Want, стр. 26

Mom, please, I say, trying to sound careful. Mom, I say. It’s okay. I’m sorry, I say, accidentally.

I am your mother, she says. Still crying.

I know, I say.

She stays quiet.

I’m sorry, I say. I’ve said it once and now it seems that I can’t stop.

I thought, she says. I thought when you became a mother … She says the word like it holds something that I have refused to see or understand. That I’ve got it now, it’s been given to me, and that I’ve ruined what it’s meant to mean.

I’M STILL NINETEEN; she’s still twenty. I sit alone in my attic room because she left and order chicken fingers and French fries every night and read and watch TV and try hard not to talk to anyone. I sit out on the roof and all the undergrads file out at night to go places I don’t know about, have little interest in without her. I hardly go to class, much less have other friends, and I watch them, listen to them talk to and yell at one another. I watch them walk out hopeful, underdressed, and buoyant. I watch them come home hours later, still out on the roof, just watching. They’re disheveled, touching one another, in different groups or pairs.

We are very good at desperate emails tinged with self-destruction. Hers are more active, more interactive. We have lives that look concretely, wholly separate, lives that, if one were to track back to the causes, to the feelings and the thinking, might feel largely the same. My depression is the flattest; it’s so boring; it’s all inward—in books, at least, as well as in her emails, the characters all do things. They have too much sex; they drink; they travel and their lives at least are filled with stories that they might tell later when they’re older and they’re better, when they’re the grown-up versions of these unformed, reckless things. I envy her these stories, their shape and texture, the concreteness of her self-destruction. She is looked at, and because she’s looked at, she lives her anger and her sadness out loud and people see; I disappear and so slip down and under. I, sporadically, quite violently, try to be seen and am then further knocked down by how completely that effort fails. I ride the T, and I cry and my hands shake and I imagine that someone will notice, will say something, will take me home with them and tell me how to live, but people look afraid or look away or don’t notice to begin with. The barista at the coffee shop I used to go to with her seems so horrified by my crying and my shaking hands, even as I order the same quiche and chocolate cake and give him money, that I stop going, just to not have to see what I look like on his face as I hold my hand out for my change.

I don’t talk and no one notices that I’m not in class or at the campus center. I buy tubs of Betty Crocker icing at the 7-Eleven that is far enough off campus that I won’t accidentally run into one of the four people I know. I get the chicken fingers I subsist on delivered, when I know my roommates are in class or at a party; I try very hard to only go downstairs to pee or shower when they’re out. I do not sleep but also do not leave my bed and sometimes, just to prove my ineffectuality more surely, I walk around Boston late at night and nothing happens; I walk back to my attic, take my clothes off, get in bed.

She has three love affairs that year and starts selling weed to friends for cash. Her dealer is in love with her; sometimes they have sex, and she uses the discount to pay for her own stash. She lives off campus with two also-gorgeous girls who have tattoos on their forearms—one of them has her nose and eyebrow pierced—and they drink beer before they eat breakfast and when I go to visit her I feel young and small and far away. I hate her maybe. I want her mostly just to feel as sad as I do, to be as trapped, if only so that she doesn’t get too far ahead of me while I’m still the same.

It’s cold still. I’ve lost track of time and do not know the day or month or whether there’s some place I’m meant to be or have been meant to be this whole week. It’s cold and I’m not wearing enough clothes, running tights, a long-sleeved shirt, no gloves or hat, and I’ve run out to the Charles River in the middle of the night. I stand on the MIT Bridge, the one, in summer, we walked over every day; the water’s frozen at the edges but not in the middle. I have my cell phone with me and I call. There’s something wrong with me, I tell her. What is feeling like? I ask. She’s in love again. All she seems to want to talk about is this man she loves, who won’t love her back, who sometimes shows up at her house at night and they have sex but does not yet acknowledge she exists in the light of day. She says my name over and over. Where are you? she says. I’m on a bridge, I say. I don’t know then but I know now that we’re both children. I want her to feel scared, I know both now and then. I want her to feel more for me than any other person. I don’t care the shape it takes: fear, or love, or sadness. I want her close to me. I want her to feel like she can’t ever leave. She starts to cry and I tell her to stop it, There’s no need to worry. I don’t mean this.