unordinary

Ted

by Shayna Y

Sometimes I want to explain how I got here. I’m in an odd place now, and people wonder about it. People assume I have an abnormal degree of insight on things pretty often. I won’t claim here to be a bush burning in the wilderness. I’m not. I’m a heap in a larger heap. I am part of the mass. I have the same information as you. I manipulate it a little differently, and so do you and everyone else. I can speak with authority about what I think is true, but it’s a mimicry of someone else’s authority, and really not many people will even attempt explaining what truth is. We can all recognize someone grasping at straws while speaking with great confidence, but sometimes we’re scared and will just grab anything that tells us directly what we’re supposed to do. It reassures us to believe that someone actually knows.

The same way that truth is different to lots of people, a feeling or an experience is never identical for two people. Maybe it’s normal to want other people to know what you know and feel what you feel. People seem like they want to have things in common. They’re trying to reach into each other’s hearts and minds all the time, but can’t quite make it.

It’s frustrating being able to think about dying and have meaningful conversations where we call all the things we’re talking about by abstract names, but still be unable to fully share an experience with another person. You’d think we’d have figured that out by now. You can watch a baseball game or eat sushi with someone, and explain to them how you did the same thing with your father for the first time when you were eight, and it was the best time you ever had, and how even if now you hate baseball or sushi makes you sick, doing those things still fills you with an intense joy that makes reality just melt. Your friend can be having the same immediate experience, but they can never feel exactly what you do. They can sympathize, but they can’t fully share it.

I always hated it as a kid. I always felt like an outsider after I realized it. I thought maybe kids were mean to each other because other people didn’t seem real to them. The mean kids couldn’t really experience what the other kids felt, even if it was explained to them. I got along in school okay, even though I didn’t feel like I related to people well. I had my friends and I made good grades.

Anyway, when I was still young and in high school I met a girl. I wasn’t like an outsider or anything, even though I thought about stuff too much and used my computer all the time after school. Lots of kids who did the same things were ostracized. The girl was really pretty, and I was 15 or so. I’m pretty sure she noticed me first. Her name was Clara. She asked me for help with her homework one time, but it seemed like she didn’t need it. She ignored the homework almost immediately and started talking about how she’d just read Cat’s Cradle, and how her little brother drives her crazy. I was in love after about a minute.

It seems dumb now, where I am, to bring up this stuff, but I guess that’s how it happened. All the feelings seem so insignificant now that it’s easy to believe I never felt what I did with such intensity. It doesn’t seem like it was ever real, but at the time I know it was all-consuming.

We dated, Clara and I, for two months. She ran and hugged me when she saw me, doing a little jump and pressing her whole body into mine. We professed our undying love and kissed each other in hallways between classes. We climbed out of our windows at night to meet in secret in a neighbor’s backyard midway between our houses. She would sit with her side pressed against mine and talk about the future. She had thick clumps of light brown hair that were usually pulled back behind her ears. She had hazel eyes and freckles, and she hid her mouth when she laughed. When I think about it now, I wonder if maybe it was just the fact that she noticed me that made me attracted to her. She wasn’t a particularly beautiful girl, but maybe that initial hint that she was interested was enough to put my hormones into overdrive.

So we broke up. She thought I didn’t have enough ambition or outside interests. I didn’t. All my interests for those two months revolved around her. I didn’t understand what happened. She immediately became an unsympathetic bully in my head. She wouldn’t have made me hurt like that if she’d known how I felt. I wasn’t angry, though, I just wanted to show her what I thought was the truth. I thought no one would give up a love like mine. It was full and complete. I knew it was something valuable, I just needed her to really experience it.

I tried to talk to her, but she told me I was obsessed. It’s easy to see reason now, but at the time I couldn’t believe that after we shared all those experiences, she could claim that she really didn’t feel what I felt. It was the first time I’d felt connected to someone.

I stopped talking to her and started working on a project. I was pretty into computers, like I said, and I’d been reading a lot of stuff about mind-control interfaces. If computers could read your thoughts well enough to play a video game, I thought I could build something to share my thoughts with Clara. We could link our heads together and really see into each other. She’d know how in love I was and we’d really, fully experience each other.

I spent hours meditating, concentrating on memories of Clara, hoping I’d be able to transfer them over easier if they were fresh in my head. They were romantic masturbatory fantasies at best. I’d picture our nights sitting on a patchy lawn, but glazed over with a rosy filter and starring Clara looking more glamorous and elegantly demure than she ever was in real life.

I spent weeks in a feverish labor. I read about MRI machines and electroencephalography like they were romantic literature. When you’re working for love, it’s like nothing else matters. The bull-headed obsession gets transferred into the job. You can work for years and feel like it’s worth it if the feeling is strong enough. I faked the flu the last week and bloodied my fingertips on wires and rusty scrap metal.

When I finished, it felt like I’d won the world series. I walked to school with my chest high enough to strain my shirt. Clara was at her old table at lunch, and I saw her like a beaming goddess. I apologized profusely, but politely, and managed to convince her to meet me after school. We walked home talking and reminiscing. I told her how I was comfortable with her choice to end it. I told her she was the most mature girl I’d ever met. I told her that our breakup had motivated me to start some honest, important work. I was building a website for a charity, and I wanted her, my inspiration, to be the first to see it. We got to my room and I proudly displayed my matching metal and wire caps. She hesitated, but I was so convinced of the power and endurance of true love that I was beaming with uncharacteristic charisma, particularly for a high school kid. We sat on the floor with our legs crossed, wearing the ridiculous hats. Then I closed my eyes and pressed the “on” button, anticipating bliss.

Clara yelped immediately. I looked up as she threw off the metal cap. Her scalp was singed in three places and fizzled, stinking clumps of her hair were on the carpet next to the discarded cap.

She screamed, “I FUCKING HATE YOU,” as she ran out of my room.

My heart choked into my throat when the front door slammed shut. I clutched my chest, believing my heart would literally break, the pain was so severe. I was in such shock that I didn’t notice my own hair burning. I wailed out huge, wet sobs as it crackled, and the fire spread onto my clothes. At that point I noticed it, but I wanted to wallow in my grief for a while, and the pain held me there. The cap was concentrating the heat on my head while flames shot out and melted a good portion of the skin on my face. My mom came in after half a minute and screamed. She ran and got a pot full of dirty water from the sink and flung it at me from my doorway. She kicked off my metal cap and stomped out the flames on my shirt. I guess she couldn’t bring herself to do the same to my face. I locked eyes with her as I writhed on the floor, full of shame, but still believing that the depth of pain I felt truly justified any actions I’d just taken.

When I see my mom now she has a wall over her eyes. She doesn’t really look at me. No one really does now, I guess. I haven’t seen Clara since the fire, but I hear she’s doing well. She probably tries to forget the whole incident, and I hope it’s been easy for her.

I’m doing well, too. I did a lot of rehab and just talked to a lot of people. I noticed the guys in the burn ward who could still talk to girls would use the burns to their advantage. Some of them played on the sympathies of the nurses or their ex girlfriends. It was easier for the ones without facial scarring. With anyone, though, it seemed like if you were as pleasant as a normal person, but had some scars on you, people thought you were inspiring. I reasoned that if people met someone who was deliriously positive after a disfigurement, they’d go as far as believing that person was filled with divine inspiration.

When I left rehab, I started traveling. I kept up a persona I’d developed the whole time. I was a man full of joy and riddled with energy. I told people I was middle-aged, even though I would have been just out of high school. They couldn’t see past the scars, and the energy I maintained seemed miraculous in that context.

I have a few thousand followers now, and they all think they love me. Maybe they do. I don’t know if love was what I felt for Clara, or what a pair of old people feel when they anticipate each other’s needs without speaking. Maybe all the mystical, unpronounceable emotions come from the same place. The butterflies in your stomach or the ache of longing aren’t so different from the feeling you get at a religious revival. People come to my tent and I make them feel connected to each other. Maybe the need for any kind of connection beyond what we can see is the motivation for seeking what I sell. We’re a species that can think about death without knowing what happens after it, and a lot of people are terrified by that. Believing in something outside of what we can see and touch and prove is a good security blanket if you’re afraid of becoming nothingness.

As for me, I’m done with trying to connect with other people. None of them really see me as human anymore. Real physical ugliness puts me in the realm of a living caricature for most. I sing and dance, and the simultaneous revulsion at my appearance and relief that my spirit has apparently gone on happy and untarnished convinces people they’re in the grips of a spiritual epiphany. They leave the tent feeling like they all know the same emotion, they’ve all glimpsed the same bright, holy light. They love each other more for having that in common, and I don’t mind just being a conduit between them. It’s not an unprofitable business, either. I sell hope to these people, and they buy it by the barrel.