Rough Divorce

And nine years later...

I'm peacefully passed out in the backseat of my little SUV, with my head resting on a folded up blue sweatshirt for a pillow. I'm parking in an almost empty lot with the back of the Mazda facing the streetlight.

The noise from my cellphone wakes me up. It's 7:12 in the morning. I was up at 4:30am to take my mother to work.

I pull out the phone from the holster on my hip and look at it in almost disbelief. It's notification of an email from Morpheus. I think about some of the responses I could get out of him. "Hey, stop writing me. It's annoying." It has to be a minor irritation to keep receiving messages from someone week after week, despite refusing to reply. Like bad spam that sifts its way through the trash folder.

I put the device back on my hip, and curl up again on the bench seat. I wait for sleep, but I am wide awake now.

I open the email, expecting the worst. Morpheus apologizes first for "leaving [me] hanging" (a phrase I originally concocted in the last email I wrote him). He mentions the "rough divorce" and that he's traveling a lot for work. He concludes with the fact that he'll be back next week.

Maybe he enjoys my dogged insistence with writing him notes, or maybe he finds it ill taste and just doesn't share.

Regardless, the email proposes absolutely nothing. Just because he is returning to Yuppieville in a few days, doesn't mean we will see each other or even speak to one another when he comes home. The only information to gather is the mention of the terrible and always painful divorce.

In one of the last emails he wrote me, he said that he had had so much happen in his person life and that essentially he didn't want to see me, that he wouldn't bother me anymore. I naturally assumed then that he and his wife reconciled at the time.

Apparently, I was wrong.

Maybe he figures I'm easy bait, as all people are when they're in love with you--easy pickings. "Oh, I can't have so-n-so, but I will always have [Jae] around."

Or maybe he's secretly in love with me too after all these years and months of silence.

After all, isn't it simply wrong to use someone, who only allows it because he/she feels great affection for you?

Romantic History

"Maggie is convinced--and has experience to back it up--that nine men out of ten will risk their marriages, their families and everything else for five minutes of pleasure."

--pg. 327 of Romantic History

Why English 156 Wasn't Easy, Part VI

"Who wants to go first?" The English instructor says to the class.

The assignment was straight forward enough, give a ten to twelve minute presentation on one of the articles in the course's textbook.

I raise my hand. I had all weekend to flip through the handbook and pick a work to publicly digest, and I forgot about it completely. I'm diving into the pages as he speaks.

"Okay, [Jae], what are you going to do it on?"

I had five seconds to find something--and there it is--dutifully waiting for me--so obvious. "The Suicide Note," I answer.

The next day, I presented. I gave my lecture the title, "The Easy Way Out," being sardonic, an attitude that at least the vocal classmates missed--if not the entire class (although I do believe the instructor caught the point--he doesn't overlook much).

In fact, at least some of the students not only missed the point of my presentation, but also the gist of the poem itself, which was a naked composition of the disordered thinking of someone who is suicidal.

"So," I ask the class at the end of the short lecture, "Do you believe that suicide is 'the easy way out'?"  

The answer is plain to anyone who has ever been suicidal, or lost a family member or friend to suicide.

"Yes," one girl answers. "People just don't want to deal with their problems."

I don't respond. Nowhere in the assignment are there points for arguing against one's classmates. Nothing I said or wrote did anything to generate sympathy or empathy for the suffering girl in the poem--a tragedy that is very real to me.

Why English 156 Wasn't Easy, Part V

"Why is it that no one ever agrees with me?" I finally say in frustration. As a class we discussed a story about a woman who whored herself out to a friend to catch a ride across a river in order to visit her lover (and after she confesses her indiscretion to her lover, he cruelly and promptly rejects her).

Earlier, I called the whole essay "slut shaming."

"That's a good thing," my instructor replies to my question and my obvious, growing irritation, smiling.

I can't tell. Is he smiling to me or to the rest of the class?

Why English 156 Wasn't Easy, Part IV

"If you were spending that much time on one class, I don't think you should take three classes next semester," my mom comments after I finished my final essay for English 156, which I spent days reading and reading and doing more research for, only to be confused and grossly aware of my own ignorance toward my subject.

We got into a minor argument over that.

As time went by during Summer Semester, I begin to slowly feel odd and old (which is a relative term). A few of the students were eighteen and straight from high school. Many worked while going to class. One girl had night shifts, but still manage to show up some days for nine o' clock morning lecture.

I remember being eighteen and at the University, starting Summer Quarter 2001. It was then that I realized I needed help, and went to the student health center for my depression. I was struggling already and just beginning my college career.

Despite the mood issues, I loved the University, even though I knew I wasn't a good fit for the Animal Science Department because they focused on agriculture and mostly food animals while I believed, and I was often alone on this, that horses should be considered "companion animals," and I was a haughty animal welfarist.

Even though back then I was too liberal for my major, I danced around and took whatever courses spurred my interest, many of which were not part of my degree.

But I failed, as early as Fall Quarter 2001, and throughout the years in college, I would fail more.

Despite the fact that I felt a lingering sense of superiority over my fellow English 156 students (I took AP Lit my senior year of high school and also attended multiple English courses at the University--plus I'm older and have been writing for personal enjoyment most of my life), I couldnt help but recognize that many of my classmates would succeed where I did not. They would go on to complete their Bachelor's in a reasonable amount of time even if they needed an extra step to freshman composition.

Perhaps they wouldn't make the large, hindering mistakes I did--like binge drinking instead of studying the night before a midterm.

I started taking college classes when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. My mother was worried I would fall behind the other students and forced me to attend community college classes over the summers.

Why, if I've spent all this time in college, am I taking a basic reading and writing course?

I was hospitalized a few weeks after my last ECT in July of 2015. I tried to play Scrabble with a fellow patient but couldn't spell simple words like "world." I was reduced to a drooling, soft baby, learning to play with small blocks.

After that, even as my cognitive abilities improved, I had little confidence in returning to any level of college.

I was essentially starting over. All those courses at the University? I don't remember them.

Downhill

"I noticed you withdrawing during your junior year in high school, and it's been downhill ever since."

--Mom when discussing my history of depression

Why English 156 Wasn't Easy, Part III

It's the first day of Summer Semester 2016. The instructor walks in to the front of the class with his bag over his shoulder and sunglasses and an distinguished frown.

"Why is he frowning?" I ask myself. "Did I make a mistake in coming?"