This Is Just The Way I Am

I aw a man dying once. I was six. He was laying on the concrete with his hands clasped around his throat. A group of adults forced me from his side, but I wriggled back to him by climbing around their legs and spidering over their feet. A sound like a storm drain bubbled from his mouth.

He ended up living. One of the dads saved him. I’m not sure how. His lungs had been filling up with blood. I overheard my parents talking about it, later, how it probably felt like drowning.

I found that fascinating. That you could drown on the inside. Perhaps your body was not a thing to be trusted? This scared me a little, but only until I discovered the eerier truth: that your mind is even less dependable.

I’m in a room, a hotel room, maybe, sitting on a bed, knees pulled up to my chest, body like a clenched fist. All the lights are off. I’m sitting there listening to the dark, waiting.

I believe that someone is coming for me.

I’m not sure who. I’m not sure why. But I believe someone is coming. Canfeel someone is coming, the way you feel the coming of a storm on a quiet afternoon, the tight, mercurial air. The coiling stillness.

I set my jaw, lower my chin. Heart thumping in the side of my head. Through an open window in the black there rings the revolving red panic of a triggered car alarm. I try and temper my breathing. It doesn’t work. The darkness seems to deepen, like it is not simply an absence of light, but something material, something physical.

Then: footsteps. As clear as knuckles against wood. Getting louder and louder. Outside the car alarm accelerates. Plus the gnarled anger of a man in pain, a high-pitched, mechanical sound, like a chainsaw chewing through metal.

A knock.

I open my eyes. I’m in my room. Not a hotel room. My room. The light blue walls are my own, the faces in the frames glinting down in the not-quite-dark belong to my mother and my father and my sister and me. The clock on my nightstand reads 11:30 PM.

The door slides open, permitting a triangle of light. It’s my dad. In his hand he’s holding a small orange pill bottle. My small orange pill bottle. He asks if I was having another one of my dreams.

My parents worry about me. They worry that I don’t play with the other kids. They worry about how little I say. But they don’t understand it’s more fun inside my own head. They don’t understand that I don’t want to be any other way.

“So, Dylan,” Dr. Omar says once a week, his office shockingly bright, his voice like milk chocolate. “Your father tells me you’ve been having your dreams again.”

I don’t like Dr. Omar.

“You’re eight, sweetie,” my mom says later, back home. “There’s no reason for you to be so anxious.”

I don’t like when my parents talk like this, either. I can tell there’s something different about me, but I’m not anxious. Sometimes I just get scared. And I don’t like being bothered. I wish I could articulate that. I wish I could quell their concern with something other than “I’m not.” Beyond that mere defensiveness. I don’t mean to seem so reflexive.

There’s a world inside my head. A better one than the one my parents live in. A world where I don’t have to engage in the arbitrary traditions or curmudgeonous customs. In my world I know what other people are thinking. In my world, I can decimate a jungle gym and turn the nurse’s office into a spaceship. In my world, I can do more than what I’m allowed in the ordinary one. I can lift cars. I can levitate. I can love.

It’s just that sometimes my world caves in around me. The colors transmogrify and darken and gravity reverses. Like I’m trapped, pinned by the weight of all that freedom, heavy as all the water in the ocean. Like I’m drowning. Unable to conjure anything but the certainty that I’m weird and broken, a failed science experiment.

“I’m not,” I say, eventually, dropping my chin, voice thin as tissue paper. “I’m not.”

I wish I could explain that I am fine. That this is just the way I am.