Bipolarland, Texas part 6

 4

I’m laying on my mattress on the floor with the TV on, but not paying attention to it. I just like the noise and the light and the movement; it’s stimulating. I stick my hand into the bag of Maynard's Cherry Blasters and find that I ate them all. I’m all out of Fuzzy Peach candies too. There are some sour gummy watermelon slices, but I’m too lazy to get up and get them.

Lucky there’s a toilet and sink in my room, so I don’t need to leave my room and face all the damn people who will scold me and tell me to get up and do something and try to use tough love to motivate me when that will only humiliate me and make me feel like they don’t like me, or at least that they don’t love me enough not to treat me like that: getting impatient with me, getting angry at me, acting disapproving of me or what I do or don’t do, acting as though I can help it and am just choosing to be lazy for fun, or like I don’t know any better and need to be taught that normal people don’t lay in bed all day and all night, or something else stupid like that.

I need stimulation that I don’t have to work for. I guess I’m preoccupied by my crazy family. I’m so sorry, but I don’t have it in me to work for my stimulation or earn my keep. My mom always said I never earned my keep, that I ought to be helping her polish her stupid figurines and shit that you don’t need to do to survive. I did earn my keep when I was with her... by washing dishes, doing laundry, sweeping floors, mopping floors, scrubbing floors, taking out trash, changing lightbulbs, cleaning windows and walls and fridges and ovens and toilets and bathtubs… but she said that wasn’t enough. I had to help her do her stupid flower arrangements and set tables for her stupid dinner parties that fewer and fewer people went to… then she blamed me when her fussiness made them not come back. She said she wouldn’t have to be so fussy in front of the guests if I’d done everything right. As in, perfectly.

I need a life way more stimulating in a positive way than that, but don’t know how to get it.

At least I can still manage to crawl out of bed and over to my boxes of clothes, and look through them, studying the bright colors and artistic, modern, stylish patterns and decorations and trimmings and pictures. I start to make outfits out of them and put each outfit in its own plastic bag, complete with matching makeup and accessories. I have a goth outfit, a punk outfit, a military camouflage outfit, a modern business outfit, a sparkly party outfit, an American-Indian outfit, an East Indian outfit complete with the sari, an African tribal villager outfit, a private-school girl outfit, a black and red hooker outfit with knee-high boots and a skirt that zips from top to bottom. What should I wear today? The Scottish tartan outfit seems about right. It’s nice and stimulating, bright red and bright yellow and bright green and white, and a little black but that’s okay. It actually gives off more light than my hippie outfit.

There’s a knock on my door. Since I’m standing near the door anyway, I open it. It’s Jules, wearing his old high school football jersey, holding his clipboard and envelope and Walk the World to Fight Hunger pledge forms. Jules, Jakub, Don, Geoffrey, Filip, Zygmunt and my brother Ira all have keys to my apartment. They can take what they want from my fridge and crash on my floor if they need to, and often they store their food in my fridge too.

“Hey, you wanna come collecting with me?” he asks, giving me a genuine sweet smile.

He means going into a rich neighborhood and collecting money for the UN World Food Programme, getting people to pledge for their walkathon, then just keeping the cash for ourselves, since we just printed the pledge forms off the internet. They don’t get any receipt, but by then we’re long gone. Jules always wears his high school football jersey to go collecting, and tells the people he’s still in high school, and he looks like he is too.

“I can’t,” I say, and I start to cry. “I’m too lazy.”

“It’s okay,” he says, looking disappointed. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” He turns away and reaches for the doorknob in the door leading out of the apartment.

“I really want to!” I say. “I really, really want to! But I’m just too lazy!”

“Then you don’t want to.”

“I want to!” I sob. “But I don’t have any motivation.”

“Well, if you wanted to come, then you would be motivated to come.”

“I am! But I’m not!”

“You don’t want to come. Stop whining about it.” And he’s out the door, looking hurt.

I fall to the floor and really start bawling. “I don’t have the energy to come!” I shout. But he’s gone. And he probably thinks that if I have the energy to bawl like this, I have the energy to go with him. He’s stupid like that.

But at the same time as I’m hating him for being stupid, I’m crying for him, for the dear, sweet friend that I hurt, the friend who is depressed himself. And I’m so angry at this depression that is ruining my life and the lives of the people I care so much about.

I need to apologize to him. But I’m not up to explaining complicated things, and I’m certainly not up to running after him down the street. Instead I go back into my room, lock the door and sob until I fall asleep.

Someone’s pounding on my door asking if I want cookies. I say no and go back to sleep. I dream about cookies in a store that I stole a chocolate bar from in my childhood. My mom told me that even if I begged God for forgiveness for stealing that chocolate bar, I might still go to hell. And other times she had said that questioning God was bad and you go to hell for it. Why even try, then, to ask forgiveness? That’s questioning God. You go to hell for asking for forgiveness and you go to hell for not asking for forgiveness. I guess I’m fucking screwed then. And I can fucking swear all I fucking want, as I’m going to fucking hell anyway.