"I'm Not Crazy"

IV.

Being alone was an art form.

I was the most prolific artist in that respect. I trained in an art school more commonly referred to as DHS custody. It wasn't a school I enrolled in by choice, but it was the one I was given. That's how it worked for all of us.

Making long term relationships was virtually impossible under those conditions. I never lived anywhere specific for longer than a year or two. I never knew where I'd end up when the next move happened. If I made a friend, I didn't have a phone number or a forwarding address to give them when I left.

I bounced between foster homes, but I also went to programs, like the year long wilderness therapy I was given when I was 16. They intentionally keep you isolated in a program like that. They don't let you keep up with your friends. When someone graduates from the program (or more likely is removed for illness, injury, or because they had parents that decided to care), they went to great lengths to never mention that kid again. It was like they just ceased to exist.

Somewhere along the line, I learned that it was best not to hang on to people. It was best to pretend you never wanted them in the first place. Surface level conversations and pleasantries could keep you going, and the eventual knowledge that the relationship would end was comforting in a way because you never had to worry about the impact you were having. I could be perceived as unemotional and boring. I could act out sporadically and be labeled as dramatic. It didn't matter. Nobody cared. I'd never see them again anyways.

I did act out. You should know that. These things don't happen to a calm and collected person. I may have you believing that I was always as docile as I appear in the now, but I wasn't. I was a liar. Liars do not go down quietly. They go down screaming their lies.

I was frustrated to find that my apartment felt lonelier than normal on the evening following my maternal phone call. The emptiness of the living room was bearing down on me. The hardwood floor was cold. The white painted walls were narrowing. The neighbors were frustratingly silent, and I was sitting there with my eyes on the front door feeling the emptiness like a cancer in my chest. It spread, and destroyed, and choked me until I couldn't breathe.

My heart was hammering. It had been hammering for over an hour, and at some point I'd picked up the pills prescribed for panic, but I had not taken them. I was just rattling the container in my hand like a pharmaceutical maraca, and I was wondering quite desperately how anyone else seemed to function without their "as-needed" solutions.

It was almost one in the morning. I still could not turn the lights off. I wondered what the grant people would say when the electric bill came in. I'd been so shocked to learn people paid for electric. Nobody had ever mentioned it to me. I'd never lived in a regular house for very long, but I still thought it was something I should have known. There was so much I should have known.

I had not applied for jobs that day. I'd thought about it; worried even, but I hadn't made the step. I didn't know how to make my stupid stiff mind do it. It felt comically hopeless. How could I get a job? Who would hire me? I had no skills. I'd done nothing. I was in my 20's and I'd never done anything meaningful. I barely understood that we were expected to pay for electricity. How could I be qualified? Why would a job want me?

My mother didn't want me. I was chronically unwanted, wasn't I?

A decision wasn't made consciously, although I might just be making excuses. I want to think that it was just the aloneness, or the heavy beating of my heart that distracted me. Subconscious was a propelling force, a motor that drove me on forward until my feet were hitting the pavement.

I had studied the cities rail system when I decided to come to LA. I read train maps late into the evenings until I'd fall asleep with the lines running across the backs of my closed eyelids. Even now, the map lived taped to the wall in my bedroom, the only decoration. While moving on impulse, I could still navigate the trains.