Fic: What Color Is Your Parachute: A Practical Manual | popslash
What Color Is Your Parachute: A Practical Manual
Fandom: pop
Comments: This is what happens when I try to write something about my own experiences. I think it's a happy ending. Not everyone would agree, I suspect.
Warnings: This is a fic about depression.
It's not that JC is sad, exactly. He doesn't sit around the house crying or whatever. He hasn't cried in a long time, not in years, probably. It's not some macho whatever reaction, either-he just hasn't cried. He doesn't have a reason to. Guys can cry, he doesn't put in with all that gender-stereotype stuff. Guys can cry. He just doesn't.
So it's not that he's sad. He's just-down, or something. Chris would say he's got a case of the blahs. But Chris would also suggest he get really drunk every night for a month and see if that helps, so JC's not really sure that thinking about what Chris would say is helpful at all. Blah is a good word to describe it, though. Mostly, JC just feels uninspired.
He hasn't sung anything in a long time, and he hasn't felt like singing, either.
It's this, more than anything, that worries him. He's used to his brain being filled with useless beats and lyrics and melodies that mostly go no where, but they're still there and he always wants to write them down, just in case. But now. Now it's just silence. Nothing. JC wonders if this is what everyone else's heads sound like, and how they possibly stand it.
He tells his shrink about it, staring at the faded burgundy swirled patterns of her rug and the white of his shoes against the dark colors, at the way his feet turn slightly in towards each other. Even the way he sits is different now. He doesn't like it.
"You're depressed," she tells him bluntly.
"But I don't feel sad."
"You don't feel happy, either. Sad is relative. Sad is different for everyone, different levels. Some would say that the absence of happiness implies sadness."
"I don't-but it's not like I have a, a reason. I'm, my life is really good. I have everything I could want."
She raises her eyebrows and makes a note on her legal pad. "No one has everything they want, JC," she says, not unkindly.
"I miss the seasons," he says, and looks out the window. It's sunny and clear blue skies, always always. Perpetual summer, even when he sometimes has to wear a jacket. Nothing ever changes in LA. "I think I'm stuck," he says.
"Let's consider that for next time," she says.
*
He really does miss the seasons. He misses seeing the leaves change color in the fall, from green to orange and red and yellow. He misses the trips they used to take, all piled into the station wagon, up through Pennsylvania to the Catskills just to watch the leaves change color. He misses spending weekends raking the fallen leaves into giant piles with Tyler and his dad. They'd push the piles onto big tarps and carry them down to the curb to get taken away by the leaf collectors, and the entire neighborhood would be lined in the crisp yellows and oranges and browns of the dead leaves. It had a smell, too, he remembers. It smelled like fall.
"This was your adoptive family?" the shrink asks. It's not really a question. She's trying to make a point, JC knows-he just doesn't feel like getting it today. He shrugs.
"I don't think of it like that. It's my family, they've never-it's my family."
"It's important to acknowledge how these things make you feel. A great amount of one's personality and ego-systems are formed before the age of five."
"That's not a question," JC says, staring down at his hands, fingers linked loosely together. His nails are ragged and dull, he hasn't felt like a manicure in weeks. It just seems like so much trouble, making the appointment, getting down to WeHo, the inevitable forced conversation he'll have to have with Lianne, who's incredibly sweet and fantastic at her job, which only means JC doesn't feel like he can be rude to her by not talking. It's a lot of work. A lot of effort. His nails are fine.
"No," the shrink says after a long time. The silence holds expectations that JC doesn't feel like fulfilling. Therapy is work, too, but he doesn't care about being rude to his shrink. She's not sweet. "It's not."
"I'm not, like. I'm not traumatized or whatever, okay? It's not like that."
"What's it like, then?"
JC rubs the pad of his thumb over the ragged edge of his index finger. "It's not like anything," he says. His parents live in Chicago now, and JC has only been there during fall once. It happens really quickly there, before it gets so cold the leaves just die all at once, but it still happens. His dad has a service come out and rake the leaves up for them now because he's older and he can't do it all on his own anymore. It still smells like fall, though.
*
The week between shrink appointments always feels both long and short somehow, like he has all this time, so many hours to fill and it never seems like he's really going to make it to next week. Not that he has some sort of death wish, he's not stupid, but he is sort of, well. He's maybe depressed, a bit, or at least that's what his shrink thinks, and it seems like a long time, but then he spends most of it sleeping or watching television or movies because he doesn't have the patience for books at the moment. He just can't seem to get into them right now for whatever reason, and before he knows it, it's next week and he's back in the shrink's office, staring at her burgundy carpet and not really feeling like talking.
"What did you do this week?" she asks by way of greeting. She says this instead of "how are you feeling today?" like she used to, because his answer was always the same.
JC shrugs. "Nothing much. You know, the usual. Watched TV. Hung around the house."
"Did you complete your assignment for the week?" She gives him the same look his mother used to give him when she wanted him to do something-the dishes or clear the table or clean his room. JC shifts in his seat and narrows his eyes at the carpet.
"No. I. I didn't have time, actually. And it's, you know. It's not a good idea for me to just go around calling people like that because-"
"JC." Her voice is quiet with disapproval. "It sounds to me like you're making excuses for not doing something that's difficult for you."
"I. Maybe I don't want to talk about it."
She sighs and leans forward in her seat, arms crossed over her legal pad, fingers wrapped around the roll of yellow that the flipped-over paged form at the top. "I think we should talk about your medication. Do you feel any different? Are you sleeping better, feeling more like yourself?" She looks like she already knows the answer. JC shrugs.
"What does that mean? I always feel like myself."
"I don't think you need it anymore," she says. "It was meant to get you to a place of mental clarity from which you'd be able to do the work of therapy, but-"
"I was just busy last week, okay?" He sounds like a child and he knows it, but he's okay with that. She reminds him of his mom, anyway.
She just raises her eyebrows. "It's been three months and you can't even tell me how you're feeling."
JC picks at a hand nail and doesn't say anything. He doesn't tell her that he's afraid of not being on medication. Because he's not sad anymore, and that's something, he thinks. He's not anything, really. He's not sad or happy or angry or tired or worried or anything. He's not anything, that's how he's feeling. But if he's not on the drugs, well. He's pretty sure he doesn't want to find out how he's feeling. This is easier.
When he told Chris about it, Chris just made a hmming noise and offered to come out to LA and hang for a while. "I just think it's better this way, not knowing. It's like. Like silence, you know? For the first time since I can remember. And it's not, I mean. It's not fun or pleasant, but it's not bad, either. I'm afraid, you know. Things could be bad."
"Things are bad, whether you let yourself feel that or not," Chris said. Then, "You should be telling your shrink this."
*
He talks to his mom at least once a week now, which is more than he used to but he doesn't get bored or fidgety or annoyed like before, either. They're short conversations, usually on his way home from therapy with his phone open in the ashtray and the speaker turned up as loud as it'll go, so her voice fills the space beside him and if he keeps his eyes on the road, it's almost like she's there.
But they're just short conversations. How are you doing, how was therapy, when are you coming home next. Sometimes she talks about whatever Heather or Tyler or his dad is up to-"Your dad's got a new limited edition whatsit for his model trains," she'll say, and describe the whatsit in great detail. She wants to know if he's going to Church, if he's taking care of himself and eating right and all that. "Fish," she'll say, "you need to eat more fish. It's supposed to be really good for you and I bet the fish there is real good, honey."
"I know, mom."
"But not swordfish because of the mercury."
"Okay, mom. More fish, but no swordfish. Got it."
Mostly it's meaningless chatter but it's also 'I love you' and 'take care of yourself,' and that's the part JC calls for. She's his mom, so he feels like he has to listen when she says it.
*
So he gets weaned from the drugs he's been taking since his first visit to the shrink's office, when he told his whole stupid sob story through a fill-in-the-blank pre-screening form. There were a lot of check boxes on the form, and he remembers thinking that the shrink must think all her future patients were idiots to have questions like, "I feel sad more days than I feel happy" and "I feel sad for a week or more at a time for no reason." He doesn't even remember which box he checked. He can't pinpoint the feeling, exactly, but it wasn't really like sadness. There was too much anger inside it.
Cutting down on the drugs is scary. He has to cut pills in half. Not all of them because he'd been taking two a day, but now he's only taking one and half, and then just one. He follows the shrink's instructions because she's not going to prescribe him more and when he Googled the meds, WebMD said that he could get something called brain shivers if he goes off them too quickly.
He still feels okay, not happy or sad or anything, but it gets harder and harder to fall asleep at night. He starts worrying about the brain shivers. They sound horrible, like something your brain should really not be doing. They sound painful and he can't sleep, wondering what it feels like to have one and whether or not he will have one, even though he's been very careful and followed the instructions very precisely.
But he's not sleeping very well and he stays up later and later, hoping that it'll force him to fall asleep if he exhausts himself. He tries watching documentaries on the History channel-the really boring ones about wars he's never heard of or the biographies on A&E. His eyes get dry and achy but he doesn't fall asleep. His shrink suggests working out before bed, making his body as tired as possible, and that helps, a bit. He gets in the habit of running on the treadmill and lifting a bit, just listening to the rhythm of his breathing and the slap of his running shoes on the conveyor belt.
He's still not ready for music, but his brain feels noisier. More thoughts, at least, mostly worried ones about brain shivers and not sleeping, but noisier just the same. When he tells his shrink, she just nods.
"It sounds to me like you're saying you feel more like yourself."
JC just shrugs and taps out a beat on the arm of his chair, a three-two-three-one kind of thing that's nothing, really, but he should maybe write it down, just in case.
*
It's been almost a month since she cut his meds and a week since nothing at all. His brain feels fine, he thinks, no shivering or anything like that, but it's getting noisy again. It's like waking up after a really long sleep--noisy and jumbled and chaotic, and he starts carrying a tape recorder around with him again because sometimes the only way to keep things quiet is to say them out loud. It's something his shrink suggested and he's surprised when it actually works, at least for a little bit. At the end of the day, he takes the tapes out, labels them carefully with the date and puts them in a box. He doesn't listen to them, there's nothing worth listening to yet, but it feels safer knowing they're there.
"How are you feeling today?" she asks. She's back to asking that question, even though he still doesn't really answer. Not the way he thinks she wants him to, anyway.
"Okay. Tired. Still not sleeping very well, but you know. Better. Sleeping better, I mean. I feel, I dunno." He shrugs.
"I know it's confusing," she says. "You're probably feeling a lot of things all at once, and it's hard to separate that into categories. Emotions don't belong in boxes, and it's okay to recognize that."
"Yeah, I. I guess."
"Let's talk about your friends."
"Oh, um. Okay. I. What do you want me to say?"
"Last week you said that you were afraid of what you were feeling. About the anger? How have you been dealing with that?"
"Um, well. You know, at the end of the day I just try not to think about it because it's like. It's like a broken record? Like, the same line over and over, and you can polish the vinyl as much as you want and try to get the scratch out and all, but that never works. So it's like. Why bother, if I can't change it?"
"Don't you think there's a kind of validation in the experience of feeling that emotion?"
JC just looks at her. "You have a weird idea of validation."
*
After two weeks of no meds, he gets a cat.
He's driving home from the shrink's office and there's a big humane society banner hanging below the Petco sign, so he turns into the parking lot. He's just going to look, he thinks, because he's feeling sort of sad and it's hard to talk about all this stuff, about his birth mom and his, well. About stuff, anyway. It's hard and he likes animals. Playing with a puppy would make anyone feel better, he thinks, but when he walks up to the pen they have set up outside, it's all cats.
He kneels down in front of the cage and a huge white cat with bright blue eyes comes right over, sniffs at his fingers through the plastic gridding of the pen. It lets him pet it, licks carefully at his index finger and closes its eyes into slits, like it's smiling.
"That's Greybeard," the human society girl says, kneeling down next to him. "Poor guy, he has Stage 1 FIV. It'll be really hard to find a home for him. No one wants to adopt a sick cat."
"Is he-he doesn't seem sick," JC says. The cat purrs and rubs itself against the cage. Its fur is soft and clean and very very white.
"He's not sick now. It's like. Like HIV, in people. He has years and years left, but it is a disease and it's transferable, so people tend to shy away from that, if they have other animals. If they have kids, they don't want their kids getting attached in case he gets sick and dies."
"Oh," JC says, and Greybeard licks his finger again. "I don't. Have kids, I mean. Or, or pets." The humane society girl smiles.
"You bought a diseased cat?" Lance says when they meet for lunch the next day, staring at JC like he's gone insane. "Why would you do that?"
"He was free, actually. And he's not, well. He is diseased, but he's not, like, sick or anything. He's nice. He lays on my stomach when I watch TV. It's nice."
"You adopted a dying cat, and you don't think that's maybe symbolic of anything?"
JC frowns at his salad. "What are you, my shrink?"
Lance just raises one eyebrow, says in a quiet voice, "You're not dying, JC."
"I know," JC says, and rubs at his chest. It burns a little there, maybe from the gorgonzola on the salad. He might be becoming lactose intolerant, he thinks, and rubs in slow circles until the burn fades. Suddenly, he does feel like crying, a little. He feels. Sad, or something, and he wishes Lance hadn't said that about his cat. Nobody's dying. Greybeard isn't dying.
*
"I'm a really happy person, usually," JC says, and immediately feels like crying. That's happening more and more lately.
He hates this. Everything is so loud now and not even the tapes help that much and the whole broken record analogy is shit because the meds did help with that and now it's over and the needle is stuck on sadangrysad all the fucking time, and JC just. He hates it. He doesn't even know what he's sad about and it's just this awful, directionless feeling of discontent that makes him feel like a shitty person for not just being happy. He has everything, or at least a whole fuck of a lot and he's incredibly lucky, so this feeling just. It doesn't make sense. This is exactly what he was afraid of and he really, he just wants it to be quiet again. He can't think like this.
"I think you haven't been happy for a very long time," she says, and she sounds sad. She sounds like he feels, but not in a pitying kind of way. Just in a "this is the way things are" sort of way. It makes JC feel even more like crying. Well, not like crying, exactly, but like he should be crying. Like he's at that part in the movie where the main character breaks down and has all sorts of epiphanies and then the shrink makes some remark about the road to healing or whatever. Not that his shrink says anything like that.
"I don't know what to do with this feeling," he says, his knee jittering in a weird, sort-of random beat, like a heart mixed with a drawn out skittering slide.
"Have you considered talking to him about it?"
"That's just a really small, I mean. It's not going to solve anything. He can't, he doesn't have to power to fix me or whatever."
"It's not about him," she says. "You need to remember that. It's about you, and controlling the relationships and things in your life that are making you unhappy. It's not the only thing, but it's something you have the power to change."
"It's not-he wouldn't understand. And then, you know, I think it'd just be more. Worse, or something. Do you. You think it would help?"
She presses her lips together in a thin line before answering, and JC knows she's not saying what she really thinks. It's part of the shrink game she has to play-because this is the part of the movie with the big epiphanies, but they have to be his.
"I think that you've been hurt a great deal in the past and you have every reason to be wary of his reaction."
"It's not like he's trying. He's not, you know. Doing it on purpose."
She raises her eyebrows. "Maybe that's the point."
*
He's sitting at his piano, working out a melody and stopping occasionally to pet Greybeard, who has taken up position along the top, all stretched out with his back paws hanging off the end, when Justin slides onto the bench next to him, bumps his shoulder against JC's. He asked Justin to come over but it's still sort of a shock, him being there, and JC feels almost sick with nerves. Justin reaches up a hand to Greybeard, who hisses lazily until Justin pulls his hand back, staring.
"Nice cat," he says.
"He's diseased," JC replies. He doesn't look at Justin.
"That's… pretty fucked up, actually. I, um. Listen, I was talking to Lance and-"
"No, it's. It's just, I asked you over because I have some things to say, and I need you to just listen and not talk, okay?"
"Oh. Um, okay."
JC takes a deep breath, inhale, exhale, and stares down at his fingers on the piano keys. Not musician's fingers, really, too short for that, but they do well enough for him. He makes do with what he has, anyway.
"You're not a good friend," he says. "I love you, okay? But you're not a good friend and you never have been and I just think. I don't think you know how to be a friend. Not, you know, a real one. You're not programmed for that kind of, of relationship and that's. It's not your fault, okay? I don't, I'm not blaming you. But you're not a good friend and you've never been there when I needed you and that's. It's just something I needed to say."
There's a moment of shocked silence and then,"Is that all?" Justin's voice is cold and JC doesn't look at him, keeps his eyes on the piano keys and concentrates on the roaring sound in his head. It's like a melody, maybe. Maybe something good, definitely something worth writing down.
"Yeah, that's. Pretty much."
"Okay then," Justin says, and he sounds more angry and less cold now. He gets up from the piano and JC can hear his footsteps echoing through the house, hears the door slam hard in its frame as he slides Greybeard off the piano and onto his lap. His chest hurts and he hears the roaring, louder now and it's definitely something worth writing down. It's something worth keeping.
*
He doesn't cry when he tells the shrink about it, but the burning feeling is back and his throat feels full and painful, that horrible hard-to-swallow feeling. He'd probably feel better if he would just cry, but that feels like giving in, maybe. That would be worse, he thinks.
"It was pretty bad," he says. "He's angry at me. He probably thinks I'm the biggest ass in the world."
"You don't think he'll consider what you said?"
JC shrugs. "Maybe. I mean, sure, yeah. But I mean, I wouldn't have said it if I didn't think I was right, you know? This is what I meant about. About things you can't fix so why fuck with them more?"
"Do you feel better now that you've told him?"
"I don't. I'm not sure that's the word. Like-relieved, maybe? I feel relieved. And I sort of. I wish he got how much he needs me. I want, I dunno. It sounds stupid, but I want, like. Recognition. Does that make me the shitty friend?"
She leans forward in her chair and smiles a little. "I think that makes you human." She sounds surprised and delighted at the same time and he thinks, well, at least he's pleased one person.
*
"What'd you do to Justin?" Joey asks the next time JC sees him, a month later at someone's birthday party in Vegas that neither of them knows.
JC just gives him a look over his drink and shrugs. "I told him the truth."
"What's the truth? Because, man, he was really messed up the last time we talked. He says you hate him now or something. And that you called him names?"
"I don't hate him," JC says. He doesn't really want to talk about this here. He doesn't really want to talk about this at all, but he's getting better with that, he is, and Joey is actually a good friend. Joey has good intentions and JC doesn't want to seem ungrateful. He knows exactly how grateful he should be. People like Joey are pretty fucking rare, actually. "I told him how I feel. But I don't think it was anything he didn't already know."
"Well he's acting like you guys broke up or something." Joey's mouth curls up a little at that and JC echoes it. It feels good to be here with his friend and drink free drinks and maybe dance a little, later, after he's had more of the free drinks. There's a gorgeous girl sitting at the table across from them, all long dark hair and big eyes and he's pretty sure she's been looking at him. He wouldn't mind dancing later, and he's, yeah, he's feeling pretty good.
"You don't break up with friends," JC says.
"I don't think Justin knows that."
"He'll figure it out eventually."
*
He leaves therapy feeling raw and exposed, his head too full of things he hates thinking about but he needs to, at some point, he needs to start thinking about these things and it's okay for them to not make sense and it's okay if he doesn't understand what he's feeling. His head is so full and his skin feels hot and itchy. All he really wants is to go home and take a shower and maybe watch the Gettysburg miniseries with Greybeard, but Justin is sitting outside the office, waiting for him.
It's been almost two months since that day at JC's house and it had been way more before that, maybe six months or more but JC didn't keep count back then, not like he does now. Justin makes him feel a lot of things just by sitting there and looking at him, but over everything JC is-he's glad. He's glad Justin is here. Justin came to see him.
"I want. Can we go get some lunch or something?" Justin asks, standing up and wiping his palms dry on his jeans. JC smiles a little and takes a step closer, holds his arms out and just like that, Justin steps into him and they're hugging. Hugging in his shrink's office, which is pretty funny, JC thinks, and yeah, he's definitely glad that Justin's there.
"Man, I'm happy you're here," JC says, squeezing Justin a little tighter before stepping back. "I wasn't sure you'd get it, you know?"
"I'm not. I don't know if I do, really," Justin says, and when JC looks at him, it's like the shell that Justin's been for the last five years has cracked just a little. Just enough to let the light get through, and that's definitely something worth writing down. Justin takes a deep breath and smiles a little. "But I want to try. I'm going to try."
Fandom: pop
Comments: This is what happens when I try to write something about my own experiences. I think it's a happy ending. Not everyone would agree, I suspect.
Warnings: This is a fic about depression.
It's not that JC is sad, exactly. He doesn't sit around the house crying or whatever. He hasn't cried in a long time, not in years, probably. It's not some macho whatever reaction, either-he just hasn't cried. He doesn't have a reason to. Guys can cry, he doesn't put in with all that gender-stereotype stuff. Guys can cry. He just doesn't.
So it's not that he's sad. He's just-down, or something. Chris would say he's got a case of the blahs. But Chris would also suggest he get really drunk every night for a month and see if that helps, so JC's not really sure that thinking about what Chris would say is helpful at all. Blah is a good word to describe it, though. Mostly, JC just feels uninspired.
He hasn't sung anything in a long time, and he hasn't felt like singing, either.
It's this, more than anything, that worries him. He's used to his brain being filled with useless beats and lyrics and melodies that mostly go no where, but they're still there and he always wants to write them down, just in case. But now. Now it's just silence. Nothing. JC wonders if this is what everyone else's heads sound like, and how they possibly stand it.
He tells his shrink about it, staring at the faded burgundy swirled patterns of her rug and the white of his shoes against the dark colors, at the way his feet turn slightly in towards each other. Even the way he sits is different now. He doesn't like it.
"You're depressed," she tells him bluntly.
"But I don't feel sad."
"You don't feel happy, either. Sad is relative. Sad is different for everyone, different levels. Some would say that the absence of happiness implies sadness."
"I don't-but it's not like I have a, a reason. I'm, my life is really good. I have everything I could want."
She raises her eyebrows and makes a note on her legal pad. "No one has everything they want, JC," she says, not unkindly.
"I miss the seasons," he says, and looks out the window. It's sunny and clear blue skies, always always. Perpetual summer, even when he sometimes has to wear a jacket. Nothing ever changes in LA. "I think I'm stuck," he says.
"Let's consider that for next time," she says.
*
He really does miss the seasons. He misses seeing the leaves change color in the fall, from green to orange and red and yellow. He misses the trips they used to take, all piled into the station wagon, up through Pennsylvania to the Catskills just to watch the leaves change color. He misses spending weekends raking the fallen leaves into giant piles with Tyler and his dad. They'd push the piles onto big tarps and carry them down to the curb to get taken away by the leaf collectors, and the entire neighborhood would be lined in the crisp yellows and oranges and browns of the dead leaves. It had a smell, too, he remembers. It smelled like fall.
"This was your adoptive family?" the shrink asks. It's not really a question. She's trying to make a point, JC knows-he just doesn't feel like getting it today. He shrugs.
"I don't think of it like that. It's my family, they've never-it's my family."
"It's important to acknowledge how these things make you feel. A great amount of one's personality and ego-systems are formed before the age of five."
"That's not a question," JC says, staring down at his hands, fingers linked loosely together. His nails are ragged and dull, he hasn't felt like a manicure in weeks. It just seems like so much trouble, making the appointment, getting down to WeHo, the inevitable forced conversation he'll have to have with Lianne, who's incredibly sweet and fantastic at her job, which only means JC doesn't feel like he can be rude to her by not talking. It's a lot of work. A lot of effort. His nails are fine.
"No," the shrink says after a long time. The silence holds expectations that JC doesn't feel like fulfilling. Therapy is work, too, but he doesn't care about being rude to his shrink. She's not sweet. "It's not."
"I'm not, like. I'm not traumatized or whatever, okay? It's not like that."
"What's it like, then?"
JC rubs the pad of his thumb over the ragged edge of his index finger. "It's not like anything," he says. His parents live in Chicago now, and JC has only been there during fall once. It happens really quickly there, before it gets so cold the leaves just die all at once, but it still happens. His dad has a service come out and rake the leaves up for them now because he's older and he can't do it all on his own anymore. It still smells like fall, though.
*
The week between shrink appointments always feels both long and short somehow, like he has all this time, so many hours to fill and it never seems like he's really going to make it to next week. Not that he has some sort of death wish, he's not stupid, but he is sort of, well. He's maybe depressed, a bit, or at least that's what his shrink thinks, and it seems like a long time, but then he spends most of it sleeping or watching television or movies because he doesn't have the patience for books at the moment. He just can't seem to get into them right now for whatever reason, and before he knows it, it's next week and he's back in the shrink's office, staring at her burgundy carpet and not really feeling like talking.
"What did you do this week?" she asks by way of greeting. She says this instead of "how are you feeling today?" like she used to, because his answer was always the same.
JC shrugs. "Nothing much. You know, the usual. Watched TV. Hung around the house."
"Did you complete your assignment for the week?" She gives him the same look his mother used to give him when she wanted him to do something-the dishes or clear the table or clean his room. JC shifts in his seat and narrows his eyes at the carpet.
"No. I. I didn't have time, actually. And it's, you know. It's not a good idea for me to just go around calling people like that because-"
"JC." Her voice is quiet with disapproval. "It sounds to me like you're making excuses for not doing something that's difficult for you."
"I. Maybe I don't want to talk about it."
She sighs and leans forward in her seat, arms crossed over her legal pad, fingers wrapped around the roll of yellow that the flipped-over paged form at the top. "I think we should talk about your medication. Do you feel any different? Are you sleeping better, feeling more like yourself?" She looks like she already knows the answer. JC shrugs.
"What does that mean? I always feel like myself."
"I don't think you need it anymore," she says. "It was meant to get you to a place of mental clarity from which you'd be able to do the work of therapy, but-"
"I was just busy last week, okay?" He sounds like a child and he knows it, but he's okay with that. She reminds him of his mom, anyway.
She just raises her eyebrows. "It's been three months and you can't even tell me how you're feeling."
JC picks at a hand nail and doesn't say anything. He doesn't tell her that he's afraid of not being on medication. Because he's not sad anymore, and that's something, he thinks. He's not anything, really. He's not sad or happy or angry or tired or worried or anything. He's not anything, that's how he's feeling. But if he's not on the drugs, well. He's pretty sure he doesn't want to find out how he's feeling. This is easier.
When he told Chris about it, Chris just made a hmming noise and offered to come out to LA and hang for a while. "I just think it's better this way, not knowing. It's like. Like silence, you know? For the first time since I can remember. And it's not, I mean. It's not fun or pleasant, but it's not bad, either. I'm afraid, you know. Things could be bad."
"Things are bad, whether you let yourself feel that or not," Chris said. Then, "You should be telling your shrink this."
*
He talks to his mom at least once a week now, which is more than he used to but he doesn't get bored or fidgety or annoyed like before, either. They're short conversations, usually on his way home from therapy with his phone open in the ashtray and the speaker turned up as loud as it'll go, so her voice fills the space beside him and if he keeps his eyes on the road, it's almost like she's there.
But they're just short conversations. How are you doing, how was therapy, when are you coming home next. Sometimes she talks about whatever Heather or Tyler or his dad is up to-"Your dad's got a new limited edition whatsit for his model trains," she'll say, and describe the whatsit in great detail. She wants to know if he's going to Church, if he's taking care of himself and eating right and all that. "Fish," she'll say, "you need to eat more fish. It's supposed to be really good for you and I bet the fish there is real good, honey."
"I know, mom."
"But not swordfish because of the mercury."
"Okay, mom. More fish, but no swordfish. Got it."
Mostly it's meaningless chatter but it's also 'I love you' and 'take care of yourself,' and that's the part JC calls for. She's his mom, so he feels like he has to listen when she says it.
*
So he gets weaned from the drugs he's been taking since his first visit to the shrink's office, when he told his whole stupid sob story through a fill-in-the-blank pre-screening form. There were a lot of check boxes on the form, and he remembers thinking that the shrink must think all her future patients were idiots to have questions like, "I feel sad more days than I feel happy" and "I feel sad for a week or more at a time for no reason." He doesn't even remember which box he checked. He can't pinpoint the feeling, exactly, but it wasn't really like sadness. There was too much anger inside it.
Cutting down on the drugs is scary. He has to cut pills in half. Not all of them because he'd been taking two a day, but now he's only taking one and half, and then just one. He follows the shrink's instructions because she's not going to prescribe him more and when he Googled the meds, WebMD said that he could get something called brain shivers if he goes off them too quickly.
He still feels okay, not happy or sad or anything, but it gets harder and harder to fall asleep at night. He starts worrying about the brain shivers. They sound horrible, like something your brain should really not be doing. They sound painful and he can't sleep, wondering what it feels like to have one and whether or not he will have one, even though he's been very careful and followed the instructions very precisely.
But he's not sleeping very well and he stays up later and later, hoping that it'll force him to fall asleep if he exhausts himself. He tries watching documentaries on the History channel-the really boring ones about wars he's never heard of or the biographies on A&E. His eyes get dry and achy but he doesn't fall asleep. His shrink suggests working out before bed, making his body as tired as possible, and that helps, a bit. He gets in the habit of running on the treadmill and lifting a bit, just listening to the rhythm of his breathing and the slap of his running shoes on the conveyor belt.
He's still not ready for music, but his brain feels noisier. More thoughts, at least, mostly worried ones about brain shivers and not sleeping, but noisier just the same. When he tells his shrink, she just nods.
"It sounds to me like you're saying you feel more like yourself."
JC just shrugs and taps out a beat on the arm of his chair, a three-two-three-one kind of thing that's nothing, really, but he should maybe write it down, just in case.
*
It's been almost a month since she cut his meds and a week since nothing at all. His brain feels fine, he thinks, no shivering or anything like that, but it's getting noisy again. It's like waking up after a really long sleep--noisy and jumbled and chaotic, and he starts carrying a tape recorder around with him again because sometimes the only way to keep things quiet is to say them out loud. It's something his shrink suggested and he's surprised when it actually works, at least for a little bit. At the end of the day, he takes the tapes out, labels them carefully with the date and puts them in a box. He doesn't listen to them, there's nothing worth listening to yet, but it feels safer knowing they're there.
"How are you feeling today?" she asks. She's back to asking that question, even though he still doesn't really answer. Not the way he thinks she wants him to, anyway.
"Okay. Tired. Still not sleeping very well, but you know. Better. Sleeping better, I mean. I feel, I dunno." He shrugs.
"I know it's confusing," she says. "You're probably feeling a lot of things all at once, and it's hard to separate that into categories. Emotions don't belong in boxes, and it's okay to recognize that."
"Yeah, I. I guess."
"Let's talk about your friends."
"Oh, um. Okay. I. What do you want me to say?"
"Last week you said that you were afraid of what you were feeling. About the anger? How have you been dealing with that?"
"Um, well. You know, at the end of the day I just try not to think about it because it's like. It's like a broken record? Like, the same line over and over, and you can polish the vinyl as much as you want and try to get the scratch out and all, but that never works. So it's like. Why bother, if I can't change it?"
"Don't you think there's a kind of validation in the experience of feeling that emotion?"
JC just looks at her. "You have a weird idea of validation."
*
After two weeks of no meds, he gets a cat.
He's driving home from the shrink's office and there's a big humane society banner hanging below the Petco sign, so he turns into the parking lot. He's just going to look, he thinks, because he's feeling sort of sad and it's hard to talk about all this stuff, about his birth mom and his, well. About stuff, anyway. It's hard and he likes animals. Playing with a puppy would make anyone feel better, he thinks, but when he walks up to the pen they have set up outside, it's all cats.
He kneels down in front of the cage and a huge white cat with bright blue eyes comes right over, sniffs at his fingers through the plastic gridding of the pen. It lets him pet it, licks carefully at his index finger and closes its eyes into slits, like it's smiling.
"That's Greybeard," the human society girl says, kneeling down next to him. "Poor guy, he has Stage 1 FIV. It'll be really hard to find a home for him. No one wants to adopt a sick cat."
"Is he-he doesn't seem sick," JC says. The cat purrs and rubs itself against the cage. Its fur is soft and clean and very very white.
"He's not sick now. It's like. Like HIV, in people. He has years and years left, but it is a disease and it's transferable, so people tend to shy away from that, if they have other animals. If they have kids, they don't want their kids getting attached in case he gets sick and dies."
"Oh," JC says, and Greybeard licks his finger again. "I don't. Have kids, I mean. Or, or pets." The humane society girl smiles.
"You bought a diseased cat?" Lance says when they meet for lunch the next day, staring at JC like he's gone insane. "Why would you do that?"
"He was free, actually. And he's not, well. He is diseased, but he's not, like, sick or anything. He's nice. He lays on my stomach when I watch TV. It's nice."
"You adopted a dying cat, and you don't think that's maybe symbolic of anything?"
JC frowns at his salad. "What are you, my shrink?"
Lance just raises one eyebrow, says in a quiet voice, "You're not dying, JC."
"I know," JC says, and rubs at his chest. It burns a little there, maybe from the gorgonzola on the salad. He might be becoming lactose intolerant, he thinks, and rubs in slow circles until the burn fades. Suddenly, he does feel like crying, a little. He feels. Sad, or something, and he wishes Lance hadn't said that about his cat. Nobody's dying. Greybeard isn't dying.
*
"I'm a really happy person, usually," JC says, and immediately feels like crying. That's happening more and more lately.
He hates this. Everything is so loud now and not even the tapes help that much and the whole broken record analogy is shit because the meds did help with that and now it's over and the needle is stuck on sadangrysad all the fucking time, and JC just. He hates it. He doesn't even know what he's sad about and it's just this awful, directionless feeling of discontent that makes him feel like a shitty person for not just being happy. He has everything, or at least a whole fuck of a lot and he's incredibly lucky, so this feeling just. It doesn't make sense. This is exactly what he was afraid of and he really, he just wants it to be quiet again. He can't think like this.
"I think you haven't been happy for a very long time," she says, and she sounds sad. She sounds like he feels, but not in a pitying kind of way. Just in a "this is the way things are" sort of way. It makes JC feel even more like crying. Well, not like crying, exactly, but like he should be crying. Like he's at that part in the movie where the main character breaks down and has all sorts of epiphanies and then the shrink makes some remark about the road to healing or whatever. Not that his shrink says anything like that.
"I don't know what to do with this feeling," he says, his knee jittering in a weird, sort-of random beat, like a heart mixed with a drawn out skittering slide.
"Have you considered talking to him about it?"
"That's just a really small, I mean. It's not going to solve anything. He can't, he doesn't have to power to fix me or whatever."
"It's not about him," she says. "You need to remember that. It's about you, and controlling the relationships and things in your life that are making you unhappy. It's not the only thing, but it's something you have the power to change."
"It's not-he wouldn't understand. And then, you know, I think it'd just be more. Worse, or something. Do you. You think it would help?"
She presses her lips together in a thin line before answering, and JC knows she's not saying what she really thinks. It's part of the shrink game she has to play-because this is the part of the movie with the big epiphanies, but they have to be his.
"I think that you've been hurt a great deal in the past and you have every reason to be wary of his reaction."
"It's not like he's trying. He's not, you know. Doing it on purpose."
She raises her eyebrows. "Maybe that's the point."
*
He's sitting at his piano, working out a melody and stopping occasionally to pet Greybeard, who has taken up position along the top, all stretched out with his back paws hanging off the end, when Justin slides onto the bench next to him, bumps his shoulder against JC's. He asked Justin to come over but it's still sort of a shock, him being there, and JC feels almost sick with nerves. Justin reaches up a hand to Greybeard, who hisses lazily until Justin pulls his hand back, staring.
"Nice cat," he says.
"He's diseased," JC replies. He doesn't look at Justin.
"That's… pretty fucked up, actually. I, um. Listen, I was talking to Lance and-"
"No, it's. It's just, I asked you over because I have some things to say, and I need you to just listen and not talk, okay?"
"Oh. Um, okay."
JC takes a deep breath, inhale, exhale, and stares down at his fingers on the piano keys. Not musician's fingers, really, too short for that, but they do well enough for him. He makes do with what he has, anyway.
"You're not a good friend," he says. "I love you, okay? But you're not a good friend and you never have been and I just think. I don't think you know how to be a friend. Not, you know, a real one. You're not programmed for that kind of, of relationship and that's. It's not your fault, okay? I don't, I'm not blaming you. But you're not a good friend and you've never been there when I needed you and that's. It's just something I needed to say."
There's a moment of shocked silence and then,"Is that all?" Justin's voice is cold and JC doesn't look at him, keeps his eyes on the piano keys and concentrates on the roaring sound in his head. It's like a melody, maybe. Maybe something good, definitely something worth writing down.
"Yeah, that's. Pretty much."
"Okay then," Justin says, and he sounds more angry and less cold now. He gets up from the piano and JC can hear his footsteps echoing through the house, hears the door slam hard in its frame as he slides Greybeard off the piano and onto his lap. His chest hurts and he hears the roaring, louder now and it's definitely something worth writing down. It's something worth keeping.
*
He doesn't cry when he tells the shrink about it, but the burning feeling is back and his throat feels full and painful, that horrible hard-to-swallow feeling. He'd probably feel better if he would just cry, but that feels like giving in, maybe. That would be worse, he thinks.
"It was pretty bad," he says. "He's angry at me. He probably thinks I'm the biggest ass in the world."
"You don't think he'll consider what you said?"
JC shrugs. "Maybe. I mean, sure, yeah. But I mean, I wouldn't have said it if I didn't think I was right, you know? This is what I meant about. About things you can't fix so why fuck with them more?"
"Do you feel better now that you've told him?"
"I don't. I'm not sure that's the word. Like-relieved, maybe? I feel relieved. And I sort of. I wish he got how much he needs me. I want, I dunno. It sounds stupid, but I want, like. Recognition. Does that make me the shitty friend?"
She leans forward in her chair and smiles a little. "I think that makes you human." She sounds surprised and delighted at the same time and he thinks, well, at least he's pleased one person.
*
"What'd you do to Justin?" Joey asks the next time JC sees him, a month later at someone's birthday party in Vegas that neither of them knows.
JC just gives him a look over his drink and shrugs. "I told him the truth."
"What's the truth? Because, man, he was really messed up the last time we talked. He says you hate him now or something. And that you called him names?"
"I don't hate him," JC says. He doesn't really want to talk about this here. He doesn't really want to talk about this at all, but he's getting better with that, he is, and Joey is actually a good friend. Joey has good intentions and JC doesn't want to seem ungrateful. He knows exactly how grateful he should be. People like Joey are pretty fucking rare, actually. "I told him how I feel. But I don't think it was anything he didn't already know."
"Well he's acting like you guys broke up or something." Joey's mouth curls up a little at that and JC echoes it. It feels good to be here with his friend and drink free drinks and maybe dance a little, later, after he's had more of the free drinks. There's a gorgeous girl sitting at the table across from them, all long dark hair and big eyes and he's pretty sure she's been looking at him. He wouldn't mind dancing later, and he's, yeah, he's feeling pretty good.
"You don't break up with friends," JC says.
"I don't think Justin knows that."
"He'll figure it out eventually."
*
He leaves therapy feeling raw and exposed, his head too full of things he hates thinking about but he needs to, at some point, he needs to start thinking about these things and it's okay for them to not make sense and it's okay if he doesn't understand what he's feeling. His head is so full and his skin feels hot and itchy. All he really wants is to go home and take a shower and maybe watch the Gettysburg miniseries with Greybeard, but Justin is sitting outside the office, waiting for him.
It's been almost two months since that day at JC's house and it had been way more before that, maybe six months or more but JC didn't keep count back then, not like he does now. Justin makes him feel a lot of things just by sitting there and looking at him, but over everything JC is-he's glad. He's glad Justin is here. Justin came to see him.
"I want. Can we go get some lunch or something?" Justin asks, standing up and wiping his palms dry on his jeans. JC smiles a little and takes a step closer, holds his arms out and just like that, Justin steps into him and they're hugging. Hugging in his shrink's office, which is pretty funny, JC thinks, and yeah, he's definitely glad that Justin's there.
"Man, I'm happy you're here," JC says, squeezing Justin a little tighter before stepping back. "I wasn't sure you'd get it, you know?"
"I'm not. I don't know if I do, really," Justin says, and when JC looks at him, it's like the shell that Justin's been for the last five years has cracked just a little. Just enough to let the light get through, and that's definitely something worth writing down. Justin takes a deep breath and smiles a little. "But I want to try. I'm going to try."