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A Life Lived Ridiculously - Chapter 2
March
One evening, I was staring at the bedroom ceiling. I’d been staring at it for three nights, and the lack of sleep was distorting my already distorted view of the world. As I slumped on the bed amid a sea of lampshades of varying sizes, shapes and colors, I continued to hope that the next lampshade would be the right one. Currently, the beam reflecting off the dark red bedspread was making me want to stab myself in the eye with a cork screw, and I was beginning to entertain the possibility that the room might be inhabited by a malicious supernatural entity that nourished itself on photons. My fingertips throbbed with pain, some were red and others blistering from burns acquired in recent days by repeatedly unscrewing hot light bulbs from all the lamps.
After a lifetime of bathing in the warmth of an effortlessly lit room, my own apartment, with its low, gray ceilings, challenged me with the task of reproducing a cozy environment. For some reason, the light in that tiny cavern of a bedroom glared such that everything seemed to reflect off everything else, and the only non-migrainous state was complete darkness. But there’s only so much that can be achieved in the dark, thus making it paramount to find a lighting motif that didn’t make me want to rip out my eyeballs and beat them against the wall. So, for months, I’d been buying and returning lamps and shades from shops along my route to work, in a futile attempt to recreate the Zen-like contentment that had been my previous life.
Instead, all I had achieved was second degree burns and the complete obliteration of my fingerprints. Certainly, this would have been an excellent time to turn to a life of crime, had I not been too busy squandering my youth in the lighting department at Ikea.
My thoughts were interrupted by the phone.
“Good evening my dear, how are you?” The drawn out ‘o’ of the ‘how’ gave Sam’s tone a mocking air.
“I’m good. You?”
“I’m very well, thank you. Are you busy tonight?”
“No, just resting really.” I summoned my most relaxed-sounding voice. Now was not the time for chatter, and I needed him off the phone quickly, before the cavernous light motif sucked away my entire soul.
“Would you like to join me for a bite?” he asked.
Who could think of food at a time like this? And now I had to find an excuse, though sometimes the best excuse is the truth, so I said, “I’m not sure. To tell the truth, I’m a tad depressed.”
But Sam was not deterred. “No, no, no. If you’re feeling blue, it’s more reason to go out. As your friend, it’s my job to cheer you up.”
“Really, it’s kind, but I would be dire company.” Stretching across the bed, I kicked the shade off the standing lamp, and it rolled onto the floor.
“I don’t want to hear that. I’m not letting you stay alone, depressed. I bet I can cheer you up. Give me a chance. I’m very good at cheering people up.”
“Mmm.” With the naked bulb teasing my nerves like a dripping tap, I grabbed another shade from the pile on the bed and tossed it over the lamp.
“Look, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But I guarantee I can cheer you up, and you have nothing to lose by accepting the challenge.”
Except valuable hours of darkness. But he ‘guarantees’ he can cheer me up? In spite of my unyielding determination to get back to the lighting, I was curious. If he knew something I didn’t about clawing one’s way out of a state of bottomless despair, then I needed to know it too. “Okay, but I warn you, I’m in a bad mood.”
“Yes! Great!” he screamed.
I panicked as soon as I hung up. What was I doing? How could I be so crazy as to believe that another human being had the power to cheer me up, when I couldn’t even control my own thoughts? I wasn’t new to obsessing, I‘d known that sinking feeling associated with a sticky thought ever since I learned to count. And count I did. Toys, books, clothes, everything in my world had to exist in specific, and usually small, numbers. Any variation to those numbers (for instance, if someone bought me a gift) and all hell broke loose, as I wouldn’t think of another thing until I’d righted the balance. Adults must have thought I was brain damaged or something, as what child, at the mere sight of wrapping paper, threw herself on the floor and howled as if she were being eviscerated? Birthdays were torture.
“Oh, don’t mind her, she’s just going through a rebellious phase against material possessions.” My father would laugh sadly. To my parents, my aversion to stuff was an ungrateful rejection of the comfortable lifestyle they had provided for me. What other explanation could there be?
“There goes my little socialist,” my father teased, when he caught me sneaking out of the house with a bag of toys for the local charity shop. “Mother Teresa just called from Calcutta, next time would you like me to pass on a message?”
At least my father mocked instead of scared me. Mum was far less forgiving the one time she caught me tiptoeing passed the kitchen with a bulging bag.
“What’s that?” she screamed, as though she were catching me trying to slip a dead body passed her.
“Oh nothing, just homework.”
And before I could blink, she was on me, one hand on my arm, long fingernails piercing my skin while she used the other hand to grab the bag and empty the contents on the floor.”
“You don’t like your Cabbage Patch doll?” She was so close to my face, I could count her blackheads.
Terrified and with no time to think, I blurted out, “B..but I have two.”
This was obviously the wrong answer, as her fingernails pressed in deeper. “So what? Most children would have twenty-two Cabbage Patch dolls if they could.”
And I cried and begged her to let go, and when she eventually did, I ran upstairs to my room, to the sound of her hollering, “Get back here, you freak, you’re not normal, you’re not my daughter!”
I curled up on the bed and rubbed my arm, which was sore with deep gashes from where her fingernails had dug from such disappointment. After that I resorted to disposing of items one or two at a time, a book, toy, or other useless ornament was smuggled in my schoolbag and surreptitiously dropped in the street at some point en route to school. One day I left a trail of plastic Smurfs leading up to the school gate.
Leaving the flat was tricky, as I’d not reached a conclusion with the lampshades. A further delay ensued when the floor lamp caught fire, after I forgot to remove a shade’s plastic wrapper. I beat the flames with a pillow, and cursed that I wouldn’t be able to get my money back for this shade. A further fifteen minutes was wasted in a last-ditch effort to find a lighting solution that didn’t give my room the feel of an abandoned warehouse, but it was hopeless, and now my pillow had a hole, and black soot stained the wall beside the bed’s headboard.
I recalled how it all came to a head when I was fifteen and obsessive thoughts reached an all-time high. My mind raced day and night with the most unusual ideas until I was terrified to even watch television, lest I become possessed by demons and go on a killing spree with a chainsaw. Everything made me think I was an axe murderer, though I barely had the energy to leave my bed, and I contemplated killing myself before I harmed another. Knotted into a ball of fear, certain things like eating and sleeping became entirely overlooked, and after weeks in this adrenalized state of paranoia, I had withered into a shadow of my former self. My parents noticed the weight loss, congratulated me and there began a descent into anorexia that landed me in hospital two years later, just weeks before my eighteenth birthday. And that was where I discovered anti-depressants for the first time.
Now, as I drove to Sam’s, I realized that I hadn’t seen a psychiatrist in almost ten years. As soon as the doctors had returned me to a normal weight, it seemed wrong to consider myself ill enough to warrant a therapist. When you have no visible symptoms of mental illness, it’s hard to seek help, and my anorexia was a perfect vehicle with which to broach the subject of intrusive thoughts, though at the time, the doctor was only interested in weight gain. But I learned fast the relief and lucidity that can be attained through medication. Perhaps, had I dared over the years to request help for obsessions and obsessions alone, I would by now be on suitable medication, rather than grasping onto a hangover of pills prescribed ten years ago for a different condition altogether.
My intention was to humor Sam for an hour, which was already fifty-nine minutes longer than my current concentration span. Then I would return to my hellish world and attempt to love a lampshade so that I could actually, finally get some rest.
Sam was waiting outside when I turned into his street. As soon as he saw my car, he ran over, so that I was still rounding the corner when he reached me. “Now, my dear,” he enunciated, as he hopped into the car. “You sit back and let me show you a good time. No questions, just enjoy.”
Although my mind was very much on lighting, the pro-active way in which he took charge made me admire him. If not needing to be elsewhere, I would enjoy his masterfulness, and I was sorry to be too preoccupied to immerse myself in the moment. But what did he have in mind for me?
No amount of guesswork would have prepared me for the ice-skating rink in Queensway. I didn’t even know people ice-skated after the ‘80s ended and it became compulsory to have a computer and satellite television. Amazingly, the rink was packed with people, and even more amazing, children. Didn’t these electronic-age whizz-kids have better things to attend to, like trawling online chat rooms and doing their bit for the childhood obesity epidemic?
“I skated once, when I was nine,” I said to Sam. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“I’ll hold onto you,” he said.
I was slim, but so was he, and I didn’t imagine that his slight frame could carry us both. I was right about being useless. I clung to the barrier, supporting my entire weight with my arms, whilst my feet swam beneath. Skaters whizzed by, who thankfully did not stop to point and laugh.
“Come on,” he urged. “Let go. I’ll catch you if you fall. Trust me.”
So I let go and crumbled onto the ice. He skated to me and hoisted me up from behind.
“You didn’t catch me,” I said.
“I didn’t know it was possible to fall when you’re standing still.” He smiled his coy, crooked smile.
Once standing, I clung to his arm.
“We’re going to move, now, Okay?” He sounded like a nurse. He pulled us forward, ever so slightly. I stumbled, he caught me. We went further, his gaze fixed on me and mine fixed the ice.
“See,” he said, “I knew you could do it. Isn’t this fun?”
“This is fun.”
Those big, syrupy eyes of his read my face. And then the ground melted, and down I went. Buttocks first. But this time the landing was soft, as I‘d taken him down too and landed on his legs. We laughed, both of us. I felt like a child who’s so bad at a game that she gives up and turns silly. And silly I was, laughing, stumbling, clutching the barrier with over-dramatic zeal. He tried to pull me away and show how easy it was to skate, and for a moment there I forgot all about lampshades and perfection and my flat. Just for the briefest moment. But it was worth it. It was worth the possibility of losing a whole night’s sleep, just for that one moment of glorious freedom.
Afterward we went to a restaurant. I wasn’t keen on the idea, as every minute with Sam was a minute less sleep for me later on. But, as driven as I was to return to my lighting freak show, I was having too much fun. Anyhow, he assured me it would be no more than a quick dash to a nearby Chinese canteen. We sat across from each other in the nearly empty restaurant, and he recounted how he used to try to cheer up his ex-girlfriend when she was sad. And that she was so often unhappy that he now considered himself the expert in cheering up depressed people.
“What was the matter with her?” I asked.
“She was anorexic. That’s how she died.” He let the words hang between us as he scanned my face with those droopy eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking down at my plate and feeling like a fraud. His girlfriend had been terminally sick and here he was trying to cheer me up. What sort of real problems did I have? I hated myself for being so hung up on light bulbs. If he knew why he had wasted his evening trying to cheer me up, then he would hate me too. The spoilt little rich girl who has to invent problems because she had no real ones. Even when I’d dabbled with anorexia, I wasn’t all that successful, not like Sam’s girlfriend.
“I used to lure her to restaurants like this one and order lots of colorful dishes to tempt her. But she hardly touched the food, and then she would disappear to the bathroom for twenty minutes. I sat alone waiting, feeling helpless, not knowing what to do. And then she’d come back to the table, sniveling and with watery eyes, and she’d look at me and whisper weakly, ‘I’m all right’. I know I should have done more, but I was young. We were both students in Australia. I studied and worked night shifts in a restaurant, just to survive. I barely had time to sleep, and then I’d have to come home and mop her brow. It’s exhausting to watch the one you love destroy herself and being powerless to do anything. I told her she was beautiful, and she was so beautiful. But she didn’t see it. And she kept on starving.”
The more he spoke of her the more I saw how much he must have loved her. And for a while there, I wanted to be her. I wanted to be a part of this heroic tale of love and tragedy, and I wanted him to mop my brow.
One evening, I was staring at the bedroom ceiling. I’d been staring at it for three nights, and the lack of sleep was distorting my already distorted view of the world. As I slumped on the bed amid a sea of lampshades of varying sizes, shapes and colors, I continued to hope that the next lampshade would be the right one. Currently, the beam reflecting off the dark red bedspread was making me want to stab myself in the eye with a cork screw, and I was beginning to entertain the possibility that the room might be inhabited by a malicious supernatural entity that nourished itself on photons. My fingertips throbbed with pain, some were red and others blistering from burns acquired in recent days by repeatedly unscrewing hot light bulbs from all the lamps.
After a lifetime of bathing in the warmth of an effortlessly lit room, my own apartment, with its low, gray ceilings, challenged me with the task of reproducing a cozy environment. For some reason, the light in that tiny cavern of a bedroom glared such that everything seemed to reflect off everything else, and the only non-migrainous state was complete darkness. But there’s only so much that can be achieved in the dark, thus making it paramount to find a lighting motif that didn’t make me want to rip out my eyeballs and beat them against the wall. So, for months, I’d been buying and returning lamps and shades from shops along my route to work, in a futile attempt to recreate the Zen-like contentment that had been my previous life.
Instead, all I had achieved was second degree burns and the complete obliteration of my fingerprints. Certainly, this would have been an excellent time to turn to a life of crime, had I not been too busy squandering my youth in the lighting department at Ikea.
My thoughts were interrupted by the phone.
“Good evening my dear, how are you?” The drawn out ‘o’ of the ‘how’ gave Sam’s tone a mocking air.
“I’m good. You?”
“I’m very well, thank you. Are you busy tonight?”
“No, just resting really.” I summoned my most relaxed-sounding voice. Now was not the time for chatter, and I needed him off the phone quickly, before the cavernous light motif sucked away my entire soul.
“Would you like to join me for a bite?” he asked.
Who could think of food at a time like this? And now I had to find an excuse, though sometimes the best excuse is the truth, so I said, “I’m not sure. To tell the truth, I’m a tad depressed.”
But Sam was not deterred. “No, no, no. If you’re feeling blue, it’s more reason to go out. As your friend, it’s my job to cheer you up.”
“Really, it’s kind, but I would be dire company.” Stretching across the bed, I kicked the shade off the standing lamp, and it rolled onto the floor.
“I don’t want to hear that. I’m not letting you stay alone, depressed. I bet I can cheer you up. Give me a chance. I’m very good at cheering people up.”
“Mmm.” With the naked bulb teasing my nerves like a dripping tap, I grabbed another shade from the pile on the bed and tossed it over the lamp.
“Look, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But I guarantee I can cheer you up, and you have nothing to lose by accepting the challenge.”
Except valuable hours of darkness. But he ‘guarantees’ he can cheer me up? In spite of my unyielding determination to get back to the lighting, I was curious. If he knew something I didn’t about clawing one’s way out of a state of bottomless despair, then I needed to know it too. “Okay, but I warn you, I’m in a bad mood.”
“Yes! Great!” he screamed.
I panicked as soon as I hung up. What was I doing? How could I be so crazy as to believe that another human being had the power to cheer me up, when I couldn’t even control my own thoughts? I wasn’t new to obsessing, I‘d known that sinking feeling associated with a sticky thought ever since I learned to count. And count I did. Toys, books, clothes, everything in my world had to exist in specific, and usually small, numbers. Any variation to those numbers (for instance, if someone bought me a gift) and all hell broke loose, as I wouldn’t think of another thing until I’d righted the balance. Adults must have thought I was brain damaged or something, as what child, at the mere sight of wrapping paper, threw herself on the floor and howled as if she were being eviscerated? Birthdays were torture.
“Oh, don’t mind her, she’s just going through a rebellious phase against material possessions.” My father would laugh sadly. To my parents, my aversion to stuff was an ungrateful rejection of the comfortable lifestyle they had provided for me. What other explanation could there be?
“There goes my little socialist,” my father teased, when he caught me sneaking out of the house with a bag of toys for the local charity shop. “Mother Teresa just called from Calcutta, next time would you like me to pass on a message?”
At least my father mocked instead of scared me. Mum was far less forgiving the one time she caught me tiptoeing passed the kitchen with a bulging bag.
“What’s that?” she screamed, as though she were catching me trying to slip a dead body passed her.
“Oh nothing, just homework.”
And before I could blink, she was on me, one hand on my arm, long fingernails piercing my skin while she used the other hand to grab the bag and empty the contents on the floor.”
“You don’t like your Cabbage Patch doll?” She was so close to my face, I could count her blackheads.
Terrified and with no time to think, I blurted out, “B..but I have two.”
This was obviously the wrong answer, as her fingernails pressed in deeper. “So what? Most children would have twenty-two Cabbage Patch dolls if they could.”
And I cried and begged her to let go, and when she eventually did, I ran upstairs to my room, to the sound of her hollering, “Get back here, you freak, you’re not normal, you’re not my daughter!”
I curled up on the bed and rubbed my arm, which was sore with deep gashes from where her fingernails had dug from such disappointment. After that I resorted to disposing of items one or two at a time, a book, toy, or other useless ornament was smuggled in my schoolbag and surreptitiously dropped in the street at some point en route to school. One day I left a trail of plastic Smurfs leading up to the school gate.
Leaving the flat was tricky, as I’d not reached a conclusion with the lampshades. A further delay ensued when the floor lamp caught fire, after I forgot to remove a shade’s plastic wrapper. I beat the flames with a pillow, and cursed that I wouldn’t be able to get my money back for this shade. A further fifteen minutes was wasted in a last-ditch effort to find a lighting solution that didn’t give my room the feel of an abandoned warehouse, but it was hopeless, and now my pillow had a hole, and black soot stained the wall beside the bed’s headboard.
I recalled how it all came to a head when I was fifteen and obsessive thoughts reached an all-time high. My mind raced day and night with the most unusual ideas until I was terrified to even watch television, lest I become possessed by demons and go on a killing spree with a chainsaw. Everything made me think I was an axe murderer, though I barely had the energy to leave my bed, and I contemplated killing myself before I harmed another. Knotted into a ball of fear, certain things like eating and sleeping became entirely overlooked, and after weeks in this adrenalized state of paranoia, I had withered into a shadow of my former self. My parents noticed the weight loss, congratulated me and there began a descent into anorexia that landed me in hospital two years later, just weeks before my eighteenth birthday. And that was where I discovered anti-depressants for the first time.
Now, as I drove to Sam’s, I realized that I hadn’t seen a psychiatrist in almost ten years. As soon as the doctors had returned me to a normal weight, it seemed wrong to consider myself ill enough to warrant a therapist. When you have no visible symptoms of mental illness, it’s hard to seek help, and my anorexia was a perfect vehicle with which to broach the subject of intrusive thoughts, though at the time, the doctor was only interested in weight gain. But I learned fast the relief and lucidity that can be attained through medication. Perhaps, had I dared over the years to request help for obsessions and obsessions alone, I would by now be on suitable medication, rather than grasping onto a hangover of pills prescribed ten years ago for a different condition altogether.
My intention was to humor Sam for an hour, which was already fifty-nine minutes longer than my current concentration span. Then I would return to my hellish world and attempt to love a lampshade so that I could actually, finally get some rest.
Sam was waiting outside when I turned into his street. As soon as he saw my car, he ran over, so that I was still rounding the corner when he reached me. “Now, my dear,” he enunciated, as he hopped into the car. “You sit back and let me show you a good time. No questions, just enjoy.”
Although my mind was very much on lighting, the pro-active way in which he took charge made me admire him. If not needing to be elsewhere, I would enjoy his masterfulness, and I was sorry to be too preoccupied to immerse myself in the moment. But what did he have in mind for me?
No amount of guesswork would have prepared me for the ice-skating rink in Queensway. I didn’t even know people ice-skated after the ‘80s ended and it became compulsory to have a computer and satellite television. Amazingly, the rink was packed with people, and even more amazing, children. Didn’t these electronic-age whizz-kids have better things to attend to, like trawling online chat rooms and doing their bit for the childhood obesity epidemic?
“I skated once, when I was nine,” I said to Sam. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“I’ll hold onto you,” he said.
I was slim, but so was he, and I didn’t imagine that his slight frame could carry us both. I was right about being useless. I clung to the barrier, supporting my entire weight with my arms, whilst my feet swam beneath. Skaters whizzed by, who thankfully did not stop to point and laugh.
“Come on,” he urged. “Let go. I’ll catch you if you fall. Trust me.”
So I let go and crumbled onto the ice. He skated to me and hoisted me up from behind.
“You didn’t catch me,” I said.
“I didn’t know it was possible to fall when you’re standing still.” He smiled his coy, crooked smile.
Once standing, I clung to his arm.
“We’re going to move, now, Okay?” He sounded like a nurse. He pulled us forward, ever so slightly. I stumbled, he caught me. We went further, his gaze fixed on me and mine fixed the ice.
“See,” he said, “I knew you could do it. Isn’t this fun?”
“This is fun.”
Those big, syrupy eyes of his read my face. And then the ground melted, and down I went. Buttocks first. But this time the landing was soft, as I‘d taken him down too and landed on his legs. We laughed, both of us. I felt like a child who’s so bad at a game that she gives up and turns silly. And silly I was, laughing, stumbling, clutching the barrier with over-dramatic zeal. He tried to pull me away and show how easy it was to skate, and for a moment there I forgot all about lampshades and perfection and my flat. Just for the briefest moment. But it was worth it. It was worth the possibility of losing a whole night’s sleep, just for that one moment of glorious freedom.
Afterward we went to a restaurant. I wasn’t keen on the idea, as every minute with Sam was a minute less sleep for me later on. But, as driven as I was to return to my lighting freak show, I was having too much fun. Anyhow, he assured me it would be no more than a quick dash to a nearby Chinese canteen. We sat across from each other in the nearly empty restaurant, and he recounted how he used to try to cheer up his ex-girlfriend when she was sad. And that she was so often unhappy that he now considered himself the expert in cheering up depressed people.
“What was the matter with her?” I asked.
“She was anorexic. That’s how she died.” He let the words hang between us as he scanned my face with those droopy eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking down at my plate and feeling like a fraud. His girlfriend had been terminally sick and here he was trying to cheer me up. What sort of real problems did I have? I hated myself for being so hung up on light bulbs. If he knew why he had wasted his evening trying to cheer me up, then he would hate me too. The spoilt little rich girl who has to invent problems because she had no real ones. Even when I’d dabbled with anorexia, I wasn’t all that successful, not like Sam’s girlfriend.
“I used to lure her to restaurants like this one and order lots of colorful dishes to tempt her. But she hardly touched the food, and then she would disappear to the bathroom for twenty minutes. I sat alone waiting, feeling helpless, not knowing what to do. And then she’d come back to the table, sniveling and with watery eyes, and she’d look at me and whisper weakly, ‘I’m all right’. I know I should have done more, but I was young. We were both students in Australia. I studied and worked night shifts in a restaurant, just to survive. I barely had time to sleep, and then I’d have to come home and mop her brow. It’s exhausting to watch the one you love destroy herself and being powerless to do anything. I told her she was beautiful, and she was so beautiful. But she didn’t see it. And she kept on starving.”
The more he spoke of her the more I saw how much he must have loved her. And for a while there, I wanted to be her. I wanted to be a part of this heroic tale of love and tragedy, and I wanted him to mop my brow.
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A Life Lived Ridiculously will be available for sale in both print and ebook versions through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, and more from April 12th 2012.
Meantime if you want a sneak peek into what happens next between Maxine and smooth-talking Sam, you can subscribe to A Life Lived Ridiculously and receive a
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