This Book Does Not Exist (10 page)

Favorite TV Shows:
The Wire
,
The Sopranos
,
Rachel
Maddow
,
Inside the Actors
Studio
,
Six Feet Under
,
True Blood
,
Twin Peaks

Favorite Movies:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
,
Apocalypse Now
,
The Conversation
,
The Virgin Suicides
,
Fight Club
,
My Best Friend’s Wedding
,
Love, Actually
,
The Devil Wears Prada
,
Parallax View
,
Marathon Man
,
Synecdoche, New York
,
The Matrix
,
Requiem for a Dream
, I love movies.

Favorite Books:
Alice in Wonderland
,
The Zero
,
The Raw Shark Texts
,
Lunar Park
,
The Great Gatsby
,
Tender is the Night
,
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
,
Pride and Prejudice
,
To the Lighthouse
,
A Short History of Women
,
The World is Flat
,
Everything is Illuminated
,
Middlesex
,
Prep
,
Kavalier
&
Klay
,
Wuthering Heights
,
Dracula
,
Frankenstein
,
House of Leaves
,
The Glass Castle
,
A Million Little Pieces
(yes, I know it’s fake), many more, but I’m tired of typing.

Favorite Quotations: “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between is the door of perception.” –
Aldous
Huxley

About Me: I rock except when I don’t.

I had a sense of Kirsten from our conversation at Joe’s party, but reading through this list of her favorite things enables me to compile a more complete portrait of who she is – or at least who she wants people reading her
Facebook
profile to think she is.

While processing this thought and considering how to apply it moving forward, a “pop” sneaks out of the speakers in my phone, alerting me to a new message inside the app’s chat function.

Kirsten
: Mike…………you remember me?

Me
:
i
do, yeah. Hey.

Kirsten
: hi!

Me
: how’d you find me?

Kirsten
:
haha
it was weird
bc
I got a friend request from that guy Geppetto you’re friends with and he only had one other friend – you

Me
: do you know him?

Kirsten
: no! I thought his clothes were
rad
for an old
man……so
I accepted

who
is he?

Me
: have you ever talked to him?

Kirsten
: nope

you
know him or you don’t either?

Me
:
i’ve
met him

i
’m
still not really sure what to think

Kirsten
: well he reunited us,
sooo

[She waits for me to respond. I don’t.]

Kirsten
: how are you??

[Not sure what to type, I start and delete several times.]

Me
:
i’m
ok

how’re
you?

Kirsten
: eh,
i’ve
been better

relationship
stuff with my ex

Me
: sorry

something
you want to talk about?

Kirsten
:
ummmm
I don’t
wanna
bug you but thanks

Me
: sure

Kirsten
: hey where are you right now?

[Why would she ask this? Does she know something?]

Me
: in
ohio

Kirsten
: you visiting?

[I decide to make something up.]

Me
: girl
i
know moved here to go to med school

Geppetto hasn’t said anything to you about her has he?

Kirsten
: no

would
he?

Me
:
sorta
how he and
i
met

Kirsten
: what do you mean?

Me
: he helped unload her moving van,
haha

Kirsten
: oh
haha

guess
he was anxious to be your friend

I’m in DC actually

not
THAT far away from you

heading
back to LA
tho

Me
: when?

Kirsten
: leaving in the morning

gotta
escape

when
are you going back?

[I don’t know how to answer. She must get impatient or nervous because she IM’s again before I can fabricate a response.]

Kirsten
: when you do we should hang out

I want to hear how the writing’s going!

Me
: ok cool

[Even though I type this I’m not convinced I mean it. I’m not sure I am going back. I’m not sure I can make it.]

Kirsten
: here’s my number 323-XXX-XXXX

call
me alright? We’ll go to a show or something (:

I leave the app open after Kirsten signs off. Before the screen dims to black, I copy her number and paste it into my contacts.

I
slide my phone back into my left pocket and stare into vacant space. Eventually, I walk out of the rest stop without ordering anything. Pushing through the exit doors, I tweet:

“H-e-l-p”

I’ve come to believe I need help. To what extent, I can’t say. But the only people I know I can turn to are my parents. They won’t judge me even if they think I’ve lost my mind
.

Approaching the front door of their house, I circumvent the patch of grass where I last saw the pilot’s dead body. The murder in self-defense – be it actual or imagined or something else entirely – haunts me. I’m having an increasingly difficult time conceiving of anything that doesn’t involve some form of pain or suffering.

I ring the doorbell.

No one comes.

I call my dad on his cell. He doesn’t answer. I leave a message saying I’m outside the house. I call my mom’s phone. But hers is pay-as-you-go, and she rarely uses it. In this case, she must have forgotten to re-up the minutes because I can’t even get through to voice mail.

I figure I’ll try the door to the garage, which is often left open in the event someone gets locked out of the house. Sure enough, it opens. Unfortunately, the garage is empty – both of my parents’ cars are gone. They probably ran out somewhere. I retrieve the spare house key from underneath an old, extraneous refrigerator that sounds like it’s broken and use it to enter the house.

Walking into the kitchen, I have never felt more alone. I light up my phone to confirm which day of the week it is… Saturday. Errands day.

I head upstairs and take a shower.

Clean and freshly clothed, but too apprehensive to sit or stand in one place, I wander about the house. Neither of my parents has shown up yet. Neither has called. Entering my old bedroom, I’m surprised to discover it has been completely redecorated. Gone are the Michael Jordan, Jay-Z,
Eyes Wide Shut
, and
Fight Club
posters. The walls have been painted burnt orange and brand new, plush grizzly bear brown carpeting is on the floor. Formerly, the walls were white and the carpeting Carolina blue. In my absence, my room has matured.

My eyes fall onto the bed and its mud-colored comforter. A scrap of printer paper is lying on top of it. The
Pinterest
logo has been shabbily drawn on the paper, and “
theredjournal
” has been scrawled in thick black marker underneath that.

Thinking this is peculiar, I go to the
Pinterest
website on my phone and search for a user named “
theredjournal
.” One comes up. The user’s name is listed as “XXX
XXX
.” No other information is given. Their profile picture is the default white pin against a red background. The user is only pinning images to one board, also called The Red Journal.

The images on the board are displayed in a grid formation. The first image at the top left of the page depicts a small, red hardcover journal, its front garnished with fanciful golden designs. Something about the journal jogs my memory, but I can’t quite place what. The photograph next to it appears to be of the journal’s inside cover, where the words “Thoughts, Feelings, Meditations” have been written in red ink. The next photo is a page in the journal, presumably the first page, and it is covered with handwritten words.

The handwriting is mine.

To be convinced takes some time, in part because all I do anymore is type, but also because I can’t remember ever writing in a book like this.

Unnerved, I scroll through the rest of the images in the grid, all of which show additional pages in the journal.

My handwriting is on every single one.

Without sitting down, I start to read.

5.10.98

Here
I am. Back Home. If that’s what it is anymore. I guess I wonder sometimes. Like recently. And I just got home. Nothing was working the night before, the day before – I don’t think she likes me; my stomach felt ill; food was consumed in mass quantities (that’s today also); writing wasn’t working; and I felt strange. The last being the most important – ‘home’ makes me weak. I was getting frustrated much too easily, losing control, and I realized it but there didn’t seem to be much for me to do about it. I was restructuring all the things Joseph Campbell taught me, combined with my experience – From darkness comes light – yet maybe what
i
forgot about was that even though
i
could always say that from darkness comes light and try to look at my ills as beneficial this doesn’t mean that those ills immediately become non-ills. Realization doesn’t cure anything. I don’t think. So I looked at all of these discomforts as challenges, things to overcome,
things
to change. Yet true change is always inherently invisible unless you look at yourself in retrospect. You can’t examine change unless it’s already happened and has taken you somewhere new, and you can look at and study who you were versus who you are now. It takes time. And conflict. Like right now things are crumbling – I can’t say the right things and I’m falling asleep.
So sleepy, yet so inactive.
So tired at only
midnite
. So full, so disgusting, and so afraid of change, but also wanting it (I wish she liked me, I want to love her) yet it seems to be all around me, but the change that’s around me isn’t the change I want. How am I going to deal without order, with chaos, with uncertainty? And it is this that I’m afraid of and encompassed in. I feel out of control.

5.24.98

it
is one day before
my 19
^th
birthday so it would seem almost fitting to do some sort of inventory of myself – who have
i
become in 19 years; who will
i
be in 19 more.
but
i’m
not interested in that sort of thing because it would be very general, most of it not reflecting anything but the last 6 years, and all of it being a rethinking of many of the things
i’ve
already thought and rethought.
so
having said that,
i’d
like to move onto some other issues which seem to me to be very simple but very difficult to answer.
when
i
got that e-mail from
liz
where she told me all about her crash and how she almost died I should have been scared –
i
should have been shaken by the idea that
i
nearly lost someone who
i
was growing close with, who
i
think I might want to fall in love with someday.
yet
i
wasn’t really affected.
and
this bothers me.