The Ups and Downs of Becoming a Recluse.

I know it sounds crazy, but there’s a point in time where you can just tell things aren’t going to get any better. Now, I’m not one to really take notes from, but I think my own demise began somewhere in between watching old reruns of Frasier and getting up at two in the morning to fulfill cravings for Pop Tarts and entire jars of pickles.

I know it sounds disgusting, but I swear it’s not half bad.

Despite what I’m sure you’re probably thinking, this was not a midlife crisis taking place. I’ll admit that I was a little too dramatic… But, then again, who isn’t a bit over the top at sixteen? I mean, when your life looked the way mine did, I swear that I wasn’t overdoing it too much. The summer right after sophomore year was the summer I finally cracked; after sixteen years, I’d finally broken down and had it with the whole state. I hated the people living in it, I hated the kids I went to school with, and I hated how hot it got in the summer. My parents didn’t help the situation, and my little sister Jaime just added to my problems.

I mean, it wasn’t that I didn’t like my family. They were just like all the other families of my friends’ parents: controlling, untrusting, and intrusive. They didn’t give me any privacy, they didn’t let me out past nine o’clock on a school night, and - what I think, really, is the worst downfall of all of it - they dragged me to the family gatherings that we had planned every month or so. And I know that hanging out with your family doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal, but I swear to God, all my aunts and uncles are older than dirt and have this old sense of humor that’s very ‘ha-ha, my, aren’t you a hoot, please pass the tea and crumpets’. I mean, they’re all kind of persnickety and they’ve got all this money from I don’t even know where, because I really don’t know what any of them do for a living, nor do I care. It’s just always kind of been this thing where nobody really talked or asked about it, and you just try and forget about it because nobody’s going to tell you.

Anyway, what I was trying to say was that there was no one specific reason behind the fact that I was slowly becoming a hermit, staying indoors instead of playing outside or hanging out with my friends; it was a whole series of things that made me hate everything about the outdoor world, as well as the world inside my bedroom where I spent the majority of the days that summer. My parents were worried about my health, my sister worried about how she needed to do better at her soccer practices, and I worried about the direction in which my life was heading.

I don’t remember much from that summer. What I do remember from it was hazy, like when I listened to Beatles records all day long - the later ones, where they got kind of crazy and you can’t really understand the meaning to any of the songs - and I stayed up watching late-night television without the lights on in my bedroom as the rest of my family lay fast asleep in their own rooms. And I’d look out my window, straight on through the darkness, and looked at the other houses down the road from ours; sometimes the bedrooms had lights on, sometimes they were all just the same shade as the night. And when I’d get tired of that, I went downstairs and just kind of wandered around without anything to do. Sometimes I’d find myself the next morning, passed out on the couch, the television blaring as it played a channel I didn’t remember changing it to; other times, I’d just get bored and wander back up the stairs, heading back into my room where I’d find my bed waiting for me.

Nothing satisfied me, and the days dripped like a faucet and they filled up slower than felt possible. I lived every day the same, if what I did could be considered living. It didn’t feel like I was; in fact, it felt like I was in a trance-like state, one where I was in this weird in between of sleeping and being awake, and even when I slept at night, it didn’t feel like I was getting any rest.

My parents worked and my sister went down to the community pool with her friends, and when she’d come back she’d be tan and drenched in chlorine water. And when Mom and Dad would get home, they’d end up ordering take-out and having it delivered because they had lots of paperwork to do and a lot of work-related stuff to go to, even though they weren’t getting paid for the extra hours of work they put into their company. We all had dinner in our rooms, never together at the dining room table, the one we never got much use from because there was never a home-cooked meal waiting for us on the table - this was probably due to the fact that my parents didn’t have the time, and neither Jaime nor I had the ability to provide for four mouths.

I mean, my cooking skills didn’t reach further than toast and instant ramen, so the likelihood that I would be able to make something as complex as a meal was preposterous.

So our family remained unconventional and misdirected so shallowly that it made it hard to believe anything would ever change.

And it was because of our unconventional family and the fact that I was alone at home all the time and the reasons I kept staying up late at night that I eventually came to meet Garrett Nickelsen.

Garrett was the in between.

And he was the reason that nothing would get better.

He was our greatest failure.