disciple
(free preview)
current patreon project
you always thought lilies were pretty enough
You are twenty-six and back in school, where no one knows you don’t belong. You look nineteen so you fit right in and you do your best to keep it that way, because there’s nothing worse than sticking out. No one knows that you live with another twenty-six year old or that you already have a bachelor’s degree. They know you work at a coffee shop, but not that you’re full-time or that you’re the manager, having worked your way up since your first run through college. You went back to get a new degree - switching from art to psychology, which was a leap you took blind, hoping you’d land on your feet.
You’re doing fine. Mostly A’s and B’s. One C, but that was in a required philosophy course that you sort of brushed off. Not because you didn’t like it. Not even because you thought it was stupid.
It scared you.
You couldn’t handle the meaning of life. You couldn’t go through mountains of hypotheses on why you exist. You couldn’t deal with famous thinkers, waxing poetic on what else might be out there. Your doctor referred you to a therapist who referred you to a psychiatrist who finally - finally, after all these years - prescribed you a medication (or four) that helped you stop waxing poetic. They helped you stop thinking. You didn’t want to go to class just to be told you had to think again. Because you don’t just consider things when you think. You panic. Thinking makes you panic. When you start thinking, you don’t stop. You keep thinking until you’re breathing into a paper bag and doing yoga stretches to calm your legs down. That’s why you chose psychology.
You want to understand why you can’t think correctly.
Of course, you’ve also learned that most psychologists were misogynists and that writing papers in APA format is fucking hard. One professor threatened to report you for plagiarism if you didn’t learn how to cite properly and you knew that at nineteen, you would have been terrified. At twenty-six, you’re just tired. You rolled your eyes and snatched the paper from her, telling her yeah, you’d work on it. She was one of the B classes.
You had to do a family tree in that class; you had to go back five generations and you had to ask your mom for a lot of references. She came to the United States from Japan when she was in college and met your dad. They got married right after graduation and you’ve heard tales that he’s a very loving guy, but if it’s true, you’ve never seen it. The last thing you want is for anyone to find out the gay kid in their psychology classes has daddy issues though, so you keep that pretty close to the chest, too. Just like everything else about your life. Plus, it’s not that your dad doesn’t love you. He just doesn’t like you very much. In any case, your mom is very proud of you for going back to school for such a practical degree. Your dad is just exasperated you didn’t do that in the first place. What good is an art degree, he asks constantly. Especially if you’re still just working at the coffee place. He doesn’t remember the name. All he remembers is the time you redrew a photo of him and your mom on their wedding day in vine charcoal for a final project and gifted it to them on their anniversary. He remembers it because it was weird, he says. Your mom framed it and put it on the mantel.
Your roommate Jenni is the last link you have to college run number one; you two met in an intro to art class and she wasn’t just a good artist, she was the kind of person that really intimidated you in a good way. The kind of person you wanted to be around. The kind of person you wanted to be like. She took good criticism well but met stupid critiques with eye rolls and dismissive hand waves. She knows her worth and builds you up, too. She’s your best friend and you desperately need her around to keep you sane. She calms you down and keeps you level. She also likes to party still, just like you do. Everyone else you met back then has settled down already. They can’t stay out late on a Friday night because they’re tired from the work week. You get it, you just aren’t like that. You and Jenni will go out every few weekends to hit on men all night and if one of you strikes out, both of you strike out. You either bring home two guys or none. Or more. And when it’s none, you spend the night eating ice cream out of the carton and watching a movie until you pass out in the living room.
But some nights, you have heart-to-hearts. And that’s why Jenni knows how much you hate to think.
You’ll get onto a tangent. Your thoughts will start to barrel out of control and get away from you. You start to panic. You think and think and think without ever talking about what you think. You just let it fester. This often leads to panic attacks about whether or not there’s something else out there and if it even matters that your dad doesn’t like you very much. Because if there’s something else, if there’s something beyond what you know, beyond what anyone knows, then maybe your little life is so insignificant that it doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t love you. In the grand scheme of things, life doesn’t matter if there’s something more after it. You don’t necessarily know if you care about there being life after death as much as you care about there being anything out there at all. Another universe. Well, of course there are other universes, but maybe other dimensions. Other life. Even here on Earth, what if ghosts are real? What if your grandmother is still wandering around, still watching over you? You hate that thought though because then she knows when you’re taking a shit and that makes you feel weird. That’s something she doesn’t need to see.
You’ve gotten better at recognizing those tangents, but they still happen, even on medication. Because anxiety doesn’t really leave you, not fully. You’re always going to have trouble thinking. Your brain is always going to run itself out of control, until it feels like it might catch fire and explode. All your doctors have tried to give you something to contain that. But no pill is going to truly cure it. The only thing that could cure it probably doesn’t exist.
It certainly doesn’t exist in an abandoned nursing home off the highway. It certainly doesn’t happen to be corporeal, to have a thought process itself and the power of speech. It certainly doesn’t care that you exist, at least. If it did - if the cure to your problems was real - it wouldn’t care about you. It would never fall in love with you. It would never change its lifestyle, uproot its entire existence, alter its core being just for you.
Or maybe it would. But you wouldn’t know. Because you haven’t met him yet.