I think I’ll buy the succulents myself today. Didn’t I think I was clever, drawing a comparison between myself and a myth? My life is not a Woolf novel and I’ve never thrown a dinner party. A Sunday without a work shift is rare. A warm day of April in this town is rare. I draw arbitrary lines to classify the severity of my illness. Only an ill person would stay inside today. I tell my mother we’ll buy the succulents on this day. She looks up from her computer screen. She’s revising proposals. She makes money fighting AIDS and bullying. I don’t really make money and it seems people no longer expect me to. No one could have foreseen my desire for succulents. I, too, was surprised that I could be seduced into gardening by listening to co-workers discuss wedding bouquets. I can’t secure a bride, not even a lover, but I don’t want to miss out on flowers too. My mother doesn’t ask questions. We go to the farmer’s market.
I read Mrs. Dalloway ten years ago. The teacher let us vote between Joyce and Woolf. There were only four boys in the class and they groaned when Woolf prevailed. The novel confirmed what I already suspected: moments do not exist in isolation but my experiences of them do. I started failing classes when the towers fell on live television on the fourth day of school that year. Everyone was trying to get into Harvard. I was trying to get high in the woods with Ashley. I missed her presence at school. I still feel her absence in my life; she might have even enjoyed my writing and not just because so much of it is about her. My guidance counselor did not understand why I had been so affected by the attack since I had not personally lost anybody. The kids on those planes though. I shrugged to his question but at night I slept with the lamp on. I started my first round of anti-depressants when my midterm grades arrived.
My coworkers think I’m on the spectrum. They talk to me slowly and assume I don’t understand the most basic of social cues. My stuttering and the monotone cadence of my voice both stem from the social anxiety, not autism. This is a distinction that even my closest friends conflate.
One morning, we are preparing the store for Easter as my coworkers discuss their siblings’ flawed lives. They say thinks like “I don’t want to toot my own horn but I think I came out the best of all my siblings”. They comment on my lack of contribution to the topic but don’t seem to infer the obvious: I am the black sheep they are talking about. Then they reminisce about how they used to get high with a boastful longing for their rebellious younger selves. They make a joke about me and LSD. It’s funny to them because I don’t even drink. It’s funny to me because they don’t know why. They look at me and giggle and I pretend not to have heard. “What was that?” I ask as though I haven’t been able to follow the conversation because I’m too busy stacking stuffed bunnies into baskets. “Nothing!” they holler with a quick smile and return to merchandizing.
I hate myself for not trying harder to resist parallels to cliché literary allusions. Sometimes a trip to buy flowers is just a trip to buy flowers. It doesn’t have to dig up all of your accumulated insecurities. It doesn’t have to trigger this degree of regret. You can browse a greenhouse without heartache. The journey to buy succulents is supposed to carry a simple message: I’m trying to enjoy my survival.
The outdoor selection is spectacular, an entire table full of voluptuous spikes. A father on the opposite side of the table asks his two young children which ones they like most and their mouths start to water. I feel creeping shame as my mom effectively asks me, her 28-year-old daughter, the same question.
I once found a photo album sitting in my grandfather’s basement. In it, there were faded pictures of my adult aunt walking through the woods with her parents. I knew immediately what this meant: Cathy spent her weekends taking walks with her parents. There were no additional albums full of my aunt celebrating major life events. I foresaw this very outing five years ago in that basement. I am reliving her life. Eventually, I will drink every night until my own brother can no longer follow my stream of dialogue on the phone. I cling to the fact I don’t drink.
It would be nice to have a garden of outdoor succulents, but my parents’ house blocks the sunlight from hitting their yard. We enter the greenhouse and locate the indoor plant section. There are two succulents. As I am staring at them and considering which window they’d thrive best in, my mom is making the same expression she wears when served undercooked poultry: a scrunched nose that means ‘yucky’. I know better than to react to this face. If I pretend the plants are exactly what I want, she’ll come to respect them.
We walk through the aisles until my mom loses her voice and can barely breathe. She waits outdoors where she isn’t as allergic to the air. I am admiring some potted plants beside a couple that has been slowly strolling and pointing while holding each other’s hands. I see the woman’s face and swallow the sudden lump in my throat. How glib it was to think I could simply buy flowers without dragging baggage through the greenhouse.
Sophia was a member of the Expos, my elite 8th grade softball team. I don’t remember our track record but I do recall the pleasing way her outfit draped on her lean frame; how she hit home runs but strolled casually around the bases like she was mouthing fuck you to the other team and a little bit to ours too. I admired her boyish nonchalance as she won us the game. She wasn’t all angst though: she clapped for me when I was at bat; she made room for me on the bench even though I didn’t want to sit with the team. She was better at the game than I was but we both rolled our eyes when the pitcher shed tears (which was after every game) or the right fielder struck up conversations with friends on the opposing team as pop-ups dropped around her. My longing to be close to Sophia scared me. I avoided interacting with her entirely.
For a second, I feel a certain contentment that those feelings have been somewhat resolved and she will never have any idea the role she played in them. I’m thankful my face has changed more than hers so we don’t have to strike up an awkward conversation about what we’ve been doing for the last decade and a half. But the feeling melts as I realize the man beside her is likely to be her husband. What if they are planning the garden for the yard of the house they just moved into? A list rapidly generates in my mind of all the things she’s likely to have experienced between our last meeting and now: high school boyfriends, a college major, unpaid entry level internships, breaking up, being broken up with, happy hours, getting her first job that she actually cares about, meeting someone she wants to settle down with, moving in together, promotions, wedding invitations, in-laws.
And then, as though a reflex, I start to generate my own list of more compromised ambitions: the career that never began; the awkward dates that led nowhere; watching Ashley’s mental health unravel; trying to hide from my mom that Ashley had been expelled and institutionalized; getting used to failing high school tests; crying so hard I tried to slap myself out of it; my lingering obsession with the children on those planes; 8 years of unrequited love for a friend; watching Ashley crumble after the trial when the assaulter was declared not guilty; explaining to several gay men why I didn’t want to wear that dress; six hand-penned journals full of pain; the mess of pill containers on my dresser; the paper flowers taking over my childhood living room; the poetry collection I acquired my senior year of college; the customers who correct my pronunciation of ‘aubergine’; my resistance to prescriptivist grammars; the books on gender and prison and race; the customers who scream at me about wedding programs; the daily discussions about my mangers’ wedding bouquets; the wish to be able to hold someone else for one night; the mounting resentment for the gay marriage movement; the bitterness; the inability to forget.
I often wonder how my life would be different if I had held it together in high school, if I had recovered from tragedy as fast as my friends seemed to. All those years of working hard might not have felt like a complete waste. Maybe I would have learned to drink in moderation and not needed to take pills to get me out of bed in the morning. I wonder whether Anna and I would have bonded over Mrs. Dalloway in the giant wooden chair at the park, shortly before she discussed it at her admissions meeting and they gave her the full scholarship. Would I still have felt the pain and would I still have learned to deal with it?
I remember the confusing day I got back a pop quiz in English and I actually passed, not because I gave a damn about my grades, but because I got it: I knew that when we bump into strangers downtown, we become bound by webs that stretch thinner as we get further away from one another but always remain delicately intact; I knew about the feelings you have for a friend that you can’t express, how everyone thinks she’s crazy because she’s willing to strip at the party with hardly any alcohol, and how she has a way of feeling life that others can only witness; I knew that some people struggle harder than most realize until it’s too late, and for people like us, each day entails a choice between an indefinite stretch or an abrupt course down.
My college writing teacher said that some poets refuse to use modern references so as to make their work more timeless, more serious. I reject this notion entirely. My writing needs to be firmly grounded for my exact coordinates, where personal grief intersects collective trauma. My words plot out my coping mechanisms and I need them to be specific, accessible, available. Such mechanisms include: reading each installment of dykes to watch out for when you’re searching for friends; smoking a joint with Ashley in the alley behind the Coolidge Corner Movie Theater before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; tucking your cell phone in a drawer and reciting Caedmon’s hymn aloud when you’ve just sent a message that says I’ve been in love with you for six years, please respond; buying chalk paint at home depot so you can scribble ne’er fear the heat o the sun’ above your bedroom door because you need to be reminded; enjoying rain because everything moves slower, like no one wants to get where they’re going and because nature has a way of achieving equilibrium with my mind’s illness; sticking to beliefs even when they alienate others around you because seven years later you’ll realize that song was sexist and that neo nazi did make you feel ashamed; accidentally standing up for yourself because your mental filters short-circuited under the pull of your heart. I want to remember that my education was not a fast track to financial success, even though that was what it intended to be. But look. Here I am with some coping skills.
Bull Dyker 