From the Vault: "Lucky: An Evolutionary Essay in Eleven Parts"

[ "From the Vault" means that this post was previously "published" on another blog, a blog belonging to my friend, which she has since taken down. It was written in 2008 as a guest post there, during the year when I was on my break from this blog. Although some things are different now from then (for example, Joey now lives with me, but then he was living 3.5 hours away at college), most of what I've written here still stands. I have a few other "lost" posts from that time that I will probably post here, probably as "gimme" posts on days that I want to continue fulfulling by NaBloPoMo requirements, but can't write something new on that particular day.

Ed. to add -- I was re-reading this, and I remembered the conversation about Bizarro us (section VII). The lucky one we decided was Bizarro Me is now in my lab, a friend. Life is funny sometimes. In that way, I happen to be lucky, too.]

Lucky: An Evolutionary Essay in Eleven Parts

I. On a drizzly March day, the computer spat out a piece of paper, and the spike that correlated with symptoms of Bipolar Disorder was huge. The scientist in me said, “Bingo. The data can’t be any clearer than that.”

Later, in the car, the logical part of me faded out, and I sobbed into the phone about how we couldn’t adopt children from China. Earlier this week, as I recounted this story to a friend, he told me that he found it bizarre. “Why was that your first thought?” he wanted to know.

“Already,” I told him, “I was seeing that I could never have the future I really wanted.”

II. May, the day before I left college for good. A friend, once so close that we referred to ourselves as “The Chosen One,” slammed his car door in my face. The last thing he ever said to me was “Thanks for trying, Jenny.”

I could have said the same to him, but instead I closed my car door and cried. The friend driving the car cried with me, cried for me.

III. Two months later, my once-best friend—girlfriend of the guy who slammed the car door in my face—told me I had a choice. I could forgive him [though he’d never apologized]. Or I could lose her too. I chose the latter. Having burned my bridges, I had swiftly lost most of the friends I’d had in college. The ones that stuck around were saints, believe me. You have to believe me.

IV. It’s August, and it’s hot in my bed, but it doesn’t matter. Under the covers, there is the boy I’ve loved since 2001. Since this one day when we both ended up at a breakfast for high school students with A averages and realized we kind of liked each other.

Since he walked me to French and walked away with my heart.

V. Sometimes, when you’re crazy, you feel like you are unlovable. Even afterwards, even with the meds, you still can’t shake the feeling sometimes.

Then someone who’s too young to have had to put up with all this shit touches your face, and you fall in love with him for the one billionth time.

Then you have a game night at your house, and your new friends eat all your spinach-artichoke dip and get tipsy off your beer, and you all laugh for six hours straight while eating Chex Mix and drinking Wild Turkey with Diet Coke.

Then you reach under your chair at the request of your closest friend in medical school, and your hands close around a fetus-shaped cookie cutter. When you tell your mom about it, she shakes her head and says, “I don’t understand your relationship with Joe.”

“I know,” you reply with a half-cocked smile you’ve developed over the past year. “I know.”

VI. Joe: “Where do you want to go for lunch?”

Me: “Rio.”

Joe: “How about a Coin Flip of Destiny?”

Me: “Ok. But I always lose Coin Flips of Destiny.”

Joe: “Call it.”

Me: “Tails, like always.”

The coin lands on heads, like it always does.

Joe: “How do you do it, Jenny? How do you change the laws of probability? How are you that unlucky?”

VII. When a new class of students comes in, we notice that—to a man—their gender distribution is the opposite of ours. Whereas my class is not-always-fondly referred to as the “Boy’s Club,” they are mostly girls.

“Maybe each of them is a Bizarro One of Us,” Thomas postulates.

“Which one do you think is me?” I ask.

“Well…” he draws out, “there is that one who escaped the Midwest right before that terrible flood. Which makes him lucky. Which makes him the exact opposite of you.”

VIII. In the past year, I’ve fallen off a curb eating string cheese. I’ve had a car splash rain water halfway up my torso. I’ve tripped by catching my big toe in my pajama pants more times than I can count. I’ve had more than twenty bruises and driven three different cars, never crashing but enduring your typical run-of-the-mill old car problems. I’ve replaced fuses and car batteries, re-glued my mirror to the windshield, and been rear-ended while parked quietly at a red light. I gave my retinal cells a bacterial infection three times and had to administer antibiotics.

I helped build a ball pit in a friend’s house. I’ve eaten so many lunches at our local Chinese restaurant that they have my order [Chicken Moo Goo without carrots or snow peas, fried rice and hot-chili oil on the side, please] memorized. I’ve received plenty of bizarre presents: Hello Kitty earmuffs, a transected fetus woven blanket, a monacle that is prescription for my right eye. I’ve improved my sparring skills out of necessity, and the phrase, “Dammit, Jenny!” always makes me smile.

On the first test of this semester, I was one of two people who put the same unique number as my ID.

After the second test of this semester, I was one of the three people the computer decided to ignore when it posted our revised grade.

I was the only person who accidentally copied our entire class in the email to tell our professor’s secretary that my grade wasn’t posted. The stress of realizing what I had done, coupled with not knowing my revised grade, was too much. On the phone with Joe, I cried.

IX. Which isn’t unusual. Four days earlier, we sat in the auditorium, receiving our grades for pathology. It’s hard to get an undesirable grade and keep a straight face, it turns out.

“Look at this morose motherfucker,” I think to myself. The entire test review, I fight to hold it together.

During a break in the review, Joe looks over at me. He holds one hand out, and simply says, “Squeeze my hand if it hurts.”

My knuckles turn white. “It does,” I whisper softly. “It does.”

X. Thanksgiving break turns out to be brighter than I could have ever imagined. It is amazing how well I sleep when I’m next to the boy, how lovely those moments with him can be. How slowly I breathe, how often I choke out belly laughs from a permanently smiling face.

For alone time, we drive forty-five minutes to his apartment, singing with songs on the radio and holding hands the whole way.

Afterwards, I’m standing in front of the heating vent in my underwear and a pair of high heels, bright red lipstick smudged across my face. I could easily stay there forever.

He comes over and kisses me. “I love you,” I think. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

The countdown is a T minus six months until he lives with me. I don’t at all regret wishing the time away.

XI. I’m in the bathtub, thinking about writing this essay and reading A Girl Could Stand Up, the book I always turn to when I’m bored, when I need something to make me smile, when I need to be reminded that a girl could, indeed, stand up.

The sentence at the end of my chapter reads, “I really was a lucky luckless girl.”

To bedlam and back, losing friends and finding exponentially better ones, being loved by the one who stuck through it all--I really am a lucky luckless girl.