Juliett Novemah: A Memoir

7: Maybe Confucius was on (to) something

Welcome back.
My waning days I've spent reading a lot of Confucius. Especially now, to distract myself. (I really got carried away in the last sections with the whole "feeling" thing.) I've spent a great deal of time staring at the words before me, mentally arranging them into something I could comprehend, something applicable to my current situation.
The pages are very tattered, the spine is broken. It is bitter work, I assure you.
There is something to be said to those that spend their whole lives studying something I want to cram into my head in thirty seconds.
I pound my palm into my head, trying to jumpstart my brain like: Hurry up! Work, damn it! Your time is running out!
At dinner we eat rigatoni, it is not boiled al dente, and it's slathered in even blander Ragu. The plates do not match. Rolls are torn out of plastic bags and condensation runs down the cups from ice cubes put in them too soon.
My mother tells my father to grow up when he slaps her ass, as she's walking past him to get another drink.
We laugh.
They do not suspect my plans.

" Dad", I say, and he raised a bushy eyebrow at me, "I'm thinking of going flying soon."
To myself, I say, and I'm not coming back.

Confucius said, " A lion chased me up a tree, and I greatly enjoyed my view from the top."
I know the implications. Being fueled by fear can encourage you, motivate you to work even harder. The view from the top of the tree shows you how far you have climbed, all the while not allowing anything to interrupt your journey there. It's humbling. In this shitty world, it is a positive outlook on things.
If Confucius had been on board the plane that Sully ditched into the Hudson, his first response would be to clap, and say to the pale passenger next to him in the middle seat, "Hey, at least we landed!"
For me, I'm not so much the person climbing the tree as I am the lion chasing the person climbing the tree.
I'm the one that wants to win the pursuit, to end the journey, and save a person the trouble of climbing anything.
But it forces me to look at the situation: if I'm the also the lion, does that mean I'm running from myself, or chasing something else entirely? I'm sure Confucius did not intend a 23-year-old girl to pick apart and alter his teachings, but it cannot be denied that maybe he was onto something.
Maybe, making things worth overanalyzing was his exact intention.
So that's that.
I peruse my brain for more quotes as I'm washing the dishes, when Natalie sticks her teacup under the faucet, dribbling both of us with tea-infused water droplets.
She is no better than Dr. Halyard with the tea, which is, I must confess, gross. (I do not tell her that I know her tea is gross because she puts a tiny bit of vodka in it on Saturday mornings.)
I assure you, just the smell of it makes me want to kill myself.
(Just kidding, we both know it's not the tea.)
Anyway, my poor parents, my room is such a mess.
I've been sorting things in there, making it easier for them. I shouldn't care. In fact, there's other things I'd rather be doing, like not breathing or watching the early seasons of Dance Moms. (Only the early seasons, I'm suicidal, not an idiot.)

(That's a lot of parentheses, isn't it?)
Another unspoken law of the universe says that the people who say they don't care, really do the most. That's kind of true, at least in regard to making my room easier to clean out when I'm gone.
It's crazy, one of the signs of being depressed and suicidal is giving things away. My mom didn't bat an eye when I surrendered the Michael Kors bag I'd won at a purse bingo game. She'd been eyeing it for months, as it collected dust in my closet.
Even more so, my Dad was unconcerned when I gave him a model plane, an unseemly piece of plastic he'd won from a claw machine. But to me, it was the beginning of a passion we'd share for years to come.
I know that life is all about perspective. Living and seeing how others live is an indefinite cycle full of misunderstandings.
I know that when I die, my parents will cry and tell each other that they had no idea I'd even consider such a thing. That they saw no indication I was depressed, though I'd struggled in the past.
That in a million years, they never saw it coming.

I've told you a lot about my family. Well, my parents. A little about my LOL. Rather my X-LOL.
You're probably wondering if I have friends.
I do, but at this point, does it matter?
My friend, Mae, she's the only platonic person my social anxiety allowed me to get obscenely close to. I'm generally more introverted and a loner.
Mae has a small cast iron skillet that she carries in her purse. It was one of those funky smelling, apple-pie scented candles at one point, and she uses it for protection. The best part about Mae is her mad swing, which could knock an MMA fighter out cold.
If I don't write about her, and she ends up following me to wherever I go after this time spent on Earth, she'll hit me with it. So, for that reason, I am mentioning her.
Well, we're soul sisters and remain good friends though I keep my distance lately.
We were friends all though middle school and high-school. She always wore her hair in two thick braids, like Laura Ingalls, and was very funny.
But after we graduated high school, she went to college and I focused on flying and we drifted apart.
A year or so ago, we ran into each other in a McDonalds and have been best friends again ever since.
Mae has been bugging me to take her flying ever since we reunited. I've always found an excuse to say no.
When I mentioned on FaceTime last night I was going soon, she said, just like that, "Can I please go?"

This is how it went:
Me: it's more of a solo trip
Mae: I'll pay you for fuel
Mae: I'm sorry but it's, like, a one-seater plane
Mae: oh, okay

We both knew I was fucking lying.
But it's hard for me to tell her that she can't go flying, when she doesn't know that neither myself nor plane will be retuning!
There is another reason though, that I cannot not allow it.
Mae is late- she suspects the best, of course, seeing as how she is married, and her husband owns his own tax business and is therefore not a Japanese hotel waiter.
Mae is happy. I'm just indifferent to her news, as I am with most things lately. However, if she is pregnant, I cannot allow myself to kill another child.
It's sick to say, but if Mae really wanted to go and ended up dying with me, there is nothing I can do about that, and why should I care regardless? A kid, though...not a kid.
I cannot envision myself and Sara, or Jacques, arranging a heavenly (or hellish) play-date with Mae's unborn child. It's just not a picture I want to bring to my head.
But like the anxious thoughts I have at points, they crawl into my mind like weeds overtaking a field of wild strawberries.
Now the pills don't work. They haven't worked in years because I stopped taking them years ago.
Dr. Halyard wants me to see a psychiatrist, but I won't go.
Fuck it. Fuck everything.

It's like six in the morning right now.
Tonight, or I guess, early, this morning, I woke up screaming. It wasn't a nightmare, exactly. I thought, at first, that it had been a good dream. My plane had stalled, falling out of the sky, knowingly toward the empty wilderness.

Soon, this would be all over.
Except, it kept falling
And falling.
And falling.
and falling.
My altimeter said zero, but I still hadn't crashed.
The plane hadn't plummeted into anything but was suspended in the empty air. With horror, I realized it would be in this loop forever. I'd be alive forever. The shrieks, my Mother said, woke her up. Dad, at the time, was flying somewhere over Fiji, I think. Not that I wanted him, anyway.

My Mom kept asking me if I was okay, and I convinced her, I think. I'm not sure if she'll file this incident away in her brain as a onetime thing, or, after I'm dead, if she'll remember it suddenly, driving down the road, and feel like she should have known my intentions all along.
***

So, my hypocrisy has been discovered officially then? Despite my continuous statements.

It's impossible for me to feel "nothing" at every moment of my life, but I assured you that the indifference I'm experiencing is a very real perspective. It's like this now: I don't care if my room is a mess, or if Mae dies with me in the crash, or even if my father completely misplaces his guilt after its all over. I don't care if Natalie shoves her new MK tote full of tissues and funeral pamphlets and Valium.

I get carried away in this journal, my "feelings" come out too much. But it won't matter when I'm dead. And I will be dead.
Even when I am dead, the world, as crappy as it is, will continue to spin and life will carry on. I'll turn to dust, so prevalent it will seem like there's too much. My blood will no longer fuel every flash of red stained upon my cheeks, like ocean foam on sand.
The people that grieve are the ones that are the most alive, I assure you. They might feel stuck but will get dragged along with the rest of these shitty people as life proceeds onward.
So, that's that.