People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp.
I don’t trust anyone named Gavin.
Trent senses I’m tense and says, “What do you want me to do? You wanna lude, is that it?” He pulls out a Pez dispenser and pulls Daffy Duck’s head back. I don’t say anything, just keep staring at the Pez dispenser and then he puts it away and cranes his neck.
Eyes suddenly focus in on the eyes of a small, dark, intense-looking guy wearing a Universal Studios T-shirt sitting two booths across from me. He’s staring at me and I look down and take a drag, a deep one, off the cigarette. The man keeps staring at me and all I can think is either he doesn’t see me or I’m not here. I don’t know why I think that. People are afraid to merge. Wonder if he’s for sale.
Romeo Void blared out of the sunroof.
And then I flashed on: When you talk to me you’re really talking to yourself, dude. I was still haunted by it.
At our last session – yesterday, in fact – the psychiatrist I’ve been seeing for the past two months asked, “What method of contraception do you and Evelyn use?” and I sighed before answering, my eyes fixed out the window on a skyscraper, then at the painting above the Turchin glass coffee table, a giant visual reproduction of a graphic equalizer by another artist, not Onica. “Her job.
My life is essentially uncomplicated.
I concentrate on the Absolut and cranberry I’m holding and it looks like a glassful of thin, watery blood with ice and a lemon wedge in it.
Have you ever wished that you could disappear from all this?
I thought I was going to cry but it passed.
The next morning over a breakfast of bran muffins and kiwi and Evian water and wheatgrass juice, Ann mentioned something about buying a BMW and I had to hold back a scream. It was clear that this had not been my best term; it was clear that I was losing it.
Someone named Angel was supposed to go with us tonight, but earlier today she got caught in the drain of her jacuzzi and almost drowned.
Walking with Debbie, our sunglasses on, I suddenly felt I was a model in a commercial, we were a couple in a travelogue who barely knew each other, which led to the notion that I was actually begin watched, that everyone was looking at me, whether they were or not, or that someone hidden, from a vantage point I couldn’t see, was monitoring my movements.
And I just stood there in the fading afternoon light, realizing at seventeen that I was already staring into my past – that the past had a meaning that would always define you. I remember this being one of my first moments nearing adulthood, when I realized how powerful memory was – or at least it was the first time it hurt the most. And there was nothing I could do about the pain of the past – it just settled over me.
Hey,” Price says. “I’m depressed, I mean impressed.
The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.
I had all the characteristics of a human being – flesh, blood, skin, hair – but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.
Redken product that prevents mineral deposits and prolongs the life cycle of hair.
And since I felt so alone that day it became a friend.
Love cannot be trusted.