I Was Here(44)
It’s one thing to type messages into the ether, but it sounds like she was talking to someone in the real world, too. Someone else other than me. The hot boil of jealousy shames me. It’s so pathetic. I’m waging a tug of war, but no one else is holding the other end of the rope.
I skim the responses. Some people warn Meg about SSRIs being a mind-control plot devised by the pharmaceutical industry. Others say that taking them will numb her soul. Others claim that humans have always used mind-altering substances, and antidepressants are merely the latest incarnation.
And then there’s this response:
All_BS: There is a difference between using a natural substance like peyote to engage in a consciousness-expanding experience versus allowing a bunch of drones in lab coats to manipulate brain chemistry to such a precise degree that thoughts and feelings are controlled. Have you read Brave New World? These new miracle medications are nothing but Soma, a government-produced narcotic to blot out individuality and dissent. Firefly, it is an act of bravery to feel your feelings.
Oh, Meg would’ve loved that. It’s an act of bravery to feel your feelings, even if your feelings are telling you to die.
And again, I wonder: Why didn’t she come to me? Why wasn’t I the one she asked for help?
Did I miss something in her emails? I open my webmail, checking to see what messages she might have sent me in January, which is when she posted this one to the boards. But there are no emails between us from January.
It wasn’t a fight, exactly. It was too quiet to be a fight. Meg was staying in Tacoma for part of the winter break because of her work-study job, so she was only coming home for the ten days around Christmas and New Year’s. I was so excited to see her, but then at the last minute she said she had to go to southern Oregon to visit Joe’s family, so she wouldn’t even be coming home. Normally, I would’ve been invited to join them in Oregon. But I wasn’t. Well, not until the day before New Year’s Eve, when Meg called and begged me to come down. “Rescue me from the holidays,” she said, sounding frazzled. “My parents are driving me crazy.”
“Really?” I replied. “Because I spent Christmas Day eating an eight-dollar turkey plate at the diner with Tricia, and that was magical.” Before, we might have laughed about this—as if the patheticness of my life with Tricia belonged to someone else—but it didn’t and so it wasn’t funny.
“Oh,” Meg said. “I’m sorry.”
I’d been angling for pity, but now that I had it, it only made me angrier. I told her I had to work, and we hung up. And when New Year’s came, we didn’t even call each other. We didn’t communicate for a while after that. I wasn’t sure how to break the ice because we hadn’t fought, exactly. When Mr. Purdue grabbed my ass—a piece of news, at last—it gave me the opening, and I emailed her as if nothing had happened.
I scroll back to September, when she left for school. I read Meg’s initial emails, the Meg-like rambling descriptions of her housemates, complete with scanned drawings. I remember how I read those messages over and over, even though it physically hurt to do so. I missed her so much, and wished I could’ve been there, could’ve gone through with our plans. But I never told her that.
There’s a lot that I didn’t tell her. And even more that she didn’t tell me.
Firefly1021
Guilt
I keep thinking about my family, not so much my parents as my little brother. What would this do to him?
All_BS: James Baldwin wrote that “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.” You have to decide if you’re willing to grab your freedom, and if in doing so, you might inadvertently set others free. Who knows what path your decision will lead your brother down? Perhaps freed of your shadow, perhaps freed to be his own person, he will be able to fulfill a potential he might not otherwise reach.