Part one. Finish your schoolwork. Wash your dishes. Brush your teeth.
He completes his homework, sorting through the piles of numbers haphazardly sprawled in front of him until they resemble tiny buildings, stacked up in orderly fashion, forming perfect city blocks. He is a creature of organization, of habit, in the way that everything makes sense to him in the way it should be and in all honesty that really should be enough.
But as he leaves his miniature world, crafted from those figures pulled from his accounting textbook, fueled by the midnight snack of cereal, and dumps the remnant of Fruit-Loop tainted milk down the sink, something starts to change. The peace found in simple answers that can be reversed back into complex questions is gone. The running water in the sink is rushing, louder and louder, just like the waterfalls in Hawaii when he went in third grade for family vacation. The running water is pounding, it hurts his ears, like the Jon Bon Jovi concert that they went to for his sister’s seventeenth birthday. It's pounding, it’s painful, it’s so, so loud but it still can’t replace the thoughts that stampede through his mind. He turns off the sink, but can’t say the same for his brain, water begins to find cracks in the self control of tuning it all out, threatening to create a flood.
Floods. Floods, to him, are aftershocks of catastrophe, like the streets of Fort Myers after Hurricane Ian. Hurricanes, that come as “natural disasters,” because the world is protesting us being here. Hurricanes, a mess of swirling, spiraling, angry, angry winds. Angry, angry, winds like the angry, angry thoughts in his head. He goes to Florida every year, for one reason or another, but for some reason they are connected and disconnected at the same time and he really doesn’t know what to think about that.
His toothbrush has someone made its way into his right hand and his left is squeezing a pea-sized amount of Crest UltraWhite onto it, the handle is hard, hard, plastic and he knows the feeling of the bristles on his tongue will make him gag. Necessary evils, he tells himself, necessary evils. But gagging makes him think of that time, not that long ago, when he was lying on the marble of his bathroom floor, cold, cold rock pressed against his burning cheek as his stomach screamed bloody murder. Cold, cold rock like the cold, cold crystal clear water that flows from the tap onto the dot of blue striped white that lies on the green and navy bristles of the tooth brush, the bristles of the tooth brush that will touch his tongue and make him gag, even though he really hates to gag but he has to do it. He has to do it even though he hates gagging, and the way that it makes his eyes water because, god damn it, he hates crying.
Crying. He didn’t cry at his grandfather’s funeral, and he thinks that might be why his grandmother cried harder. Crying. He didn’t cry at his grandfather’s funeral, but he cried at that stupid beer commercial after the Superbowl where the dog found its way back home. Crying. He doesn’t cry at things that matter because he doesn’t want people to see him cry because if they see him cry they might know that something inside of him is broken.
Bristles hit his tongue and the gagging distracts from his psychoanalysis. Gagging, my god, he hates gagging so much, but even more than that he hates how he can’t turn off his brain. He hates that he doesn’t know what it’s like to close his eyes and drift off to sleep, he hates that he can’t seem to choke out why it is that he has bags under his eyes that grow darker by the day because no matter how tired he is, he just can’t fall asleep. He hates that it makes him weak to ask why this is happening to him, so instead, he finds quiet solace in the peace of his homework, his numbers, his peaceful, private, city because those have a beginning and those have an end.
Those have pure, beautiful simplicity. And he does not.
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