Tiptoe Through the True Bits

My friends all pretty much abandoned me after it happened. Pretty cruel, right? I think they just had no idea how to talk to me. I probably wouldn’t have known how to talk to me, either.

It was in the local newspaper the next day:

MARRIED COUPLE DIE IN HOUSE FIRE.

What a crude headline. Six words? Six words are all my parents deserved, apparently. We were not a rich family. We struggled for money every day. But my parents were good, honest people. I remember when some lawyer upstate died, it was all over the fucking news, you couldn’t escape from it, and he was a prick. His own wife admitted that he had several enemies and he used to beat her and their children. And that fucker got more media attention than my parents; the kindest and most selfless people I had ever known. Just because we weren’t well known.

My mother was a musician. She taught me from an early age to play the guitar and sometimes if I had a bad dream she would sing softly to me with her beautiful voice.

My father was a truck driver. Sometimes he would have to go away for weeks on end because long-haul trips pay more, and even though he hated leaving my mother and I for so long, he would insist that he had to earn us some money, and he promised he would bring us presents. For my mother, he would buy an obscure candy bar from every destination, and for me he would buy a plectrum. Underneath my bed, I had a shoebox filled with guitar picks of every colour and shape imaginable.

But they are all gone now, and I haven’t picked up a guitar in weeks. It feels too painful. There are too many memories.

Sometimes I worry that my parents won’t be remembered like they deserve to be. Obviously I will always remember them. But to others, I’m not sure they made such a lasting impression. They were too nice to people. They were walked all over and forgotten. It saddens me but I think it is probably true. I think I was the only person really affected by the fire.

The funeral was the worst part. It took place in a small room filled with people I didn’t know. My aunt wanted me to read a poem but I told her to go to hell because it was a shitty poem. Some crappy religious bullshit that my parents would have hated. Clearly she didn’t know her sister at all.

So I wrote my own poem, and I swallowed hard and made my way to the front and took a deep breath and stood in front of my parents’ caskets and faced all of the people in the room. There were not many people. Maybe around 40 or something.

That poem was the last thing I spoke aloud.

All throughout the wake people were talking to me but I just stared blankly back at them. They didn’t care what I had to say. They were just saying they were sorry to make themselves feel better about their own pathetic lives.

Humans are vile creatures. Humans are selfish and dishonest and greedy. It’s just the way we evolved. Survival of the fittest dictates that only the bastards get to pass on their genes. Only the individuals who are cruel and brutal and will stop at nothing to get what they wanted. That is what we evolved from. So it isn’t our fault that we are disgusting and horrible.

My parents were an exception to this, but I don’t think I am. I can be selfish and I can be greedy. But I am not a liar.

In my 18 years of life I remember lying only once, when I was about six. I told my mom that somebody had stolen my lunch money for the week so that she would give me some more. But in actual fact, I had spent my lunch money on candy on the way home from school. And even though she believed me and gave me a cuddle and some more money, my stomach twisted into sticky knots from all the sugar I had consumed and I threw up all over the kitchen floor. I was in hysterics as she tried to calm me down and figure out why I was crying and why my vomit was bright pink, and I hiccupped that I had told a lie and I was sorry and I would never lie again.

And I never did.

Why bother lying? Lying doesn’t get anybody anywhere. Even a little white lie can escalate into a big fat black lie. Because once you tell one lie, it can be impossible to stop. You have to tell more lies to cover up the original lie and it snowballs until you don’t even know what’s real and what’s not anymore and it becomes too difficult to keep up the charade and you almost always get caught out.

I despise liars.

--

For three days, I wandered through life in a trance. I woke up, I went to school, I sat vacantly in classes, I got home and I went to bed. Nobody tried to talk to me. It was kind of nice, actually, to just be invisible for a while.

On Wednesday I went straight from school to my appointment with Dr. Gould. I entered the room and the receptionist stopped her tapping and ushered me straight through into his office. Apparently he had been waiting for me. Woop-de-fucking-do.

“Elise,” he greeted from behind his desk, rising to his feet to shake my hand before I sat down. I found this awfully formal and grown-up but I flopped down into his comfortable leather chair anyway. His face then turned austere. “Did you do me another drawing?”

I nodded and leant down to pick the notepad he had given to me out of my schoolbag. I had gotten the cover a little stained from where a pen had exploded in my backpack, but he didn’t comment on that. He just smiled and took the book from my hands, skipping quickly to the second page.

I had drawn a box. Just a simple, run of the mill cardboard box. It had taken about three minutes in total to draw, but I had spent hours agonising over my decision to draw it.

He looked up at me and frowned. “Why did you draw a box, Elise?”

I reached over for the book and turned the page before handing it back to him. I had anticipated this question because I knew this was how he was planning to get me to talk to him. I had figured him out. But I was not going to cave. I was not going to talk.

Essentially my aunt was paying two hundred dollars an hour for me to sit in a room with a stranger and draw things in a vain attempt to uncover my broken psyche. She was even stupider than I gave her credit for.

I chose to draw a box because a box holds hope. There could be anything inside this box. It could be full of lollipops, or it could be full of Anthrax, and the only way you will ever know is to open it. But sometimes it is better not to open boxes, because if you don’t, even if the box is full of barbed wire and vinegar, you can still imagine all the possibilities that it holds. You can believe whatever you want to. You can carry on believing that the box is full of jellybeans and rainbows, instead of opening it to find something terrible. You can keep on hoping. And this applies to both literal and metaphorical boxes.

I watched Dr. Gould’s eyes as he scrolled through the words, stopping every now and then to scribble something down onto his notes. Then he looked up.

“Well, it’s better,” he smiled faintly. He paused for a while. “Listen, Elise, I know I’m not going to get you to talk to me anytime soon,” he said.

Finally, he got it.

“But, I would really like to ask you some questions, okay? And you can just nod or shake your head if you like. Okay?”

I nodded and he smiled.

“Good. Now tell me, Elise, have you really been silent for two whole months?”

I took a second to mentally count back the days from the funeral, and once satisfied that it had been almost nine weeks, I nodded.

“I see,” he said, scribbling something down. “And are you silent for any particular reason?”

I looked at him like he was an idiot. I was starting to think perhaps he was. I nodded slowly and looked around me at all of the certificates and degrees that adorned his office. Maybe they just give them to anybody these days.

Am I silent for a particular reason? He may as well have asked me if I ate cereal for breakfast for “any particular reason”. Isn’t there a reason behind everything? Even if it just because there was no bread for toast, that is still a valid reason to eat cereal. Fucking moron.

Of course there was a reason. But he wasn’t going to guess it.

“Is it because you feel worthless?”

I folded my arms and shook my head. He was wasting his time. He was wasting my time. And he was wasting my aunt’s money. But I was kind of smug about that. She didn’t deserve it anyway. My aunt Fran is a selfish, pointy woman obsessed with money and mindless annoyances like an orphaned niece being dumped upon her. I’m convinced she makes herself worry about nothing, just for the sake of having something to worry about. Such a drama queen.

Dr. Gould leant forward on his desk and smirked a little. “I think I know why,” he said.

I scoffed a little but let him carry on.

“You’re silent because you are hurting and you don’t want people to see. You want to be invisible and you want to go about your life without being noticed because you’re afraid of being forgotten. You want to either make a large impact on people’s lives, or you want to make no impact at all. You can’t be forgotten if you are never remembered to start with. Am I right?”

I guess the look on my face said it all. I was staring at him with my eyes wide and my mouth hanging open a little. He looked smug and scribbled some more stuff down on his notepad.

He understood. He got me. And apparently he could read my mind.

“They don’t give PhDs to just anybody, you know,” he was saying as he wrote all of this down. He then looked back up at me and smiled. “I am confident that I can get you talking again, Elise.”

I shook my head. He was wrong about that. I could go the rest of my life without saying a single word, I was sure of it. Speech was overrated. Why speak if you had nothing to say? It’s just noise in the end.

“Three weeks,” he announced with a clap of his hands. “In three weeks, I will have you speaking again.”

I didn’t believe him, and the rest of our appointment passed as I sketched the view from his window. After the hour was up, he took me back into the waiting room and made another appointment for me again.

Once again, the same beautiful man was in there. This time, when I entered the waiting room, he looked up at me and I plucked up the courage to smile at him. He smiled weakly back and gave me a small wave. I saw that Dr. Gould noticed all of this but he didn’t say anything, he just smirked at me and handed me my appointment card and called Gerard Way into his room. And, once again, he smelt like cigarettes, this time with soft undertones of almonds.

I wondered what he was in for, and if he was crazy like me. He didn’t look like a crazy person, but I guess neither did I. Until somebody tried speaking to me, obviously.