Chapter Text
The vinyl record playing at the moment, nestled neatly on my adjacent dresser, played smoothly and crisp. No surprise, as the vinyl likely hasn’t existed much longer than perhaps a month before I bought it, manufactured swiftly and easily. Modern vinyl rarely had the comforting stiff weight of those in the past and often had a lingering sense of static cling I couldn’t stand fresh from the package, but the excitement of opening one new overrode that distaste. I couldn’t bring myself to put up posters from inside or use anything not as intended, so I neatly folded everything large back into the sleeve when not in use along with lyric sheets or other merchandise. My side of the room, at times, looked unlived in. In contrast, while I so dearly loved my friend, the other half of the room had two uneven posters that I was not permitted to shift and various states of disarray. It was, by all means, normal. Normal tended to frustrate me.
Perhaps it was from the boring burden of being named Adam, I thought.
I listened to it intently, knowing each lyric and anticipating the next. I had things to be doing, as I always did, but I still enjoyed taking time to devote to things I liked. Meanwhile, I would never completely distract myself from importance like my roommate. Even while enjoying my records, I was still passively working. I couldn’t drop the academia mindset. My roommate, however, I had never known to be necessarily academic. Sure, he was good at mathematics and economics, but he was terribly average at best in other categories. The more liberal of the arts weren’t his forte.
We met in high school. I had very limited experiences with friends and those who were ever interested in being friends got intimidated by either my mother’s aggressive pursuit of prestige or my busy schedule. So, I usually return null. Charlie, my roommate, was my best friend by default, but he easily won the position with his presence. I thought I would miss him when I went to college. I had gotten accepted here at Yale to be a pre-medical undergraduate. I worked awfully hard to get in and yet, Charlie came to me with the huge surprise that he too had been accepted. Here, the student I wrote the English papers for and knew to be disinterested in extremely competitive higher education programs, holding the official packet with his full name, address, and everything declaring he too, Charles Wyatt Marin, had been accepted into the college as a mathematics major.
I was shocked. He teased me when he first met me in high school for caring so much about the colleges I wanted to go into, so how couldn’t I be perplexed about how he got in?
“Well, you are going, aren’t you?” I remember him asking.
“Absolutely, but… how did you get in?”
He shrugged playfully. He always rerouted the question. “I wanted to follow you. You probably won’t make any friends up there. I’ve known you for almost four years and you do not have friend-making skills,” he pushed me gently.
And, so, he really did. In fact, we roomed together, thankfully. I dreaded the idea of living with a stranger. For four years now, I’ve lived with him and, honestly, it was not terrible. After a while, you quickly got used to Charlie’s nearly boundaryless flirtation and platonic touching. He was overjoyed easily and had an extroverted social dream. Meanwhile, I wondered why he really did like me. People often called me chilly due to my closed off nature, but in my own space, I could be far from closed-off. The prudence typically returned the moment I was in public or anywhere else I could be scorned, but I still stood my ground. Charlie called it “flaunting” whenever I had something sharp witted back at someone, which was often, but I didn’t care. That was, perhaps, a flaw of mine. I got unhealthily smug about my academic achievements and intelligence. I could always be reminded by the look on someone’s face after whatever tort I had ready. Obviously, it wouldn’t be so bad had people not been readily rude or hostile to me, but I learned early on in elementary school that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. I refused. Even here at Yale, there were the standard social cliques I could not bring myself to engage in and that made me remain in the category of outcast. I didn’t want to go party with the other students and I certainly wasn’t going to waste my efforts pursuing anything dangerous.
Charlie loved to do that, I didn’t. I had no other friends, so Charlie easily was my best friend… but why wasn’t someone else his? There had to be someone better than me; I did not see what made him so fond of me. Maybe, I was like a pet always being in the room if not obligated elsewhere and low maintenance (from others, at least). Charlie left me alone a majority of the time.
Even now, with the fall semester finals glumly approaching and leaving every student with a sense of trepidation, Charlie was off doing whatever or whoever when he had class in the morning and assignments to finish. His priorities were flawed but he always rejected any “parental advice” I offered, according to him. He even accused me of parroting my mother. The nerve!
Hey, I thought, at least I get to play the music he finds dull.
The vinyl was halfway through the track listing on side one now. I watched it coolly glide over the dark band between the audio grooves before sinking down and bobbing along into the next.
Oh, Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head…
“And as I climb into an empty bed, oh well, enough said,” I mumbled along to the song. Admittedly, The Smiths were not hard to sing along to. While not a talent of mine, my voice’s natural register at the casual, dry tone like that matched the lethargic lyrics. Although, perhaps it wasn’t the best to find a similarity between oneself and Morrissey, the singer of the song, but who has the time for that debacle of ethical dilemma? Jeff Buckley’s cover of the song would win any competition, but I could not deny that I do, unfortunately, still like the music. Each lyric fell like raindrops. I knew this song by heart.
“I know it’s over…” I continued before sighing. During this time, I was matching up project submission deadlines to my planner. I drummed my fingers, bouncing my attention between the planner whose pages were rough and splitting on the edge where I flipped them and the highlighted, most recently printed stack of syllabi. I repeated the phrase.
“Listen,” I heard a loud voice interrupt the music, “you might know it’s over, but I didn’t. Are we breaking up?”
I swiveled around to look back into the small, nestled hallway that separated the door from the rest of the room. I shook my head at him, rolling my eyes.
“You know it’s just the song. Secondly, we aren’t together and you do know that,” I smiled lightly.
“It’s all sad and mopey and all about things being over!” Charlie declared, walking by the machine between him and the path to his bed. He lightly flicked the volume knob and lowered it nearly down to inaudible, especially for me when I already had been playing the song at a low level. He tossed his dark blue-jean field bag onto the bed before letting himself flop down beside it. His light blond hair with natural waves bounced as he flopped. My friend was slightly taller, attractive, pale blond, with a clean, heavy skin tone. I could see why he could so easily sway a girl into his direction by batting his blue eyes. Although, he had never been one for sports. We had that in common. We, unfortunately, did not have music tastes in common.
Shaking my head, I went through the routine of shutting off the record player, letting the needle arm rest securely in place, flicking the guard over the arm, closing the lid, and nestling the vinyl back into the internal sleeve before storing it in the outer sleeve. My records were in a box beside the table, alphabetized by singer then by album. This meant the album went right behind Meat is Murder by the same band.
“You didn’t have to shut it off. I thought maybe I could hear you sing better,” Charlie responded after rolling onto his side and haphazardly tugging a pillow from along the wall under his folded arm where he supported his head.
“Sing? For you? I would rather choke,” I answered.
“You would prefer to choke! See, this is why you stressed-out, overworked kinds of students need to avoid this poetic babble hipster music. A knife doing slitting and the sea that wants to take you? Allusion to being buried? Goodness, Adam, why fill your time alone with depression if you don’t have it? You are, right? What if that’s all you start to think about?”
I pinched a tiny piece of my lip between my front teeth and gritted, “Those lyrics are from the near beginning of the song. Did you have a reason to walk in quietly and lurk in the doorway? Besides, it is not of your concern what I listen to or think about. I’m clearly not depressed. Look at how much I do. So, I’ll take my poetic babble.”
Charlie lowered his eyebrows and frowned in genuine offense. He paused as I watched his more playful laxness in his posture tense up. He braced himself up on his elbow and put the arm he had been lazily resting over his head swing over to the front and also provide support. “Joking aside, man, you and I have different music tastes, sure, but the content can affect people in different ways. If you are always isolated here, holed up in the library, or at home being lectured on some… impossibly detectable failure your mother wants to alter or fix, then eventually you get burnt out. I don’t want you to get burnt out and then… get bad ideas. And-“ he gripped the bed sheet a bit before dropping his tension, scrunching his nose, and rolling away from me to face the wall.
“Charlie…” I said, casting my eyes down, “I’m clearly not burnt out.”
“Whatever,” he finally said quietly, “listen to your music for dying to and get snobby about your so-perfect-made-only-to-work existence.”
I felt my energy drop along with a cold drumming in my chest. I hadn’t meant to offend him, no, hurt him. Besides, he’d never been so sensitive about my own state of being. I couldn’t recall having done anything to strike a cord or get on his nerves. I couldn’t remember ever having done so, in fact.
“And, like I was about to say,” Charlie spoke in a gentle tone, “I just don’t want something bad to happen to you. I don’t know how you take care of yourself. I’m sure you must do whatever it is alone but… I’ve never seen you with a girl or really another human outside of a requirement for a school project. I’ve been your friend for eight years. You and I are still young with a bunch of energy, but if you let that energy get drained for too long, it’ll hurt big time. Do you remember to be someone other than just a student?”
I looked at the multi-color coded planner, seeing some timelines merely minutes or hours from one another. I crossed my arms and slouched back into the dorm chair, “I know, okay? I’m not burnt out right now. I don’t have time to be burnt out. If I was, then… I don’t know. I’ll research something up and look for solutions. I thought you weren’t big on unwarranted advice.”
Charlie sighed, “Adam, hear me out. I know you swear you are always fine and I want to believe you. I also worry about events that might lead you to not being fine. Do you think if you really crashed hard and lost the motivation to work that you’d seriously have the time or expendable effort to research help? No, you would lay there in your bed you make each morning, which is fucking creepy, dude, and sleep. You sleep and when you wake up, you feel like you are in pain and your body can’t find the source. So, what? Maybe you listen to music like that and hear about knives and drowning and how maybe working so hard won’t always be worth it.”
Where was he getting this from? I shook my head, growing more frustrated at the conversation as it teetered towards accusatory. I was fine. I had those thoughts as much as anyone else does, which was… well, surely not zero. A few times a day, fleetingly, is mundane. Normal. “Who cares if I might think about something? What matters is that I don’t do it.”
Charlie quietly asked, “If you did, say, think about stuff, would you try to fix it sooner or later? At the beginning or when it hurts too much to handle?”
I looked away into the dark shadow beneath my bed. Charlie couldn’t see me, I knew, but it felt so wrong to show my face in case it betrayed me. School always stressed me out. I took my frustration out on myself, but never anything as severe as he must be imagining. I had the impulse to strike, punch, hit… I knew better than to hit anything that wasn’t myself. Food had to be earned and easily deprived to save time or occasionally postpone sleep in order to punish myself. I rarely lashed out in a manner that broke through my skin; the most memorable exceptions being a frustrated stab of a pencil into my thigh through thin jeans and biting into my own hand a few times when something just wasn’t making sense. I knew my right thigh as it neared my knee was bruised from slamming down my fist during an exam review just last week.
“Depends, what kind of thoughts? The talk about it with a friend kind of thoughts or the involuntary hold kind with security on either side of me and one-to-two weeks in the state hospital with more work piling up I’d have to get back to,” I waited, “I do not have the time for it and it would genuinely make it worse anyway.”
Charlie shuffled before rolling back onto his right side to face towards me, “That sounds like you’ve thought about it.”
“Why are you so persistent on this?” I interrupted him.
Charlie tapped a finger onto the mattress and looked into the deep blue plaids on the covers. He held his mouth open for a bit before looking up, “You’ll be in here all alone for an entire semester with me taking a semester away. I want to graduate with you, but since you are taking an extra semester to fit your second major in… I’d be graduating a semester early without you. I just really don’t want you to become too alone.”
I slowly turned back towards him, shaking my head passively in thought, “I’ve always been like this. There is nothing new.”
“False.”
“Huh?” I blinked.
“False,” my friend reiterated, “you’ve never been alone like that. In high school, at home, you had both parents even if not home and your little brother every day after his daycare or school got out. Even if you were alone, it was a temporary slot of time just like now. You might not exactly vibe with a crowd, but you still need people. I know you do. If not, you wouldn’t talk to me or play games with me.”
“Are you in psychology this semester, or something?” I interjected more brightly than the current tone. “It kinda seems like you are taking the lectures too seriously. You don’t need to worry. I would never kill myself in this room, drown, or cut myself, like you implied.”
Charlie squinted. I squinted back.
“Yes, actually. I even like the class! I spoke to the professor in person and everything about stuff. Hmm, do something for me, please,” Charlie said with a low, serious voice.
I raised my eyebrows and blinked, “Eh, okay? Like?”
“Repeat what you said.”
I blinked faster in confusion. I inhaled slowly while tilting my head, “Excuse me?”
“Repeat what you said about me not needing to worry. That and why.”
I opened my jaw to answer, letting it gently float with my thoughts as I thought through a response, “You don’t need to worry. I won’t kill myself here or do what you referenced in the song: drowning and cutting, or I suppose slitting throats, too. Either way, I won’t do that, so no worries.”
Charlie nodded, clearly thinking, “Okay, repeat it again, but stop being overly specific.”
“I won’t do anything I don’t want to do?”
At that, he frowned angrily at me, “Is this funny to you?”
“Okay… fine I won’t-“ kill myself here, implying I might do it elsewhere if the need arises, which it wouldn’t, but hypothetically , I knew the method would be not within the room. I couldn’t just say I wouldn’t kill myself either because what if I did , for some reason? Hurt myself? Obviously, this incorporates the first in a more vague way. Beating my leg in frustration, bashing the bony inner wrist of my fist into my cheeks when I wanted to cry, and any hand biting would certainly void this statement. I stared, trying to think of how to answer without answering anything truly at all. How to answer in such a way I could carefully create omissions of truth? Damnit, Charles, why did you have to be smart about this. He didn’t know about anything bad I thought about, so I had no idea why he would be focused on it. Sure, the alone thing… I could feel my heart rate slowly quicken until I could almost hear it.
“I...” I said quietly. Charlie sat up on the bed, folding his hands into his lap and peering at me with growing concern. I knew he knew what the hesitation had meant for his answer, which he clearly didn’t like. Why would he? Any friend would dread the idea.
Suddenly, I was surprised by Charlie sloughing off his bed and taking a few steps to appear behind my chair. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders and upper chest from around the back, letting his head rest on my hair. I sighed but he only snugly held on. His lingering summer tan contrasted my natural paleness which was further vibrantly white from being inside, wearing long sleeved dress shirts outside, and the sturdy pale genetic inheritance of England’s most posh.
“I figured, for a while but now…,” Charlie said sadly as he rested more weight on me, “come with me to my family’s place this winter break, please?”
“What? Why? I don’t know them, hell, you said I wasn’t allowed over..”
“Then you can get to know them! I want you to be somewhere new, somewhere different for once. See Albany again where we grew up. Get a breath of change and recharge. We can have fun. Please? You can fly to your parent’s new house a week in if you insist. Just a week. I’ll drive, no problem.” Charlie must have had it planned out.
I shook my head, logistically running over all the types of problems that could arise from it. Charlie had refused to let me meet his family before now. In fact, Charlie wasn’t allowed in my home for the longest time because of my mother’s strict mother-to-mother discussion about ground rules. He insisted for so long that they weren’t my kind of people and certainly far from the kind my mother would like. Had I not known they owned a moderately high-traffic pawn and antique store with considerate square footage, I would’ve thought maybe they were drug dealers. Maybe they still were… Either way, something changed, right?
“I was thinking it would be fine because my dad isn’t going to be there the first week and my cousin, she’s a year older than me, will be there. So, just my mom and the three of us around the same age! We have part time workers for the store front and it’s going to be closed for three of the five days he’s gone. We can play with so many old things!” Charlie happily beamed into my dark hair.
I sighed again, something I knew I did far too often. I looked at him sadly in the reflection of my computer monitor which sat to my left on a black screen. He stared back at me with expectant eyes and a smirk. I held my look back.
“You really would rather kill yourself, huh?” Charlie’s arms went slack. My eyes widened and I got hung up on a breath.
Quickly, I pushed my chair from the desk and tore myself away from him. I faced him directly as I could feel my heart accelerating at the idea. My eyes blinked. My hands shook. My voice quivered, “What? No! No, I-I-I… didn’t say that! I just… No! What the actual fuck? Do you honestly think I’d prefer that than spending time with my best friend?” I thought I might cry. I would not prefer being dead if he was my other option.
Charlie had stumbled when I flung around to look at him. “So, you are coming then.”
I chomped my mouth shut, taking a deep breath before swaying over the side just far enough to push my face into a propped up fist. Eyes scrunched closed, I groaned from annoyance. It’s not a question. I was coming along, it seemed.
“Charlie?”
He looked up with a gentle eyebrow poised, “Yes?”
“I wish you were failing that fucking psychology course,” I jested the best I could, feigning my frustration and anxiety over the conversation.
“Thank you,” he poked my shoulder. I slowly gazed up at him without moving my head. He smiled, “I have a B+ standing.”
I shook my head at him. He kneeled back and I remained in my seat staring at him. He may have now grinned a small smile, but I could still see the lingering concern in his eyes. My face gradually felt hotter with the worsening realization of what just happened. I flicked my eyes away from him and instead stared into my bed frame to his left. I swallowed and felt my eyebrow twitch.
“Adam?” Charlie asked.
I blinked and looked back at him, “Yeah?”
He opened his mouth and then stood up, brushing his hands over his knees and fixing his shirt. He itched his index finger across his thigh in the following awkward silence. Charlie darted his own eyes before slowly walking towards his bed before pausing and turning back with a slow inhale.
“I guess… to clarify… about that…” Charlie circled his hand in the air.
I winced and turned back towards my desk, looking down into the tabletop. I knew I wasn’t finished, but this particular task was something I could always finish in the morning before class. In fact, I didn’t need to.
“Clarify visiting your house?”
Silence.
“I just want to be sure there aren’t any misunderstandings. No, not about my house.”
Now the silence came from me. This was not the time to incriminate myself. “What do you think? Well, about what you may think about me.”
He sat on the bed, nervously swinging his legs. There appeared to be a growing apprehensive tension in terms of talking.
“Charlie, really, I really want to know what you might think about me now. I don’t want something potentially false to change how you treat me, for example.”
My friend folded his hands. The suspense was eating at my nerves. Finally, Charlie responded to me, “Okay, I interpreted it as… you phaving bad thoughts and hurting yourself. I honestly thought about cutting because that’s the cliche I always heard about but you did promise against that… so I don’t know? You’ve always been so hard on yourself and isolated, so I have somewhat suspected you might at some point. Living with your parents, too, in high school, made it seem more likely but I thought if anything it would’ve been in the past instead of present.”
I considered what he said. He wasn’t necessarily wrong and his thought process made complete sense. I appreciated his honesty. “Thank you.”
“Well?”
“Well?” I asked back.
Charlie huffed.
I pinched my nose. He was not going to let this down so I knew I would have to get to the point to get this over with. “Fine. Suicidal thoughts? Not really. I hope that makes you feel better, I really do. Have I been stressed enough to think that, yes. Do I know how I’d prefer to die if so, yes. Do I have intent? No. Do I genuinely think about it, no. Is it often, no. That is normal, right?”
I received only an unsure noise. I sighed. I thought to myself, damn, I sigh a lot. I wasn’t lying. Genuinely thinking means to actively engage. I can’t often genuinely think about it if I don’t.
“Self-harm? Not in the way you are implying. Everyone harms themselves.”
Charlie interjected, “Don’t give me that!”
“Alright, alright, fine, I get mad and hit my leg for example. Or, maybe ball my fists and drum my wrists into my cheeks. By technicality, it counts. That’s why I was hesitant to say no. Not so bad, huh?”
“Not the best… Adam, you seriously need self-care and relaxation.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Do you think you would, though? Even though you say you don’t have intent?” He asked.
I closed my eyes, “Why would I?”
“Say… you didn’t get accepted into a program after this, or get turned down for jobs. A particularly bad fight with your mom? You get expelled, for some reason?”
“That’s highly unlikely.”
“So?”
I considered it. My mother was horrid. She always held me to impossible standards. Even here, as far as I’ve gotten, I’m not quite perfect enough. Not to mention my father’s bizarre insistence I begin searching for a wife. I am only in my early twenties! A wife? I’d be happily surprised to have enough free time to be married by forty. Sometimes, perhaps this is how it started, I considered killing myself out of spite. That was early high school, maybe middle school. After befriending Charlie, I started feeling awful at the idea. Spiteing her would be spiteing everyone. I couldn’t do that to a new friend, especially after his older brother had just been killed after being struck by a speeding car the year we met.
“Hey!”
“Hmm?” I focused my eyes back onto something and looked at him.
“Would you?”
Instead of addressing it, I played it in reverse, “If your life was hypothetically ruined, would you?”
He sighed this time. At first, he appeared to accept this, but then snapped back, “Not getting into a PhD program first try is not your life being ruined. I’m talking about back to back hardship. Like, your girlfriend leaves you or you lose a job… so you get severely depressed. Because, if the thoughts are already substantial and you are admitted to a method then what stops intent from switching from no to yes? Happy people don’t decide on a way to die.”
“Circumstances.”
He flung up his hands in frustration.
“Charlie, I literally do not know what to tell you. I genuinely am stuck. Why are you so hard pressed on this? Today? Why is this conversation going on for so long? I’m done! We are done talking about this. You got your answer. Unless you want me to do something, unless you want to find me hanging like a fucking chandelier, stop trying to figure out the best scenario for it!” I snapped and slammed my hand onto my desk. My wire pencil holder vibrated, shaking the pencils loudly. A folder shifted and fell from the stand beside the monitor. My pinky knuckle hurt. At that moment, I realized I had struck my desk far harder than intended. Instead of emphasizing, I accidentally tried to intimidate. For a moment, I felt like my mother.
Charlie flinched, eyes wide at the outburst. I was normally calm. I had lost my temper only a few times before, and if so, only minorly when in front of someone. Alone, I remembered a few instances of rage, some even to the point of launching my belongings into a wall to watch them shatter. He recoiled from the conversation, citing his apology, before returning to his original position on the bed.
I uneasily felt the tension. I got up and walked over to my own bed. I sat on the edge, untying my shoes, before setting them aside with my socks. I removed the sweater I was wearing over top of a button up shirt and, uncharacteristically, threw it into the ground. It made a soft whump. I unbuttoned the top of my shirt, but left it on. I didn’t bother changing anything about my pants. Afterwards, I rolled into my side, facing snugly into the wall, and draped my blanket over me. Quickly, I became comfortable enough to fall asleep at some point.
I heard Charlie moving around on his bed. His phone clicked, indicating he checked his home screen, then he spoke up, “Adam, it’s… only 7:45.”
“Okay,” I bluntly responded.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie uttered.
He seemed so upset. I had upset him. I made someone upset? That struck me as odd. I knew I’d offended people before, but making a friend genuinely upset due to my actions was new. I hated the idea of hurting him. If he asked me to get out of bed and drop the attitude, I probably would without question. Instead, he seemed to go about the rest of his day, but I could tell he was watching me occasionally. I internally cursed myself for this decision. I had no idea why a friend showing concern for me made me suddenly want to rebel in some way against them. It was far too early to sleep. Yet, now I had to. I started to ruminate on the conversation.
What if he hated me now? What if he didn’t want to room with me next year now? Had he finally learned I wasn’t worth being friends with? I was barely a person outside school and my mother’s control.
I felt the inner corners of my eyes slightly burning followed by a light buzzing. I kept my breath steady and deep. I knew I just told him those kinds of thoughts weren’t common, but right now, they were. I considered, impulsively, if being gone would help him. I know this is false. I know he’d greatly mourn me. I couldn’t die and leave him. I’d be devastated if I lost him, too. Despite this, I hated myself.
As the minutes started to crawl by closer to a regular time to sleep, I desperately hoped my friend couldn’t hear me cry.