5.2

Exit parents.
Hey.
Hey.
How’s it goin?
Good. Good.
I think this is the first time my parents have left us alone in the house.
Yeah.
Guess they don’t have anything to worry about anymore.
Sorry. I don’t know why I…
S’alright.
So, I got home a few days ago.
Yeah.
Been trying to call you.
Yeah.
What the heck, Stace? Whaaaaaaaaaaat’s goin on?
I don’t know.
You don’t know.
I’m…confused.
About what?
I don’t know.
Ok.
I’m sorry.
About us?
Hmm?
Are you confused about us?
Yeah.
Ok, I don’t know what that means.
Staci, please talk to me, and please look at me.
Hi.
What is it?
I don’t know.
I don’t know if we should…If we’re meant to be together right now. It’s been a lot.
It’s been a lot.
It’s been a lot for you.
Tyler.
For you.
Ty.
That’s…interesting. Because look at me, could you, just, actually
look at me for a second…Staci, look at me
I am!
Cause everything’s great over here for me.
Shut up.
What the…?
Whatever. I understand.
No you don’t.
I don’t? Ok.
You don’t.
Sure I do. I’m in a wheelchair now. I can’t walk. My body’s messed up.
And who cares if I’m still the same guy who loves you? Physical. It’s always physical with you.
That’s not true!
Then what is this?!!
It’s me not wanting to give up everything.
Like what?
Like sex.
That’s pretty physical, Stace.
And babies.
And moving around the…planet. Having a life.
Right.
I’m sorry.
I’ll give you what you want, Stace.
No you won’t. You wouldn’t before.
Excuse me?
I wanted you. All of you. I wanted to experience…I wanted you,
but you were scared or something.
I was principled! There’s a difference!
You were a coward! And now it’s too late!
Who are you?!
Well, gosh, Staci, I’m so sorry for the hell I put you through,
trying to get to know you for you, and respecting you, and
being able to look your dad in the eye when I talked to him…
Hell? You think that was Hell? It was purgatory,
Tyler! This is Hell! I’m sorry for being so selfish
and wanting to not be, like, a eunuch when I’m
seventeen! And for wanting to be anything other
than your wife!
Why’d you just say that? Sit down.
No.
Just sit down for a second.
No.
Sit down!
No!
Staci, what the…?!!
Staci!!!
5.3
I remember my pastor talking once in a sermon about anger. It was very informative. He said that there are different levels of emotion, and that anger is a secondary emotion. That is, you never feel it first–it’s the result of a primary emotion, like fear or embarrassment or sadness or frustration. And no matter what anybody says, you can’t manage anger unless you identify and deal with the primary cause of it.
And I strongly suspect, but who am I?, that of all the primary emotions, frustration is the most volatile.
Try any of these:
1. Your mom leaves you alone for maybe a half hour while she runs to the grocery store. She has parked your wheelchair right next to your bed, but forgotten to put the brakes on. You reach to grab it, but you accidentally knock it just out of reach. With one hand you hang onto your headboard so that you don’t fall off your bed onto the hard laminate floor, and then with your other hand you reach for the chair. You reach so hard that your muscles are taut, your ligaments are about to tear, and you feel like your arm is about to come out of its shoulder socket. But you just can’t gain that one half inch to the chair. So you wait for your mommy.
2. You live in an old house. There’s an upstairs, which you can’t get to, a basement–where the washer and dryer are, which you can’t get to, and then a main level. On the main level there’s a long, narrow hallway running from the front of the house to the back. You can’t get down it in your wheelchair because of a huge radiator that sticks out from the wall on one side. So you are basically confined to your awesome new bedroom with really wide doors, a tiny north-facing living room, and the kitchen.
3. And the kitchen: You can’t pull up to either side of the fridge and then lean and pull the door open, because there isn’t that much room on either side of the fridge. And you can’t get directly in front of the fridge and lean forward and open the fridge door, because there’s a counter top where you would need to be in order to do that. And you can’t move the table out of the kitchen to make more room, because your awesome new bedroom is where the dining room used to be. So your parents have to put a little microfridge in your room. And no matter what is in the microfridge, it’s never what you actually need at any given time.
4. Your girlfriend basically referred to you as a eunuch and moved two time zones away and hasn’t called. Not once.
5. You have to keep a log of your bowel movements to give to a doctor.
6. Your mom asks you about your bowel movements. Every day.
7. It takes you at least fifteen minutes to go out and get the mail. On a good day. And that’s pretty much the funnest thing you do.
Frustration.
Confinement. Living in slow motion. Straining to do everything–a ridiculous exhaustion. Being left behind. Idleness. Home in the middle of the day, asleep in light, awake in dark, still amid movement, uselessness.
And that apart from missing.
Missing a touch, warm and light on the sides of my face. Missing the crooked line of the part in her hair, the peach fuzz on the far back of her jaw bone when her face was backlit. Birthmark on the side of her right ring finger, another on that same wrist.
Her short, lagging stride; the fact that she’d jog with me at all.
Adorable disheveledness–shirt untucked in the back, always tugging up her little britches. That short, choppy hair–often flattened on one side because she’d fallen asleep leaning against something.
Everything just got really…medical. Still is, though less so, and I get that sometimes you just need a breather. That sometimes disinfected just isn’t far enough away from infected–you need to
step. out. side.
But she’s gone. And gone is far.
6.0
I gained like fifteen pounds that winter. I was technically still in school. All I lacked to graduate was pre-Cal, two electives, a semester of German, and English. The German I did at home–it was my second year of it. The teacher A) knew B) liked C) felt sorry for me–gave me straight B’s as log as I knew when to use das, der, and die. I also took “Architectural Drawing” at home–which everybody knew was actually “Smoking Behind the Band Room,” so the teacher couldn’t conscionably give me low grades on anything. I took a high school correspondence course from UT–marketing?–can’t remember; Mom kind of did it for me–don’t judge–and then it was arranged for me to graduate after taking the math and science in summer school. The schoolwork gave me some diversion, and I had a steady stream of friends coming over to help/tutor/stare at me.
The one thing that really kept me going, though–kept my hands off the knives in the stillness of midday, kept me getting into the shower when I had no place to go–was this faint thing between a whisper and a thought:
for a reason
I did not touch my bible. I knew where it was, and I knew where God was, the way you know where your kid is, because you just do, which is,
exactly where you left him.
But I was so mad. I said, uh, swears. To God. Because those were the baddest words I could think to say. And that’s what people say in the movies. And movies are a highly accurate representation of real life.
And it made me feel not one inch better. There are moments, and note this, writers, when you are way, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay past an expletive.