent me back out into the office, where my mother was waiting. When we got home I Googled the name of the medication, Florida, teenager, suicide, and I found an article about a kid who had stolen a Cessna and flown it into a Tampa office tower. A note found in his bedroom claimed that he was operating in concert with Al Qaeda (it wasn’t true) and that he was trying to turn the upside down right side up. America was oriented in the wrong direction, according to his manifesto.
I looked at the photographs of the office tower and the suburbs that surrounded it and I thought that everything did look upside down. I printed out the photo and turned it upside down and hung it in my room, just above my bed. It stayed there for a couple months, as I kept taking my pills every morning and evening, as my acne started receding and my face started to get clearer, so much so that even Ross noticed and said it was a huge improvement, though I hated him for saying anything, until one day the poster disappeared when I was at school. Mom had taken it down, telling me when I got home that it was morbid and that she worried about me.
But it felt true.
My cousins on my mom’s side used to live in Brampton, in a huge residential tower on a street of huge residential towers, high and wide and clear and bright, with ornate lobbies and concierges and underground parking lots. But in between them pavement, empty lawns, tiny trees and shrubs, and the howling of traffic going by on Highway 10. The rush of cars constant, ever-present, like the sound of blood rushing through veins. When we got out of the car sometimes I imagined the buildings being excavated a thousand years in the future and the assumptions the archaeologists would make, and how they would miss the one thing that was crucial to understanding what it was like to live there, the machine hum and throb, like the wings of fibreglass zephyrs swooping and diving, and I wondered what they missed now in the digs out in ancient Mesopotamia or in the Mexican desert that you could never even hope to reproduce, the dim, menacing rumble of a world hundreds of years removed.
It all seemed upside down to me, in the same way that the photo of the office tower in Tampa did. Now my cousins live in a little upscale subdivision in Waterloo, but when they were in Brampton we would sometimes walk over to the corner store to grab a can of soda, and I remember those walks being endless, us so far from the thing we wanted, even though that thing was nominally part of the complex from which we originated. The scale was not human — you were meant to drive. What was a blink in a car was a whole afternoon on foot. The avenues were wide and the distances between things large.
It was like we were walking on a treadmill, moving endlessly with only the slightest shift on the horizon. I think it took us something like forty minutes each way.
I remember in the car on the way home I paid more attention to the strip malls and suburbs that we passed on the road out, seeing the distances differently than I had before, when they had been innocuous blurs, quickly accessible via right or left turn signal.
I thought then that there was a menace to the distance that had been erected, the distance set up between everything. My cousins’ home had always been its interior, intimate and warmly lit and engaging and varied, and I hadn’t spent any time assessing its outside. I felt grateful to live in Durham, a place that was maybe nowhere, but was at least for human beings, with a main street off 89 with churches and restaurants and little stores and close houses and mature trees. But I could see Brampton on the horizon, or what it represented, in Durham. I could see it even though it was over an hour away, with the new developments on the north side of town and the new gas stations and the promised shopping centre that they were going to build south of the highway.
What will it be like to live through so much change? I wondered, at the same time that I was almost afraid to find out.
My dad had been upset about some of the new development and I hadn’t until then been able to understand his anger or what it meant, only thought about the future fast-food chains and convenience that would come with them. But it felt after to me like an eradication heading straight for us, a nothing that was coming and going to turn us upside down. To concentrate us and pin us, smouldering, to the side of an office building in Tampa.