The Boy I Could Never Love

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The mill went bankrupt in my second year of high school. Out of work and yet recovered from my father's drinking and scheming, my mother lost the house I grew up knowing as home. The place we moved to sat downtown and only contained three bedrooms, one of which stood no bigger than a walk-in.

This became mine as mom contained a bedroom set with a queen and the kids needed the largest. With five people, three potty-training toddlers, a teenager, and an adult, the space felt cramped. Yet, we tried to make the best of it, and with the help of her parents to look after the little ones, mom went back to school.

My workload overwhelmed me where I slacked off the last few years, making classes appear harder than ever. Following the lessons became difficult. Even drama seemed more of an undertaking than a reward. As the weeks passed, I began feeling drained.

At first, I fought the urge to lie down, but a month of constant fatigue saw it consume me. Soon, napping in the afternoon became commonplace. I arrived home, did some reading, laid down, mom woke me to eat supper, I ate, did some more homework, and back to bed I went.

Reserving the option to ride the bus saw me oversleeping pick up and needing to walk the mile to school. This at least ensured I got there before the bell. I started carrying a brush in my backpack, not wanting to earn the caption of the girl with the raggedy hair again, or the matted dog. A few times, I even took a shower in the locker room. As the naps came with more frequency and lasted longer in duration, waking me evolved into a chore. This reached the point where my girlfriend gifted me an alarm clock.

The day this peaked saw school let out and me going to my closet room the moment I got home. Three hours later Mom arrived to find me in bed. Shaking me awake proved me cool to the touch and unresponsive. My skin looked ghostly, and my mother believed me dead.

Her panicked voice caused my eyes to open. I noticed the night entering through the window and her frizzy black hair illuminated by the light from the hall as she moved about the room, too afraid of what she might find by turning on my light. No sense of touch beyond knowledge of the act registered and speaking felt like a round peg in a square hole. I could hear her talking, yet could not understand more than my name, and movement felt forced.

She asked a few times before what she said registered. Hearing my mother beg to know what I took left me perplexed. Shaking my head brought insistence, but I just felt tired and went to bed. Upholding my report that I did not take anything, she sat me up. I don't remember how, but gaining enough sense to get downstairs and in the car, we rushed to the hospital.

Mom kept me talking for the half-hour drive to the emergency room. I did my best but continued to find it uneasy to respond. All I wanted was to sleep. When we arrived, I remained coherent, yet listless.

Suspecting I took something, the staff unceremoniously hauled me out of the car and wheeled me into a room. My condition earned a bombardment of questions multiple times over. Our answers brought even more ill treatment from the ER doctors and nurses. No longer preserving the will to care, I allowed it, and my freaked-out mom did not stop them.

I've often wondered if the mishandling knocked the sense into me as they tossed me around in a haphazard manner, like an angry kind of CPR to jump-start the connection to my body. This went on for four hours, and by the end of it, I began coming back.

At eleven pm, a battery of tests failed to find any drugs in my system. Not even Tylenol came up in their screening. They then concluded that depression left my fifteen-year-old brain to mentally and physically check out as they found no other cause. My return to responsiveness had them send me home after making an appointment with my doctor who later gave me antidepressants.

I always laughed about how they thought I came there on drugs only to then give them to me. Now, if I did take something, I can see how the comedy would go out of that statement. The fact remains that I didn't. Yet, some people wouldn't find the humor in that at all. They look at prescriptions differently than drugs. My friends fell into that category.

In making the joke, I met with crickets. Nonetheless, the image remains funny to me even now. The knowledge that I got tossed around, quite literally, for taking drugs I did not take, only to leave with a prescription after the fact is hilarious. It makes me laugh all the harder to think they didn't get it. Sometimes, you need to laugh at the little jokes life throws at you.

In a few months of trial, they found a regime that began working for me. It wasn't perfect, but the medication pushed my perspective of the world around me to change. This brought about an obvious draw toward my friend. We already entered our junior year by then and knew each other for six. Sure, I thought about saying yes that one time but regarded it as a momentary lack of judgment. I could not understand why the transformation happened or what it meant. Further, I didn't know what it was at first.

One day I looked at him and thought, would it be that bad to go out with him? It came out of nowhere. Nothing he said or did changed. I still rarely saw him outside of homeroom, and he offered nothing extra to gain my attention. Even his gifts stopped by that time. As similar dialogue presented over the next few months, I thought, this is it, I have finally gone crazy.

My continued disbelief held me back. There existed no justification to feel this way other than the fact that I knew he liked me. <He started pulling away around that time, and this resigned me to thinking I held no reason for feeling the way I did as he no longer showed interest.> It went from trying to convince myself to accept my feelings to asking the age-old question, what's the worst that can happen? This became my downfall.

The meds worked some, but I received no counseling while taking them. Once my feelings surfaced, my self-hatred took over, and with no one to talk to, I held no way of combating it. Looking into my life and the way I treated my friend, I told myself there was no way he still wanted me after everything.

I felt him too good to deal with someone like me, and his personality, though strong but reserved, remained unsuited to deal with my kind of crazy. I would destroy his kind and gentle nature, and there existed no world where I would make him happy. I could never love him as he deserves. My best one stated simply, I am not his happiness. These unspoken truths convinced me it remained better if he did what I asked and moved on, even if I no longer wanted him to.

Telling him I suddenly saw him, surely would seem unbelievable. I felt a confession like that would shatter the remaining friendship we managed to hold on to. We stood on rocky ground with my insistence on our just being friends. Something I stayed adamant about whenever someone challenged our relationship in the past. Nonetheless, visiting him in homeroom recharged me to deal with the bullshit of day-to-day life, and I still feared losing that. He existed as my shining light, but only in those twenty-five minutes.

Seeing him beyond the confines of homeroom made me wish to rip my hair out where catching sight of him in the hall or the cafeteria felt like a betrayal, but to him or myself, I could not answer. Even with the new thoughts, I still felt nothing but hostility at the sight of him around school, though it lessened as my musings evolved in frequency.

The controversy of my reactions furthered me to regard his presence as something I exploited. I loathed myself for the idea, and the reality seated in me like sludge. Yet, I could not bring myself to give up those twenty-five minutes.

I once asked why I felt like I did, and the girl I talked to said she didn't know. Revisiting this time led me to conclude I hated the way I treated him and wanted him to call me out for it as he'd done in the past. When he went about uncaring, it left me unable to process what I did to him.

I know I barked at him when he came near me, but what I wanted was my friend to stand up to me, and show me he contained the strength to handle the broken parts of me. My moods jumped around a lot then as they adjusted my medication, resigning me to the idea that for someone to be with me, they needed to truly want me to get through it. I couldn't find out that he really didn't.

When did you push someone away for their own good?
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