TANTALIZED by NENIA CAMPBELL
Nenia Campbell
Copyright © 2014 nenia Campbell
All rights reserved.
Published at Smashwords.
DEDICATION
To my readers.
This is proof that you should not encourage me.
Now you must reap the consequences.
PART I
Once I half-convinced myself that I could hear pain. Sharp, stinging cuts were high-pitched like screams. Throbbing aches were low moans. Swellings and itches had a slow, steady, timpani beat.
The more I pondered this phenomena, the more blurred the lines of my own self-perception became amidst the crashing chorus of chaos. Every scratch and bruise took on new shades of meaning. Was it so unlikely that my body had developed a peculiar brand of synesthesia?
My mother thought so. In fact, she thought the whole thing was, as she put it “bloody ridiculous.” She's not even British, either. No. She just watches too much Downton Abbey. Talk about weird.
I remained convinced that she was wrong. She couldn't feel what was going on inside my body or my head—that was my unique experience. And the folly of human experience is precisely that it is so subjective, so tailored to the individual. One person's symphony of neural synapses is another person's auditory hallucinations.
I remember the day when my convictions shattered. I had just sliced my wrist, and I sat in my room for hours, listening, waiting, half-wanting to move on but unable to let go. The only sound I heard was the sound of my heart echoing in my ears.
That resounding sense of disillusion and disappointment serves as a perfect comparison to how I feel when my parents rise in unison at the breakfast table to inform me that I'm going to Fielder University against my wishes the very next day.
Trapped. Caught in an infinite loop. Tricked.
It seems necessary to point out that Fielder is the only college willing to accept me, out of dozens. Something Mom makes painfully clear while listing off the various reasons I have to go. As far as my parents are concerned, this is my last chance to make something of myself.
Because if you don't have a college degree from an accredited university stapled to your forehead, you're worth less than the air in your lungs.
I'm nineteen-years-old. I let college application deadlines sail by unheeded last year and intended to repeat the process again this year. Fights erupted at the breakfast table every other morning, preceded by loaded questions about my plans for the future.
“I'm living, aren't I?” I said. “Isn't that enough?”
No, it wasn't.
Apparently, I had to live and be miserable.
Things got really unpleasant for a while. I cut, and drank, and stayed out all night so I could sleep in all day, thereby avoiding further interactions with them. My parents started discussing other subjects.
Mercifully, they started leaving me alone.
I thought the two of them had finally come to their senses and seen just how much their constant harassment was taking its toll on me.
I should have known better.
Because they weren't being merciful. They were being stealthy. While I was sleeping, or out, they had filled out various college application forms in my name. I could not believe it when I found out, just how deeply rooted their treachery was.
They had gotten copies of my high school transcripts and copies of my SAT scores, which they scanned and sent out accordingly—by mail or PDF.
They queried letters of reference from the select few teachers who hadn't loathed me. Namely, my creative writing instructor and the teacher for home economics. I cringe a little when I think of what they may have said to my benefit. “Puts cathartic release in fiction to good use.” “Quiche has half-decent crust.”
But that wasn't even the worst of it.
For my personal statements, Mom spilled out a tearful recollection of my institutionalization worthy of Oprah. She talked about how being at Cherry Hill Psychiatric Clinic had made me “introspective” and “eager for a fresh start.”
It was a betrayal on par with Judas or Brutus.
Et tu, Mother?
“Try to understand, Jessica. We're worried about you.” I had just finished screaming at her, asking her if she had any thoughts or considerations for my feelings—and no, not the ones that she had just made up on paper for the benefit of the admissions boards.
Her apology did not impress me.
“I'll never forgive you,” I told her.
Six months later, and I still haven't.
People are careening around me in a wild carousel of colors and shapes, dizzying in their sheer intensity. After spending three hours in the car my legs already feel unsteady, but these densely-packed crowds are giving me a sense of vertigo.
I have the passing urge to grab hold of my mom's hand like I'm five-years-old and still afraid of the dark but then I remember that I'm still pissed off at her and plug in my ear buds to suffer in the not-so-silence.
Besides, being the nosy busybody she is, Mom would want to know why I'm afraid. I'm not quite sure how to put my fear into words. Much like my preadolescent conviction that I could hear as well as feel pain, my fears seem to transcend the bounds of ordinary human experience.
Telling my mother this would only result in an accusation that my predicament is somehow my fault. She would probably accuse me of sneaking drugs. That's her go-to excuse for my behavior these days.
The fact that she is partly right in this instance makes me even angrier than I already am. I go to my iPod's menu and select my “vindicated” playlist, which includes a bunch of I'm-pissed-off-type songs including the titular one by Dashboard Confessional.
With the well-worn lyrics playing on the tip of my tongue, I hold my silence as other incoming freshmen swirl around me in clothes like the plumage of tropical birds. I wonder if it's possible for my retinas to burst into flame from sensory overload, like maybe the rods and cones are getting too much friction.
I don't know, I never took any science classes. Maybe the weird things my brain does would make more sense if I had. Like the way how sometimes, when I'm spacing out, the world around me doesn't even seem to be moving anymore. Instead it changes to a series of shifting, strobe-like images like in one of those old-fashioned projection screens.
That's a real disorder, by the way. I know, because I looked it up on PubMed. It's called akinetopsia, and it's the inability to perceive movement or motion. Picture it. The world, moving. But for you, time always stands perfectly still.
My world is a frieze, as elaborate as it is unmoving. My parents' lips are making sounds and syllables, but they hold no meaning to my deaf ears.
I shouldn't be in this place.
That is truth in the center of madness.
Where I should be, I'm not sure. But this place, Fielder University, isn't it. No, sirree.
“Isn't this exciting, Jessica?”
Mom's words make sense again, and she has the strained voice of one who has had to drag her nineteen-year-old daughter out of bed, kicking and screaming at five in the morning. Full of pep and forced enthusiasm, provided by buckets of caffeine and sheer determination. As if those things can rub off on me by association. So not happening.
When I don't respond, she says, desperately, “Just think, your first day of college.” Since there is nobody around to keep her from uttering inane clichés, she goes on to say, “The first day of the rest of your life.”
Fucking spare me. “I wish it were the last.”
She fake smiles. “You don't mean that.”
“Oh, trust me. I do. I really do. Completely.”
She flinches, looks to my father for assistance.
“Don't bother, Helen,” he says. “She's in a mood.
”
But moods pass; they are fickle things darting in and out of the underbrush of the conscious mind. This—whatever this is—is deeply entrenched: a permanent squatter looming dark and dangerous in the forefront of my brain.
I can feel my pulse ticking in my temples like a time bomb. Or a tumor. That's another thing, I used to wonder if I had brain cancer. It would explain so many things. The wild fluctuations in emotion. The fact that I can never seem to focus. The weird fixations and sensations that everyone brushes off but me.
One CAT scan and $1,000 proved me perfectly, scientifically healthy, with a side of “I told you so.”
“She seems to have a mild case of hypochondria,” the head doctor said. “Perfectly normal at her age. I went through a similar phase myself in adolescence.”
You and I are nothing alike, I wanted to shout.
I almost wished I did have cancer, if only so they wouldn't be so condescending. Mom told me that was a horrible thing to think, let alone voice aloud. “You're lucky you're healthy. Millions of people in this world wish that they could say the same, and you are selfish enough that you would throw such a gift away? God should strike you down for having such thoughts.”
Yes, I thought, he should—but why hasn't he?
I wouldn't exactly call my situation a bed of roses, either. For example, who tells a kid suffering through cancer that they're just in a mood when they're upset? When their lymph nodes are swollen with bus and their atrophying, tumor-ridden frontal lobes cause them to shout abusive things at their family and friends, or even shit themselves in public, who tells those poor cancer patients that they're not trying hard enough to control themselves. Who the fuck tells them, “You know what, quit the chemo. It's an indulgence. You should just get over that cancer by yourself. You'll feel better.”
Nobody, that's who. Not unless they want to find themselves the center of a communal outrage.
On the other hand, if you have a mental disorder that makes you shit yourself in public and shout abusive things at your friends and family, you're accused of doing it for the attention, of being dramatic. Suck it up, you're told. Stop wallowing in your own selfish indulgences (not to mention your own shit). Jesus Christ, there are people out there who have real problems, like cancer, and here you are whining because you don't feel happy or normal in the morning. Learn to be empathetic, for fuck's sake!
The amount of sympathy you get from having an illness is paid out like a Ponzi scheme and psychiatric disorders are at the bottom.
So no, I'm not exactly eager to deal with life's shit.
The sunlight is starting to hurt my eyes. I can see floaters zigzagging across my retinas. The more I try to ignore them, the more they're there. I'm starting to sweat. My shirt is plastered to my armpits. I don't belong here. I can see it, just as plain as the arcing floaters twitching around in my visual field.
It doesn't take a college degree to see that one of these things is not like the others, and I'm the one who's just not right. Anyone can. Anyone except my parents, that is, who wrote my acceptance letters for me, turning the very things they criticize about me into my biggest selling points.
Ignorance must be a fun place to live; my parents seem to vacation there year-round.
“Jessica, please say something,” my mom pleads.
Jessica, please, don't you want to be normal? She said, when I found the acceptance letter. It was addressed to me but somebody else had clearly opened it, and after I finished screaming about how it was against federal law to tamper with somebody's mail and that I was going to call the cops on them both, I screamed at them for applying to college's in my own name.
Oh, wait. Did you say normal? Sorry, I didn't realize I had a choice. You mean if I shove my thumb up my ass and wish really, really hard, I might just become normal, you fucking assholes?
“Jessica.”
Don't talk to your mother that way.
How should I talk, then? How do I talk so that you'll listen to me, instead of spewing this fountain of bullshit. It's like I'm at the national water park of bullshit over here. You never listen to me.
You should listen to yourself, my dad said. Then you'd hear how irrational you sound.
And why we're so worried about you, Mom cut in.
With all due respect, Mom, fuck you.
I say that now, only without the with-all-due-respect part. “Fuck you.” All our arguments seem to follow the same cookie-cutter pattern these days, so formulaic I practically have them down by rote.
“Do you want to go back to Cherry Hill?” Dad is saying. “Is that what you want? Are you telling me that you would prefer to be institutionalized than to attend school at such a prestigious institution?”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, Jessica, your father's not threatening you.”
“I thought that was why you were sending me to Fuck-All University”—“Fielder,” Mom cuts in, because she can't help herself—“That's what I said. Fuck-You University. Because it is an institution. And that's the next best thing, right? A little paid vacation away from your daughter, where you don't have to deal. Well yeah, I guess given those two options I would rather rot away in the fucking loony bin.”
Even my psychiatrist wasn't completely on board with this decision. “It could be a good opportunity,” was what she said, “But only if you're ready.”
Note the qualifier. Only if I'm ready.
Since she has a Ph.D., I really thought my parents might take her professional opinion to heart. But they weren't impressed. Dr. Fields hasn't known you as long as we have. You can be very manipulative when it comes to getting your way. It's her job to take you seriously.
But not theirs, obviously.
You're going to Fielder, Jessica. We are tired of you bumming around the house all day, sleeping in until three or four in the afternoon and coming home at all hours with those boys. Your mother and I have to go to work in the mornings. You can't hold down a job, and you refuse to try. We made it clear when you graduated high school that we expected that you would either go to college or work.
I knew this was some cowardly under-the-table scheme to send me away for good. Hearing my suspicions confirmed didn't make me feel any better. It filled me with the anger that belongs exclusively to the vindicated and self-righteous.
If you force me to go to Fielder, I told them, I'll kill myself. I'm not fucking around. I mean it.
Don't go into one of your moods. Not now. Do we have to dial 911? Do you really want to be put into involuntary confinement? Again?
Don't, don't, don't. I didn't ask to be born. Why can't you let me die? Why can't I decide whether and when to end my own life? How the fuck is that fair?
You destroy us when you say these things.
Then you deserve to be destroyed.
Even though I'm uncommunicative, Mom oohs and aahs over the campus. Still pathetically trying to win me over. As she points out stores and restaurants, anything that catches her eye and might catch mine, the transparency of her desperation makes me sick.
I pointedly ignore her. I know it hurts her, but she deserves as much for dragging me out here against my will. I don't want to be taken in by a few shiny things. I want to hate this place, and it will be easier to hate Fielder if I have nothing that grounds me to it.
Dad tells her not to bother, that she's just wasting her time. “Look,” he says. “Let's just find the dorms so we can drop her off and get out of here so we can beat the traffic. She's determined to be miserable.”
He's always been the first to give up on me.
“I knew it,” I cry. “You want me to go to college because you don't like having me around, but you're too fucking cowardly to let me take care of the problem my way. You don't give two shits about my education. Well, I may be breathing, Dad, but I'm still dead inside, and it's because you killed me!”
At the sound of my raised voice, a few people turn in our direction. “My God, Jessica, shut up,” he says through cl
enched teeth. “We're in public.”
“I'm sorry, am I not normal enough for you?”
The two of them are like broken records, playing in tandem but not at all in sync. It's jarring and I hate it. I hate them. I hate this place. I hate everything.
“These are the dorms.”
The relief in my father's voice makes me sick. He wants me gone. It's so obvious he's counting down the seconds until he can race back home and turn my room into a rumpus room or a guitar studio.
I stare at the brick buildings. “That's where you're sending me to live? I've seen jails that looked cosier.”
Even Cherry Hill had a garden.
Cherry Hill's garden was beautiful, featuring what was probably the biggest collection of nontoxic plants in the area. A lot of the schizophrenics liked to stand out by the fountains, perhaps attracted to the sound of running water. I don't know. Some of them would freeze in place and stand there for hours, unmoving, and I would marvel at how their muscles wouldn't give out.
I would talk to them sometimes. The best listeners are people who don't talk. It's even better if they don't comprehend what you're saying. Less chance of being judged that way.
Dad ignores my remark. “I'll go find someone who works here,” he says to my mom.
I squint my eyes and watch my dad depart for the yellow brick buildings against the dazzling backdrop of the sun. Tears roll down my cheeks. Situational. Emotional. Does it matter?
All at once, I feel resigned. Maybe it is the lack of relationship between my body and my mind, but then it sinks in that this is really happening and there is no foreseeable way to stop it.
None.
I'll try to hold it together until we can locate my dorm room. Until my parents leave and I can lie down. Until then, I will do nothing except exist, and only because I have no choice in the latter.
For the moment.
Dad returns with a blonde girl whose smile is stretched wide enough to split her lips like rotten fruit. She is wearing a pink shirt with khaki shorts and it is hard to say which I hate more: her, or that hideous color combination. It makes her look like a smug, fermenting watermelon.
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