do you blame the trees for the fire?

Do you blame the trees for the fire?

Things are concrete and iron in the holding cell. The visual world is hidden here, but for the sounds of Manhattan cars. I have never felt more at home in my life.

“Don’t worry,” Charles my lawyer said with little affect. “The insanity defense is strong with you.”

“I don’t understand that,” I said squinting my eyes and crinkling my forehead, “how can they be so understanding?”

“You have been diagnosed for years, under multiple doctors who will swear to your severe mood disorder. What is there to be confused about?”

I saw his point partially, and a psychiatric ward does even have the prison like qualities. But the world outside those antiquated bars had taught me otherwise. It had taught me that I was my brain, and I held responsibility for its actions. How is it the no one else saw it?

The room was partially lit, and I stood in my boxers, my scapula winging gently. My girlfriend lay in the bed room six feet in front of me, but the door was closed. I looked around the apartment. I looked at our green couch, at our black buffet, at the soft yellow glow of our four ceiling lights. One needed replacing. I heard the tinkling of the drinking fountain for our two dogs and cat. I looked out the window at the quarter moon. I had paid for none of this. Not the computer in the bedroom, not the rent on the apartment. My father paid for all of this through the money I had inherited. I had not even earned the right to enjoy the moon. I turned my head away from it, the last words he said to me echoed in my ear. “I don’t think you’ll ever get a full time job.” 

In that moment I felt doubt and then I felt a tear bubble out of my face like a confused raindrop. I wiped it from my face, composed myself and went into the bedroom.

“Come lets play Mario,” Emiliya said. Our Nintendo 3DS portables were covered in dozens of smily face stickers organized into an EZ on hers and a PD on mine. We often referred to ourselves as EZPD. Another sicker said creativity on mine, hers had a spiritual sticker. I couldn’t make eye contact with her as we started. Not even the sounds of our Nintendo portables was enough to perk me up. I started to cry in front of her.

“I know you said tonight that we couldn’t talk. I’m sorry. I’m gonna go upstairs.” I said this as I slid out of bed. I took nothing but my iPhone. We had our nice sheets on the bed, purple with a three-hundred thread count. She had thought a hundred dollars on sheets was a waste, but one night of sleep changed her mind.

I closed the door as quietly as I could so as not to alert Emiliya that I was having suicidal thoughts. Once you have a suicidal thought you are always vulnerable to them. The brain is a problem solving machine and when it has a potential solution to a problem that remains untried it suggests it, each time you arrive at a certain emotional destination. 

I climbed the tight spiral stair case to our second floor, a duplex. As I reached the top a chair with cream colored arm rests and cushions that were a shallow purple corduroy sat in front of me. Behind the chair was a bookshelf of nearly two-hundred books, all Emiliyas. This was her office, and place for seeing life-coaching clients. Behind the chair were two black out blinds, also purple, with a chain-link design on them that hide a glass sliding door out to our upstairs deck that could easily hold twenty people.

  A love-seat of the same design sat across from the chair. On it were two small throw pillows. A rug with cherry blossoms on a tan background lay between them. My Taylor guitars rested behind the love-seat. One hung from the wall, and the other was in its black reptile looking hardshell case. The hanging guitar was quite pretty. We both liked it there.

I lay down on the couch in the fetal position. I put one pillow between my knees, and one beneath my head. I felt myself calm down. I felt like I could, and might fall asleep. But then I a cold bloody breeze blew my spiked hair like grass in the park. The window that looked out onto our upstairs deck was half-open. I wanted nothing less then to get up and close that window, but I also wanted nothing more.

I rose. I walked over to the window. I looked out. I looked at the edge. I thought about jumping off the building. I walked to the side of the sliding door, and turned on the white Christmas lights that Emiliya had put surrounding the deck. They were like beautiful little stars. As wonderful way to light the deck, for our one house party. I went out onto our duplex’s deck, and walked to the edge. I looked down. It was cold, easily the mid-thirties.

I thought about the last two weeks. I thought about how I felt slighted by Emiliya; I felt second to her job, a distant second. I thought about how we had nearly stopped having sex. I thought about how when I brought this up she was either too tired to talk about it, or too busy. It had bellowed in me like fire on the mountain side.

Emiliya knocked on the glass. She was naked. She beckoned me to come in. I walked towards her feeling my goosebumps rise in the cold. She slide the door open just enough for me to come in.

“I have something to show you,” She said.

“Please leave me alone,” I said not coming inside. “We’re gonna have a fight.”

“We don’t have to talk,” she said gently arguing for her point. I gave her another look that asked for distance.

“Fine. We won’t talk at all,” she said. I sat next to her on the love-seat. She held her phone so we could both see, and pressed play on a youtube video.

There was no set up. An indian man approached a man who I judged correctly to be homeless. 

“I have a lottery ticket for you,” said the Indian man.

‘What? I don’t understand,” the homeless man said.

“Come lets go cash it,” said the Indian man.

The scene cut to a bodega. If I had to guess they were in Philadelphia. 

“You’re a winner!” the man behind the counter said. He also looked Indian.

“How much did I win,” the homeless man asked. His body language suggested that he thought this was a setup, that he might need to run and escape at any moment.

“A thousand dollars!” said the man behind the counter. A woman came out and started to smile.

“Congratulations!” the woman said.

The Indian man patted the homeless man on the back as the man behind the counter out a thousand dollars in twenties, a hundred bills. He handed it to the homeless man who began to look like he was about to collapse.

“Let’s share it,” the homeless man said to the Indian man. “Come take some.”

“No it’s all for you,” the Indian man said.

The homeless man began to cry.

I didn’t get it. I didn’t get what she was trying to say. It couldn’t be that I had nothing to be sad about because I might do something like that, which I wouldn’t. But that is what she was trying to say.

“Please go downstairs. We are going to have a fight.” I said not making eye contact and pointing towards the stairs.

“Pete. I just wanted you to see what you are capable of,” Emiliya said.

“Please go down stairs.”

“People you don’t have to feel this way.”

“How is giving a thousand dollars to a homeless man going to make things better!”

“I love you.”

“You love me? Where you loving me when you brushed me off these last two weeks? Were you feeling love for me when you were working all day and night for your own glory? You can’t feel love for and work at the same time. I am second. And you don’t give a fuck. GOD DAMN IT. Why couldn’t you have just stayed down stairs? Now I’ve started.”

Emiliya started walking down stairs. I was now fuming. Now, like an emotional allergy, I was about to have a reaction. When I came downstairs I was shouting. Emiliya had gone into the bed room and had gotten into bed. I stomped to the other-side. We had a little more than the width of the bed between us. A mirror was behind the bed and was flanked by two identical sets of cabinets full of our clothes and two drawers. My far side cabinet door was open.

“You make things worse, so much more often than you make it better. Why are you so mean?”

“That is a story your tell yourself. My intention was not to make things worse.”

“FUCK your intentions!” I slammed the open cabinet door hard enough to knock it off its hinges. 

“You’re fucking crazy,” she said turning away from me and starting to cry.

“I’m fucking crazy?” I repeated quietly again to myself. “And you say you’re not mean.”

That comment sobered me up. I was being fucking crazy. I wanted her to save me. I had wanted it when we first met. I had hoped that when I had my first hypo-manic episode and we nearly got married that it would stick, but it didn’t. I was fucking crazy, and distance was the best thing. But she wanted to save me. She had built her life around saving people. But her tactic was to focus on what was good, and believed that would naturally eliminate what was bad. This was and will not be the case with me. Something is wrong with, but somehow the justice system was the only place that understood that this wasn’t true. There was nothing wrong with me. There was something wrong with my brain. The brain is an organ. I am not my brain. Why does no one understand this?