Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (13 page)

She asks me if I do feel numb. If numbness really captures what I feel when I’m anxious or sad.

“I can’t tell right now because I don’t feel like I’m anxious or sad.”

She asks if I’m happy or calm.

“I feel like this is the kind of calm I can achieve.”

I think about taking medication and then go online to read about the effects. Dr. Dora didn’t name any medicines I should take, so I look up info about anxiety and depression pills. All the top Google hits are stories about kids who take antidepressants and end up more depressed and kill themselves.
The medicine made him do it.
That’s the title to an article I don’t want to read. Maybe it’s just isolated cases that people are freaking out about.

Maybe the medicine doesn’t make these kids more depressed, maybe it just didn’t make them feel better and they gave up. Medicine failure, broken promise, last shred of hope. Goodbye.

I call Jorie’s cell number just in case she got it working again. It rings and rings, so I listen to the rings for a while.

She is so much more damaged than I ever thought. Am I that damaged? I don’t have a box of pain. I have a tree on my ceiling, though. I don’t cut myself, but I hug trees. I spend more than a few nanoseconds a day wondering what it would be like to kill myself. Is this all the same thing but different?

I pull up Beth’s contact information on my phone. I haven’t called her before. Ever. But she gave me her number so we could text. I stare at her number and my thumb hovers over it, ready to initiate the call.

A warm feeling bubbles in my throat. I try to think about how I will explain a late-ish call on a school night. I try to think of what to talk about that’s not scary and emotional.

Maybe I should just go downstairs and talk to my parents about nonsense.

Maybe I should call Derek and see how he’s doing.

But I don’t. I press the call button and somewhere in the sky, waves and radiation work to connect us. We live in the same town, go to the same school, have breathed the same air, laughed at the same jokes, but I’m asking for a signal to go to space and back to connect us.

Weird. I wonder if Whitman ever thought it was weird for people to use a telephone?

“Hello?”

I croak out a hello or something and my name.

“Hey, James. What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

And the sound of nothing follows.

I can’t even fake a conversation in the state I’m in.

“I was thinking about something for the literary journal,” she thankfully says. “What if we designed the journal with some cool HTML stuff so that your poems could float over the photos in different places and the reader can, like, click when they want the next line? It would be kind of interactive.”

I’m willing to think anything is cool as long as I’m not talking.

“I can have my uncle do the work,” she says. “He loves doing Web stuff.”

“I think that would be really fun.”

“You sound tired.”

“Did I tell you I have a bunch of photos of trees on the ceiling above my bed? It’s hard to explain. It’s branches and roots and trunks and leaves. But I put it all together to look like one tree made up of many trees.”

“That sounds really cool.”

“It’s hard to describe, but I’d like you to see it.”

Yes, America, I just invited her to lie on my bed to look at my ceiling. A smoother pickup line has never been uttered.

“Hey, maybe we can even do
that
for the issue. Have like four or five of your poems and you click on different parts of a tree to get to it? That would be totally in line with Whitman, too, right?”

I hold the phone up to see if I’m actually on a call with someone real. I press a thumb against my left eye to check if I’m awake. The tests reveal the truth—that I’m having a small, good moment that I should cherish.

“That’s a great idea, Beth.”

“I think it would get more people to actually pay attention to the lit mag and to your poems, too. Just for the novelty of the Web presentation.”

We stop talking and the silence is comfortable. It could be a golden silence. In fact, it is.

AT THE PIZZERIA
on a slow Sunday night, I ask Derek if he can drive me over to my sister’s or to Fillmore’s this week.

“I have to ask her something important,” I stress.

“Just call her.”

“No phone. I told you that.”

“I’m not tracking your sister’s life, you know.”

Derek is texting furiously. I’ve never seen him so focused.

“Who are you texting?”

“Sally. Her fiancé found my jacket.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Well, it’s not really my jacket. She got it for me and hadn’t given it to me yet. But it was in their townhouse. He’s a Mets fan, so seeing a Phillies jacket made him instantly suspicious.”

“I can’t believe you are screwing around with an engaged chick who buys you
official team merchandise.
”

“I’m very charming,” but he says this without charm. It seems like things are weighing on him. At least he’s not still mad about the weekend cover story mishap.

“You all right?” I realize, as I ask this, that I rarely ask him this. He asks
me
if I’m okay. He’s asked me that pretty often since Jorie left. But I never inquire about him. I just assume he’s happy because he’s Derek. I’ve never thought of him as having an internal monologue. He gets mad, riled up, tired, worried, happy, hyper. But depressed? Morose? Introspective? Never!

“I’m just not sure about this whole thing,” he says. “Sally seems to think this can go on forever—that she’ll get married but we will keep messing around.”

Sally’s fiancé is a trainer for the Fillmore’s restaurant chain, which requires him to travel all over the country to help train staff at various locations. He apparently will go away for months at a time. I ask Derek how people can be in a relationship like that and the two of us stare off in the distance, thinking for a good minute before we agree that marriage makes no sense anyway.

“Are you gonna break it off with her?”

“Not until I finish my sexual Jedi training.”

Normally Derek would deliver this line with crude gusto, but he’s staring at his phone like he just got a sext from Justin Bieber.

“So can you bring me over to see Jorie?”

“I don’t think so,” he says. “I just got a text from Sally that doesn’t seem to be for me.”

He holds the phone up to me and I see the message:

Can’t wait to see if you live up to
the hype this Friday! See you at
Fillmore’s at 6:30!

It’s followed by three smiley faces.

“I assume she wouldn’t be talking to you about your hype?” In my head, Dr. Dora warns me not to joke about serious things.

“Is she cheating on me?”

This is not a rhetorical question. Derek wants me to confirm or deny his suspicions. My gut says, Sure, of course she’s cheating. She’s cheating with you on her fiancé. Why wouldn’t she also cheat on you with someone else?

I resist honesty through sarcasm and choose ambiguous emotional support.

“I don’t know, Derek. This could be a bunch of things.”

“But this message wasn’t meant for me. We don’t have plans Friday.”

“No. No, I would say it’s definitely a mistake that she sent it to you. She’s probably texting a couple of people at the same time. You do it all the time. But three smiley faces doesn’t mean anything. And Fillmore’s isn’t exactly a romantic spot to rendezvous—I mean. Um.”

Flip comes out with a well-timed delivery; I’m saved but feel bad for Derek anyway. I haven’t been embroiled in a double-agent, older woman love affair before. It must be a whole new level of emotional turmoil and gratification.

MY CAST FINALLY COMES OFF
and my arm looks pale and thin and smells, but I think it helps me get over myself. At least something seems different these days.

Beth and I work on the lit mag website design after school. I try really hard to just relax and have fun and it takes me a few days to realize that I am, in fact, relaxing and having fun. Dr. Dora and Dr. Bird would be so proud of me.

That and I stop thinking about Beth as
a girl I like who might like me
and focus on how we have a mutual goal—to make the online literary magazine all sorts of crazy awesome.

For a week I don’t think about medication or depression. I don’t write anything in my anxiety journal because nothing I feel feels like anxiety. It feels like fun.

Her co-editor, Roy, gets into the website too, and the three of us end up staying on a Thursday until six o’clock. One of the maintenance guys comes by and tells us we have to leave.

“I’m not even sure why you’re doing this here,” he says. “You all got laptops. Go home!”

Roy tries to explain about the network storage and the website, but the guy clearly doesn’t care.

As we’re walking outside, Roy says he’s actually really excited about the website.

“I don’t even think my stuff is good enough for it. I’m going to try drawing, like, a short graphic story or something.” He talks about an idea that Beth and I both agree will be great, and I feel good about Roy and his idea and don’t even care if his skills fail to match his ambition. He’s excited about something. It’s infectious.

Beth sees her mom’s car. Roy sees his dad’s minivan. I see no car for me.

“Do you want me to wait with you?” she asks.

Roy waves and leaves without offering a ride. Maybe he knows what I’m hoping. Even though I’ve been relaxed about Beth and the potential for us to fall in love, even for just a little while, I won’t deny that I have spent many moments staring off into space with the thought of a first Beth kiss. Does it make me seem like a liar? To say that I’ve been relaxed and focused on just the lit mag when I’m hyperconscious of the moves we’d need to make, to tilt our heads just slightly, for our lips to part just a bit, for us to move our faces close, casually, naturally, not like we’re floating across space hoping to intersect, but that the gravity of our bodies, the gravity of our personalities, the gravity of fate itself, will bring us together in a kiss that will send tickles of joy through our lips, cheeks, faces, down into our hearts and beyond? Do you think this makes me an overthinker? A dreamer? Like someone who might loaf and contemplate a spear of grass?

Well, who cares, right?

I guess I care, because kissing this girl in front of the school while her mom sits in a car a few yards away would not be very romantic.

“It’s all right,” I utter. “My dad will be here soon.”

We have a moment. I’m sure of it. It’s a moment because we don’t say anything and I think—I’m pretty sure—that Beth wants to hug me, at the very least, and then she does. It lasts billions of nanoseconds and I feel like I could blow up into a thousand happy pieces!

In the time after Beth leaves, I wait and think of all the stupid things I’ve hated about life before. It seems unreal that I would ever be depressed. How stupid it seems to hate life, to hate homework, to hate my parents, to get annoyed with Derek, to think I have any excuse to be depressed. What is there to be sad about when the world has possibilities? When even in the smallest spear of grass there is wonder?

My father’s car pulls up. I get in and the stench of leather seats and a thousand cups of coffee and four thousand cigarettes engulfs me. I cough.

“Thanks for getting me.”

“Your mother hates driving over here.” He turns out onto the road that will lead to another road that will lead us over the highway and to our house. I hate being in the car with my father usually, but I’m feeling pretty damn good right now.

“You working tonight?” he asks.

“Nope.”

Some awkward conversation follows. School and then work and then school again.

Then I think of something to push my luck in every sphere of my life.

“Can you give me a ride tomorrow night?”

“Where?”

“To Fillmore’s.”

“When?”

“Around seven?”

“Why?”

“I have a date.”

My father and I have never discussed women before. Women as in
women.
I got no sex talk. When I turned twelve I did find a strangely conspicuous
Family Health Manual
on my bed. The book, copyright 1968, taught me a few things about the dangers of masturbation and how girls spend their adolescence thinking about their periods. The Internet, copyright 2013, has refuted most of that book’s basic claims.

“Who is she?”

“Thanks for assuming I’m straight,” I tease.

“Ugh. Don’t even joke. All that gay Whitman probably stunted your development.”

My father has read no Whitman, as far as I know.

“She’s a girl from school. We work on the literary magazine together.”

“So she likes poetry?”

“She likes me. And poetry.”

My father thinks. Using my excellent peripheral vision, I study him. Who knows what happens in his brain. He’s probably wondering if he can sell her some commercial real estate.

“You’d like her, though, because she doesn’t like Whitman.” I need to charm my dad because, technically, I’m grounded. But maybe the prospect of a date will help more than charm.

He laughs the laugh he uses for me and my mom—a puff of air out of his throat.

“Here’s hoping she likes Emily Dickinson,” my father says.

“I don’t get it.”

“
Dick-
inson?” He sighs but smiles.

I guess I’m waiting for him to ruin my day. And here he is making a crude joke that Derek would have made.

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe my father just can’t talk to me and I can’t talk to him. Maybe we speak in different languages about things, and maybe it’s too late for either one of us to try to learn a new way to talk. It doesn’t help that I hate him for everything he’s done to Jorie. But maybe he just didn’t ever figure out how to talk.

“Do you ever get anxious, Dad?”

“Before a big pitch or an important lunch. Yes. But you know that to be successful you have to learn to hold that all in check.”

“How do you do that?”

“It’s different for everyone.”

“No, I mean how do
you
do it? What works?”