Silence for a block. The pickup halted at a stop sign, the last stop sign before the house.
“I swim,” you said suddenly. “Swam. In high school. But I’m on a swim scholarship to college too. You swim?”
Someone help me someone make the earth rise up and swallow me. “I did,” I said. It was all I could say, it was like there was a rock on my tongue, like I had forgotten how to speak to someone.
“O … kay … then,” you said, drawing it out, like, why is this girl so weird, and honestly I was impressed you had even tried again given my TOTAL LACK OF CONVERSATIONAL SKILLS OR EVEN BASIC TOOL KIT OF SPOKEN POLITENESS.
So again, for your benefit now:
WHAT I MEANT: I used to swim, with my dad, who after all is a Navy SEAL, so actually swimming has always been a major part of my life, or always was up to a certain point anyway, and that’s so cool that we have something that we share, because, yes, being in the ocean, held up by it, my strong arms knifing through it, I love that.
You pulled up to the house. The windows were still dark. “There you go,” you said. “I mean, me too, of course.” Because, as you said, OF COURSE you had to live in the apartment above our garage, just in case the whole thing wasn’t awkward enough.
I got out without saying anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say, even though I knew, of course I knew, that it was rude. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in that situation.
Behind me I heard the engine cut out. Heard the truck door slam, and then your steps on the stairs up to the apartment.
I kept walking and didn’t turn.
Well, I’m telling you stuff now.
Maybe too much stuff.
Only time will tell.
Even writing this is making me cringe.
You must have thought I was such a weirdo.
Okay, I’m not going to finish this in time if I don’t start summarizing.
I went to the group the next week, and the week after that. I barely saw you; you were always working. Probably you didn’t have any interest in seeing me anyway. You were probably hurt by how I totally failed to talk to you in any meaningful way. At group, I listened to people talking about their voices. There was a woman named Marie, who heard a devil and an angel, or that was what she called them. The devil told her to hurt herself, like my voice, called her names. The angel would help her, though—tell her where she had left her keys, stuff like that.
There was a guy called Rasheed who had what he called the Red Voice and the White Voice. The Red Voice sounded terrifying. Way more extreme than mine. Rasheed said the Red Voice was the voice of a guy who had tortured him in Syria. He lifted his shirt once and—
It was bad.
Dwight turned out to be a cop. His voice was his father’s, he thought. It would punish him. Shout at him. In real life, his father had beaten him “like a dog” since he was a toddler. When he was three, his dad threw him down the stairs and he broke fourteen bones. His dad said it was an accident, and the paramedics believed him.
Dwight told a psychiatrist about this when he was a teenager, and the psychiatrist told him he had invented the memories. Dwight gripped the sides of his chair, hard, when he told us that.
But.
But the Doc was helping all these people. They’d all gotten to the point where they rarely heard their voices anymore, where they had it under control. The only bummer for me was that he said it took months or years, in most cases, to get to that point.
What I’m going to do is, I’m going to give you what the Doc told me, over the next weeks, as if it was all one thing, okay? Just to save time.
This was what the Doc taught, or recommended is maybe a better word. I mean, he kept stressing how these weren’t “rules”; they were just “guidelines,” and it was about finding what worked for each individual and yadda yadda yadda. Anyway these were basically the steps. The group’s philosophy, their approach to hearing voices:
1. SAFETY. Ensure that your psychiatrist and the people close to you know what you’re doing. Continue to follow your doctor’s instructions in addition to pursuing the following precepts. Notice that I had already failed at this.
2. ACCEPTANCE. Acknowledge your voice as real, both a real part of yourself and a manifestation of your feelings about yourself.
3. DIALOGUE AND CONCILIATION. Welcome the voice, instead of ignoring it or telling it to shut up. Encourage more positive interaction and negotiation.
4. SCHEDULE. Allot a regular time at which the voice can speak to you. Refuse to engage if the voice tries to speak at any other time.
5. FREEDOM. Challenge the power of the voice and establish dominance over it.
Looks simple like that, doesn’t it?
Of course, an easier philosophy, an easier alternative plan, would have been:
1. Spend all my time with you.
Since you always silenced the voice, always muted it, just by being around. But that would not have been realistic then. And is most likely not realistic now.