Nowhere Is the Only Place - Chapter 19

Sometimes, I wonder why I keep Chad around. Or else why Chad keeps me around. I don't remember which way it is. I don't remember when I'm uncomfortable. See, earlier today, I was talking with him and we were over at his apartment. It actually wasn't like today, more like this evening, because I don't really have my actual days free for much anything. And sometimes, I really don't want to be at home at night because I'm afraid I might pose some threat to myself there, I need someone present to make sure nothing goes wrong.
It's weird, because I'm trying to escape the tension of life and myself at Chad's apartment, and the place always makes me uncomfortable. It makes me feel vulnerable. I feel vulnerable and unsafe because it's his world, and it's not my own. I'm unsafe in such a place. Granted, I'm not safe anywhere. But some places feel safer than others.
I wanted to talk with him about our writing assignments. I wanted to read mine to him and see what he thought of it. He read first. His was very much like what Edgar Allan Poe might have come up with had he been given the same assignment. That is, it was about a young woman having a mental breakdown while nobody around her noticed or cared, and it ended with her going down to a river to absent-mindedly drown herself, and with her boyfriend (referred to in-story as "the only man who ever loved her") finding out and coming to save her, but he arrived too late, and she drowned. That's where it ended.
"It's a…it's a nice story, Chad," I offer after his reading, and I realize that I used the completely wrong word. You don't call stories about madness, death, and love problems "nice".
Chad seems to be alright with the phrasing, though. He kind of smiles and just says, "Nice…yeah, I guess it's nice. I liked writing it, anyway."
"Now – now can I read my story?" I ask.
"What? Oh, yeah, sure, go ahead," Chad says. "If you have to."
So I read it. It's an awful, half-formed narrative involving a writer who falls in love with a woman he deeply admires. He barely knows her, actually, they just have a mutual friend and the friend tells him all about her. And he writes a lot of stuff for her, and she reads it and likes it, but she doesn't pick up onto the fact that it's about her. And so he feels completely rejected, and his writing takes a darker turn – he starts writing about death and despair and some religious dread and stuff like that. And there's always this woman in the stories that acts as a kind of light in the typical depressed protagonist's life. Usually something bad happens to her. And the woman reads the stories but doesn't like that they're so depressing. The writer gets even sadder, and it's not helped by the fact that the woman he loves soon gets married after that, so of course there's not even the smallest chance of him having her. And it ends with him finishing up some long, depressing, most likely boring story that expresses his angst most perfectly and then contemplating suicide. It doesn't say if he did it or not. It just says that he was thinking about it.
"So – so how was it, Chad?" I ask when it's done.
"It was okay," he replies. "It's kind of a rip-off, though."
"Rip-off? Of what?"
"Dante and Beatrice. Or The Great Gatsby. Or, you know, pretty much any love story."
"Oh. I wasn't thinking about that." I'm surprised Chad made those comparisons. I thought he was going to say that it was a rip-off of my own life. "Hey…this is very off-topic, but can I ask you something?"
"What is it?" He sounds distracted, like he's not really listening.
"I've noticed that sometimes, you say…very insensitive and unkind things to me. Why?"
He blinks at me, as though he doesn't understand my question. "I don't do that."
"Yes, you do. You tell me how abnormal I am and that I'm not like other people." Question: Am I actually asserting myself? Answer: Yes, I am.
Chad doesn't take the self-assertion very well. He looks at me, he looks upset at me, like he's hinting that I shouldn't have spoken. "Well, you're not like other people. You know that. You're abnormal, Ish." Like I should accept that.
"Okay, so I'm not normal. But – but shouldn't I be able to have normal feelings? Shouldn't you see me like I'm a person? Can I have the right to be a person?" I begin to raise my voice, and I know I shouldn't, but I do it anyway. "Can I be a bloody person, Chad? Can I?"
Chad says nothing, but his displeasure becomes less of a hint and more of a statement.
I go on, with that strange feeling of empowerment. "Why do you tell me that I'm abnormal and that I should be lucky that someone appreciates me?" I stand up, unable to just sit and be outraged. "You don't appreciate me, I know you don't. So you lied to me about that. Just let me be a normal person, not a bloody lunatic!"
Chad stands up, too, and he's facing me. I'd never noticed how tall he is. He makes me feel very small. "Ish, I don't want to argue with you, but I will, because you need to understand this for your own good. You. Are. Not. A. Normal. Person. Don't ask me to treat you like something you're not." He raises his voice, too, and I'm frightened. I don't know what to say, so he continues angrily. "You're not appreciative. You don't appreciate what I do for you, how I keep you around and I don't treat you the way other people would. I'm really the only person who appreciates you at all. You'd never be able to manage friendship or relationship of any kind, because you just can't do that! You don't understand anything, nothing about people or yourself!"
"I understand things," I say, my voice low and uncontrollable. I'm so small in front of him. "I understand that people are terrible, and so am I, but maybe I need them. Maybe –"
"You have me, you lunatic bastard! And I accept and tolerate you, unlike other people! Who else appreciates you like I do? Nobody."
I make a little sound in the back of my throat, a high whimper that sounds like a small animal that's been caught. "No. I – I need someone who really accepts me. You just keep me around, heaven knows why, but you don't accept me. Someone who accepted me wouldn't have called me a lunatic bastard."
"It's what you are!"
He hits me on the face, and I wince, step back, nearly fall because of the pain.
"That was because you're not listening to me," he explains. "That's because you're not listening and I have to get through to you somehow."
I look at him silently, wrathfully. I will not let him be right. He can't be. But I'm still so small now, a little animal in his trap.
"I got through to you now," he says. "Now you're listening. Because I'm communicating at such a basic level with you. The only kind of level you lunatics and abnormal people can really understand."
Silence. I'm sure I'm crying, but if I am, it's very softly, and it's in that pathetic trapped animal way, now a wounded animal, an animal that's always going to be wounded if it moves. So small.
Chad moves towards me, as though to take any kind of further action, but he sits back down, closing his eyes and letting out a sigh that sounds both calmed and angry. Maybe that's how he really feels.
"I'm not going to have this discussion with you anymore, Ish," Chad says. "I'm really not. I don't want to have to explain this to you if you're not going to understand it.
No. I suppose he doesn't.
A large degree of fear takes over me, the kind of fear that insists I leave the situation. The fight-or-flight response. I don't fight, I never really can. But I can come up with some kind of absurd excuse, and whatever I come up with will be a total lie, but it's what I have to do. But as I'm trying to give him a reason for leaving, I can't think of anything and instead I just get up, falter a bit, and leave, stumbling back home directionlessly.
As I make my way back to the place where I live – I can't even call it home, because nowhere is home anymore – I notice how dark it is. Nighttime now, reminding me of those lonely spaces of time that I hide under the streetlight and escape there. My eyes roam, and see a streetlight. Maybe it's the streetlight. I can't tell right now. Even if it's not, though, it'll have to do, because I'm going to take my place underneath it and let my mind wander while I stay right there.
What just happened and why? Why was I there, and why did Chad do as he did? He called me a lunatic, I remember that, and that's all I can really pull from my mind right now. And he hit me. I remember that, too. My eye twitches involuntarily as I think about it and the nasty pain that's still there. I think it's going to leave an awful kind of bruise afterwards, the kind that you have to come up with a stupid story about to explain it because you're too afraid to tell the actual story.
He said that I was his only friend, but I don't know if that was true. He's certainly my only something, but I don't know if that something is a friend. A companion, maybe. The word sounds applicable. Someone who's there, someone who follows you through something. A companion isn't necessarily a friend, is it? That would explain a lot.
An actual friendship isn't going to happen, though. I'm fairly certain of that. Because who would want to befriend me? I don't even really remember how Chad happened to become my companion. I think he initiated it. I tend not to initiate things. Except for my escapes from suicide. When I try to turn into someone else. If I did that again, what name would I take on? Not that I'm getting suicidal enough for it, but what name would I take on? Maybe another book reference. What book? The Stranger, maybe. The main character's named Mersault, and he's the sociopathic narrator. His name doesn't sound normal because it's French. I couldn't get away with a French name here. Especially when there's no reason for it beyond self-comparison to a fictional sociopath.
I'm like Mersault already, maybe. He doesn't care for anything but he's more or less alright for it. I wish I could be like that. If I were trying to recreate myself, I would want to be like that. But I know it's not going to happen. It never does.