Eric loved school.

Eric loved school. Of course every kid says that but Eric really really loved school. Every day Eric would get up bang on time and well-prepared and walk to the school. Hardly any one was ever there when he arrived and the teacher was generally asleep. Once about half the class stumbled in late, the teacher might begin to teach. The other children would all stare ahead blankly, mindlessly doodle on their paper or even onto the desk, some of them would get up with the pretense of going to the bathroom and actually have a wander around. The teacher knew this and it was actually encouraged if needed. The other kids always laughed at Eric, every-time the teacher asked him a question whether the answer was right or wrong he would reply immediately, he never paused or stared ahead as if unable to hear. This really annoyed his teacher. 'Please stop being so attentive' and 'Why can't you be like everyone else?' were the most common things his teacher would say to him, when he wasn't able to lose concentration like the other kids. This made Eric really sad and he wanted to try to be just like them. Soon he figured out that if he applied himself to lots of other work like equations and essays whilst the teacher was teaching, he would lose concentration and would not be able to listen to the lesson. It also really calmed him down and made him feel good. While the other kids repetitively and compulsively drew the same pictures over and over to get graded, Eric tried to complete this work and hand it in like them but he always did some equations in the corner of the page which annoyed his teacher. The other kids always bullied each other and made fun of individuals, rotating it around so everyone got bullied but they always respected Eric and tried to include him. Eric couldn't understand why they wouldn't treat him in the same way.

When Eric went to secondary school, the equation habit became even more annoying to his teachers. 'Grow down, you're not an adult anymore' they would say. Eric found exams too easy to complete. The other students worked twice as hard, often didn't answer the exam questions going off on irrelevant tangents and sometimes they just stared blankly ahead even when they knew the answer and had studied the question before. Most of them seemed to get extremely changeable grades which the teachers always praised. To make matters worse Eric's mood was drastically changing and he noticed the moods of his classmates were becoming more out of control swinging from depression to states of elation compared to this Eric found he was only becoming a calmer and more diligent person with a consistent work ethic which meant his grades were generally the same and did not jump and down. Eric's classmates didn't understand why he was always so calm and attentive and they said things to him like 'what's right with you?'.  Eric always found his emotions were proportionate to the circumstances at hand and got really worried and scared when he saw the people around him acting in different ways to him. At this time many of Eric's friends began to self-harm out of frustration and confusion. The teachers in the school always accepted this and secretly they worried why Eric wasn't engaging in this activity occasionally. Sometimes Eric would come home from school and found his family were so loving and caring that he could not bear to be around them so he locked himself in his room and carefully completed his homework. Sometimes Eric would say to his family 'I think there is something wrong with me, I'm different', they would always say 'you'll grow into it' or 'you are under-exaggerating'. Even when some of Eric's teachers mentioned that Eric might need extra help, his parents dismissed it believing that Eric was looking for an excuse for his consistently good grades.

When Eric went to university things seemed to get worse. Eric began to engage in very expected and predictable behavior and he felt in complete control of his actions. Eric felt so confused about his behavior that he turned to eating and drinking healthily to make himself feel better. The people Eric lived with worried about these habits of Erics. Whilst everyone else rarely attended lectures and found it difficult to leave the house, Eric turned up every day and always on time. While Eric's housemates often returned to the house several times a day because they had forgotten something and would often cry with frustration, Eric was always prepared. His housemates found this behavior infuriating and asked him why he couldn't just 'try less'. Eric didn't want to annoy people and so he tried less but try to try less as he might his sleeping patterns were always regular and he always remembered to switch off lights and that he was cooking something and not to leave it unattended. At one time Eric really believed that things would get better when he got older but things were getting worse, despite this Eric seemed blind to reality believing the world was ultimately a good place. Eric felt confident and self-assured as people continually told him to 'grow down'. One day Eric asked his friends for help and they brought him to a hospital. Eric told the doctor that he had thoughts of hope and that he believed things would get better and that he was feeling resilient, the doctor said this was much too 'normal' and Eric had to stay in the hospital instead of attending university. The doctor started him on tablets. Eric loved the idea that he needed tablets to make him the same and remembered to take them every day. Things began to get better then, Eric started experiencing mood swings that were highly irrational and rarely experienced hope. Eric sat in a room and did not talk only to mention trivial pleasantries to a counselor. Eventually Eric returned to university.

But something was still wrong. Even though Eric's moods were now extreme like everyone else's he still couldn't help concentrating. When people were talking to him he often responded or nodded. This greatly irritated everyone and he still got accused of 'caring too much'. Again and again he was told to 'try less'. He found complicated tasks really easily and never needed to repeat actions in order to learn them. Eric told his doctor that things were still difficult and his doctor told him he was 'normal' and that he would not get cured but things will get better when he learned to cope. The doctor recommended things like setting his diary and calender on fire so he didn't know what was going on and to throw his alarm clock at a wall if he ever mistakenly remembered to set it. The doctor recommended Eric learn to drive and to do so everywhere as his concentration was so good.

Still Eric worried, he worried on the road that he would be on time for things and people would give out as they all were walking. Often he turned up extra extra late just in case.  He always wanted to get a job managing a business but this disappointed his family and he was told there was too much money in it so instead he worked writing. Eric worried about having too many practical skills and a linear method of thinking and thought that if his other novel went unpublished again, he would never make money. He still planned and did things in an organized fashion much to his and others disgust. Eric worried about falling in love thinking that no one would see him as an equal. Still he recognized that there were people in much more difficulty than him, people who were so focused they were called 'very productive' and people who compulsively jumped everywhere through windows and could not access the ground floors of buildings. He worried about kids like him having too much extra support at school and getting respected by the other kids. He worried that he should never have children because he might teach them the right things instead of the wrong and they would be brought up in a world where they would never fit in. Sometimes he tried to imagine the type of world where he himself would fit in but he couldn't. Still it was better to imagine a world where everyone fitted in, not just people like him but 'ill and disabled' people too.

She Lied To You

She lied to you.

I was fourteen when she first when into hospital. It’s funny how you can normalize what is initially so shocking just with time. As if by sheer virtue of things going on long enough, they develop outside the bounds of your own mind and become something else entirely.

So of course she visited the hospital regularly then after, she lost her hair and she got free make up from support groups, which made her laugh because she never wore make up. “

“A scarf or a wig or does it matter?”

“Be a blonde for a while” I said.

“They’re meant to have more fun or something right?”

“Cut the crusts off the bread, I read it in a health magazine in the waiting room, this smooth rock, I got in the holistic shop, rub it every now and then its meant to have healing properties”

“You can fuck off, if a two euro rock and not eating bread crusts cured you, I wouldn’t be here in the first place”

We both laughed, I was so young, I looked at every option then and then one day I didn’t have to, one day it was all over, one day we said the ‘C’ word out loud, we said it ‘Cured’. I was fifteen.

“It won’t come back will it?” I said.

“Not if I have anything to do with it”

She lied to you. 

I grew up. It seems strange to say that. Past tense. Part of me still feels like I’ll always be a teenager, like teenager is attached to me after all my teenage self made the self who is writing this. My teenage self is as attached to myself as if it were part of my physical make up, as if it were a tumour.

One thing we loved her for was that ability to weave a story, everything could be anything and anything could be everything in her mind, of course generally these stories was to raise herself in higher esteem or to terrify us into doing what we were told but there were other types of stories, the ones that thrilled and tingled at what seemed like the very inside of our imaginations. Circuses under mushroom heads and fairies following the ventricles of the leaves like maps. Now they seemed marred, blemished. They were lies too.

She lied to you.

She had to keep going to hospital regularly of course like I said so regularly it was normalized so one day when she came back she looked a little more worn, a little more tired than usual but she smiled a weak smile and made a joke that she didn’t want to make dinner so much that night, she would rather eat my brother’s food, we laughed. I was twenty-one, I had just graduated, the next day I booked my tickets, globe trotting for a year, working in between, my dream in life, at my fingertips on my keyboard, I smiled to myself.

That night she came into my room like I was child to say goodnight except she said something else.

“You should do what your able to, what you want when you can”

“Are you alright ma?”

“Bitta food poisoning due to your brothers shit but nothing a good rest won’t cure”

We laughed.

An hour to go until the plane leaves. Bags packed, I sit alone with the nervous reminders of my mother at security echoing in my head. Did I have this, did I have that? It was her nerves that left me sitting in the airport with an hour to spare and nothing to do. I wondered about waiting, the space between now and then. I hated it, time emptied of occurrence. Empty time. I wondered if I could gather up all the time spent waiting, spent without happening and just allocate it to something else. If I could I would give that time to my ma. If I could do that, I would be on that plane now, if I could do that, I would not be thinking about time, I would not feel overcome with guilt, the guilt of leaving someone dying. If I did that, she would live longer.

Eighteen months the doctor had said.

“Are you alright ma?”

She lied to you.