by Ann Mauren
He caught me staring and came right up. Pausing a step away, he looked me over without comment. Then sort of abruptly he gathered me up into a tight hug that lasted for a wonderfully long time. When he finally released me, he looked me over some more. Then his hands came up to cradle my face, fingertips pressing lightly behind my ears and thumbs brushing back and forth to wipe away some of my tears. His probing eyes bore into mine for longer than I could stand and I had to look down. After what seemed like an eternity of me fighting with my eyes to get back to business and stop wasting time being ridiculous, he leaned in and kissed me…on the forehead. Very softly he whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
Then he hugged me one more time, kissed me on the top of my head and walked away.
Was I having a grief-induced delusion? Some coping strategy my mind had fabricated to make me feel better? Well, it was working. But then with horror and self-loathing I realized that I hadn’t said a single thing to him, like “Hi” or “Thank You” or “I Love You”.
IDIOT!!!
I tried to soothe myself with reason and logic. Despite the endless scenarios of girlish fantasizing that I’d engaged in since we’d met, always with him in the starring role, I had been slowly facing up to reality. There were some things that placed me far, far outside of his league—things like the fact that I wasn’t gorgeous, or cool, or an adult. Over time and especially recently I had come to terms with this reality. I thought I had finally moved past it.
So although our brief encounter had felt amazingly good—and I’d take an amazing reality over an amazing fantasy any day—I knew it would soon result in the infliction of a terribly painful mental and emotional setback for me. That knowledge converted into reality, which set in immediately and with a vengeance.
Just like the rush of the most pleasurable high imaginable, from the most illicit drug available, thinking about that hug and especially the way his hands and lips had felt on my face was completely irresistible. It would start before I could stop myself, taking me by surprise and debilitating me, stringing out into various memories or fantasies, each with their specific appeal. Then just like with an addictive substance, following my high was a hideous torturous crash. For one thing it reminded of the funeral, and my holes. But then I also would have to face the facts about the past and the future. The truth was that Gray had never been mine and he never would be. The truth about the present was the worst of all. He wasn’t with me now and neither was my grandpa.
Sometimes I would get mad. Why did he do that to me? Did he really come all the way over from school in England to hug me?
Fantasy Answer: Our time together in Iceland had bonded us in an eternal way.
Real Answer: His dad made him come to the funeral and he was sorry for me because my grandpa died—nothing more.
Then I would crash…again.
Chapter 3 – Recovery
The mental self-destruction lasted longer than it should have. It felt like an eternity. Maybe it was the dual nature of the torment, making it seem to last twice as long, or just the absence of people I dearly loved making time drag. My mind was trying to deal with a fresh wound (losing my beloved Grandpa) and an old wound opening back up on me (a strongly entrenched crush I thought I’d finally beaten). Which was more painful? It was hard to say. But the combination was greater than the sum of the parts, and the sadness stabbed at me from different directions. I was miserable all the time and I couldn’t escape, though I certainly tried.
My coping strategy was all about defense and evasion. Strange things like a commercial would spark a memory and the sadness would crest over me like a wave. Sometimes I’d literally get wet from it…breaking out in a cold sweat or, most usually, getting soaked from warm involuntary tears. I felt totally out of control and very embarrassed with myself. So I began to retreat. I spent a lot of ‘quality’ time in my room, quiet and alone. Being around my folks meant the presence of TV, or movies or music and I just couldn’t handle the effects.
Over time I realized that I had myself boxed into an imaginary padded cell. And though it was boring and lonely and I felt trapped by it, my painful reflections had no such restrictions and still managed to come and go as they pleased, totally unhindered by the perimeter of protection I’d tried to construct.
Mom and Hoyt had mercifully given me lots of space in the beginning. They didn’t try to pull me out or push me into anything I didn’t want to do. Though I felt free to privately wallow in my own sadness, I tried to be discrete about it around them. I worked very hard not to be moody or unpleasant. But there was no sense in faking happiness. It’s like faking big muscles when you’re weak and thin. Trying to be myself in front of them was the hardest thing I had ever done. For once I was glad that I was shy, it meant I didn’t have to try quite so hard to be outgoing or bubbly—things I had never been before. Still, I knew I wasn’t doing it right, pretending to be normal for them, that is.
It was when Mom started hinting around that grief counseling might be a good idea for me that my attempts at a more convincing recovery began in earnest. In the deck of negative emotions, fear will always be the high card, for me, at least. In this case it was fear of the very real threat of having to discuss my ‘feelings’ with a therapist. I was suffering greatly but I still couldn’t imagine a more acute form of torture!
Just thinking about that possibility was enough to affect the most immediate and miraculous emotional recovery in history...outwardly. Though, the inward recovery was not too far behind. That began in earnest when I initiated my own therapy sessions with myself. I told myself that I was going to have to accept that I may never get over any of this, so I would just have to settle for getting through it.
I made an agreement with myself to hold on to the hope that maybe someday, in the far distant future, perhaps, I could be happy again. After all, wasn’t my mom happy again? I never would have believed that possible. Of course, right now my problems were tainting her happiness, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that. So I needed to start moving forward if I had any hope of getting to that happy future which I had never questioned until recently. Although, to be honest, moving forward with life was almost as scary as dealing with a therapist…almost.
One way that I chose to ease back into normalcy, at least from my mom’s perspective, but certainly not by any other measure, was to engage her in our thing that we did—just her and me.
If I’d had any notion of how strange and lame it was I would have never played along. But it had always seemed perfectly normal and fun to me, and now after years of participation, I couldn’t give it up even if I wanted to.
It was the peculiar little game of words that my mom had played with me ever since I could remember. It was basically a game of word switching where the players replace a normal word with some random, scarcely known and rarely used synonym, and then try to understand each other.
My earliest recollections of the game involved nursery rhymes.
Game version:
Scintillate, scintillate, celestial body minific;
Feign do I fathom your nature specific.
Loftily perched in ether capacious;
A reasonable facsimile of a gem carbonaceous.
Scintillate, scintillate, celestial body minific;
Feign do I fathom your nature specific.
Mainstream version:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high;
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
How I wonder what you are.
I loved it that the game version rhymed as nicely as the mainstream version, though admittedly, it did not sing as well.
Another game, Scrabble, was also a favorite pastime and one where I quickly eclipsed my mother’s excellent skills, much to her conflicting maternal satisfaction and competitive chagrin.
When I was a very young child, my mother took great pride in my impr
essively good diction, which surpassed that of many adults. Although living in Kentucky as we did, the triumph of such a thing was somewhat diminished. In defense of my own kind, I’ll assert that we Kentuckians have numerous admirable traits and talents, but as a group, speaking with grammatical correctness isn’t at the top of the list—at least for those whose jobs aren’t specifically tied to it.
One of my elementary school teachers actually thought that I had a speech impediment because I spoke very clearly yet unintelligibly on occasion. I couldn’t help it if I was smarter than she was…none of us knew.
Though, ‘smarter’ was not a fair or even accurate description. I was just a logophile (a word lover) with vast stores of minutia in the form of words and their definitions that couldn’t be used in normal conversations with people other than my mother. Though she disapproved, now that I was older, and more self-conscious, I tried to tone the impressive diction thing down around normal people so that I would sound more normal and less like a robot or an alien infiltrator. Sometimes, though, I would catch myself using that ‘alien’ vernacular of mine and feel obligated to throw in extra words to elucidate (explain myself).
One of my favorite tangents of our game had to do with phobias. There are over five hundred named phobias and making up a new one is as simple as determining the Greek word for it and adding the suffix ‘phobia’, which is an entirely separate and enjoyable game in itself. A side benefit was the addition of numerous Greek nouns and verbs to my minutia collection.
Incidentally, I never used the word ‘lame’ lightly. The definition I preferred was ‘something boring, old-fashioned, weak or unsatisfactory’. I’d always been a lover of multi-purpose words, and ‘lame’ worked well much of the time, particularly in relation to my life, but especially because other teenagers understood my meaning when I used it…and that made it indispensible, well it would be if I ever ended up with any friends. Of course, once they discovered the real me, they would probably think I was…lame.
Chapter 4 – Scopophobia
Since my grandpa had died, I’d been fighting with melancholy. I missed him terribly. And that was the issue to which people who knew me attributed my blues. I was so glad that no one knew the other half of my problem: heartbreak over someone other than my grandpa. Even I knew it was stupid. How could someone who wasn’t my love break my heart? It wasn’t like we had broken up. And that was the key. We had never really been together. Together like the way I had daydreamed (and night-dreamed) about over and over. Yet, we had spent a considerable amount of time in each other’s company—the best time of my short life—where I worked every minute trying to understand his moods, his comments and the looks he gave me. The signals were always mixed.
If it were possible for me to be objective, though, I’d have to admit that, overall, Gray had treated me more like a little sister than anything else. Still, in softer moments between his bipolar bouts of incessant teasing and stern lecturing he had also managed to work in holding my hand, hugging me tight and staring into my eyes. There was never any kissing—much to my strangely simultaneous disappointment and relief—but those more tender moments had still felt very romantic. Of course I had no experience to draw upon; perhaps being hit over the head with a stick by a handsome guy also felt very romantic.
I could definitely understand his initial irritation with me. His internship in Iceland had been turned into a glorified babysitting job, all at the insistence of my own grandfather. I was mortified! But in the end he didn’t change any of his plans—he just pulled me along for the ride—quite literally in some cases. To my surprise and his credit, however, he took the time and considerable effort necessary to draw me out as we moved through each of our excursions, and in consequence I talked to him more than I could ever remember talking to anyone, even my grandpa. He eventually broke down my barriers so that I felt comfortable enough to let my sense of humor loose. That had never happened to me before and it felt absolutely, singularly amazing.
My sense of humor was my most secret and precious possession. And as though it was a baby bird, I guarded it fiercely, so that no one could step on it—accidentally or on purpose. It was tied up with who I really was, and I had always been terrified to expose it or damage it in any way. In the past when I had revealed it, very often it had offended my mother, and was generally totally lost on Hoyt or Grandpa. My dad had nurtured it, but it was still in very early bud when he died. I had no other close associates with which to exercise it, so it had been locked deeply away for safe keeping until I met Gray.
Although he seemed to take great pleasure in teasing me, he also seemed to intuitively understand the need to be very careful with that particularly vulnerable soft spot of mine: my humorous sensibilities. When he laughed at my jokes, it didn’t feel like I was being humored. It just felt like he understood and appreciated my brand of humor as borne out by his reactions and responses. It was a kind of emotional intimacy I never expected to have with anybody, let alone someone like him: intelligent, handsome and amazing.
Eventually I came to an understanding about why my feelings for Gray and the loss of my grandpa seemed to be so strangely connected. The loss was connected. Losing my grandpa meant losing my connection with Gray.
With Grandpa’s encouragement I had spent nearly every day for over a month in Gray’s custody. In retrospect it was clear that Grandpa wanted us to be together, and had obviously maneuvered things to make that happen. Gray’s father was like family to him and maybe he was hoping things would turn out to make our connection to the Gregorys ‘truly’ family, as opposed to just ‘like’ family. That had been a pleasant tangent to dwell upon after Iceland, but it became unthinkable once it was clear my regard was not returned by Gray.
I wasn’t going to be invited to join any more survey expeditions because of what I could bring to the table. Mr. Gregory had given me his business card and seemed sincere about helping me pursue a career in geology. But his son said three words to me at the funeral, which, incidentally, were not ‘I love you’, and I never heard from him again.
I’d rather die than insinuate myself into their circle again. The implication of rejection was far more tolerable than its confirmation, though I had to admit, the effects were identical.
So our association was over now. I was grieving over his loss like a widow…except he wasn’t dead. I suppose because no one had ever expressed a romantic interest in me, not even Gray, for that matter, I was totally blindsided by the new experience of unrequited love and had mistakenly assumed that his ability to draw me out was connected with a purpose for doing so. It was embarrassing to admit, even to myself, but I had actually thought that I would be married to him some day. I even had dreams where we talked about that...and did other things. So even sleeping through my depression didn’t offer the kind of solace from pain and disappointment that I dearly wished it would. In addition, it felt petty and disloyal to my grandpa to split my sadness over his loss with some guy I had known only briefly, but misinterpreted so completely. Unfortunately, concentrating on that didn’t stop it—it just added guilt to the other negative emotions I was already dealing with.
The passing of time had started to make the pain fade. It still flared once in a while, but I felt like I had the psychosis issues mostly under control now. I had been working up to this so that I would be able to face school again, which would start before I knew it. Yet, there was still one strange, negative feeling that constantly hounded me. It was weird because it seemed like it had nothing to do with grieving, but over time it had emerged as the dominant feeling, beating out the sadness and emptiness that had been so overpowering at first. It was the feeling that I was being watched; a strange and indefinable sixth sense; the certainty of unseen eyes, observing me from somewhere close by.
I had only a vague notion of the sensation after the funeral, when it started. But as spring phased into summer and I began to spend more time outside the house, sometimes riding my bike, sometimes hanging out in the tin
y tree house in our back yard, it became impossible to ignore. I felt it on the back of my neck constantly. Of course, I didn’t dare mention it to my mom. She already wanted to have me committed. Telling her about this would be like calling the paddy wagon to arrange the pick-up myself. No, just like everything else, I had to find a way to deal with it on my own and get past it.
One day early into the summer break something happened and I realized that I was not a victim of irrational scopophobia (the fear of being watched) after all.
It was a very warm and sunny day, late in the week. Mom and Hoyt were gone for work. I had gotten up late, like normal. I was hungry and in the mood for cereal. After pouring myself a bowl full, I grabbed the nearly empty container of milk from the door of the fridge.
I’ll be the first to admit that I have some obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and one of them was to check the expiration date on everything, even non-food items—go figure. Milk was no exception. So before any milk was poured I examined the blurry print on the front of the carton. This was a wasted notion, though, since I didn’t actually know the day’s date. But a sniff of the opened carton communicated very clearly the milk’s expiration. It smelled like something had expired all right. I experienced a brief moment of sadness as I considered that not so long ago I would have just headed next door to Grandpa’s house in search of drinkable milk. Now, if I wanted fresh milk, I was going to have to ride my bike up to the new drugstore on the corner and purchase it.
