If (20 page)

I knew that finding myself would be hard. I had gone up and come down, and I wanted to just remember what it was like to be Asher, before the meds. But I was stuck in a hole. I wanted to see Bird in all the colors, and I wanted to sense the world as vividly as I used to. I wanted the energy to finish the rooftop project. I didn’t want to worry about trying to paint the smallest of details in a piece, only to be thrown off by the sudden shaking of my hand.

I needed a reset. I wanted to climb out of the depth as fast as I could. I knew nothing could get me out of the bottom faster than stopping my medication.

I hadn’t been great about the meds lately, but I was on them. I started to think they were a pointless attempt at making me level. It had been almost two years since the breakdown and maybe I could be fine again without them.

I was sick of being tied down to a bottle of pills. I was sick of the check-ins to monitor my lithium levels. Even living on the street, I was never really free because of them. I was a slave to the very bottle of pills that was putting a damper on the two things that made me who I was: my synesthesia and my art.

I had lived most of my life without medication and I had been fine. Maybe it was time to try life without it again. Maybe it was the meds that were holding me back, like some sort of crutch that wouldn’t allow me to sprint.

They threw a wrench in the cycle of vision to canvas that I had relied on for most of my life. I had so much living to do. I wanted out of this medicinal alteration. I could do this. I
would
do this. For Bird. For Sarah.

So that night, after Bird fell asleep, I got my bottle of pills and I emptied the few remaining ones down the toilet. I was going to be the real Ash, no longer viewing the world in its ordinary dullness.

I could do this.

ASH

I WAS RIGHT.

It had been four weeks since Bird found me on the street, back to my old ways. I let her think it was some kind of flu that I had succumbed to from the lack of sleep. It wasn’t hard to convince her. In many ways, that’s what the low felt like: my body and head ached, and all I wanted to do was sleep.

During the third week, the fog started to roll away on its own. I didn’t need the medicine. I just needed Bird and my art. Bird helped me forget the guilt. She filled me with feelings I was afraid to feel. All this time I feared I might hurt her, that I might lose control. But I was starting to learn to funnel those high feelings into my art. That was the healthy way to do it, not these numbing meds.

Bird was off with teaching the little ‘uns, as she called them, and I decided to venture out for a walk. It had been a while since I had done that, spending most of the past few weeks in a miserable fog.

The sun beamed on my skin, and it felt like life was being fed into me. Weeks ago, the sun would have felt like an annoyance, a reminder of how good I should feel. Nothing feels worse than knowing something should feel good, but instead feeling nothing at all.

This time, I stayed away from 5
th
.

A child screamed, not a tantrum, just the way toddlers like to test out their vocal cords with a random screech. A blast of white exploded and disappeared just as quickly.

I walked a little further, past a construction crew. The jackhammer pumped a collection of dark purple dots before my eyes.

My synesthesia was coming back in full force, no longer reserved for things associated with Bird. Shit, I thought Bird glowed before, but now she was otherworldly, just as I knew she would be. I imagined it would be hard to understand for someone who didn’t see things like me. Imagine your significant other glowing like a celestial being. That’s what it was like for me with Bird. But it wasn’t blinding, it was soft and radiant. It was soothing. Her aura sometimes changed colors from its baseline lavender, expanding to layers of mint green, sherbet, or a golden sheen. I never tired of it. I never got bored of looking at the totality of her beauty: her mouth and the plump pinkish lips that framed it. The tiny freckles that speckled her nose and cheeks and the occasional rogue one on her chin or forehead. Her eyes, mostly dark green with flecks of gold. Her hair, the color of embers. Lush, wild, coarse curls that made her all the more womanly in my eyes. Her skin, creamy and bordering on pale when she stayed out of the sun, but it would turn the slightest hint of caramel if she let herself enjoy it. Her body, firm with muscle, but soft to the touch.

A dog barked. Red triangles.

Having the synesthesia come back again was like being reunited with an old friend. The kind of old friend that you clicked with right away no matter how long you had been apart. No awkward reintroduction. No need to relearn your rhythm. It had been like we had never parted ways.

Bird and I had sex for the first time in a while that morning. My drive had been low due to being sick, and she didn’t want to catch what I had anyway. She obviously didn’t understand that what I had wasn’t contagious. I planned on finally telling her everything, but I wanted to be in my right mind. Being depressed is not the condition in which you want to deliver not so great news.

Sex with Bird was like swimming in a warm liquid rainbow. I saw the colors I always saw when we made love, or fucked, but now they were metallic, like mercury. It felt like I was bathed in them, dripping with the limitless colors that she inspired. A sweet and sour taste, like a nectar, filled my taste buds when we softly thrust against each other.
Low moans. Soft panting. Gentle caresses.
When it was hard, her kisses tasted different. The taste of her mouth was always present, but when I was ravenous, when there was pulling, groaning, growling, grabbing, biting . . . I tasted flesh. Like the finest dry-aged steak, rare. If you’ve ever had a hankering for steak, where nothing else will satisfy you but the slab of meat, with pink juices pooling around it. That first bite, that relief of tasting life, and it filling that intense animalistic craving, that’s how fucking Bird tasted.

There was nothing like being inside of Bird. Nothing.

I entered the coffee shop where I was supposed to meet Bird after her class, using my long walk as a roundabout way to get there.

I sat at a table, observing the crowd around me. I used to be surrounded by people who lived under tarps, kept all their possessions in cart, and shoved needles into their arms in broad daylight. Now, there was a businessman on his cell phone staring up at the menu board and holding up the line, a woman clad in designer workout gear feeding her daughter a piece of coffee cake, a couple of people my age plotting out some “disruptive” business plan. The latter made me feel like a real winner. I was just trying to manage functioning each day, and there they were trying to conquer the world.

A hand waving in my peripheral vision broke my people-watching. As Bird stood up on her tip toes, her sexy stomach peeked out the bottom of her cutoff t-shirt. Her long legs were covered in black spandex. I had become a huge fan of that material since I first saw her. Her body was made for spandex.

“Hey!” she said cheerfully, planting a kiss on my lips. “You look so good today. I am so glad you’re finally feeling better.”

“Yeah, I took a long walk today. My energy is coming back.”

“You’re telling me,” she winked. “Are you sure you still don’t want to go to the doctor? You were sick for so long.”

“But I’m getting better now, so it’s pointless.”

“Men,” she huffed. “I was just scared maybe you had mono. The fatigue and all.” She leaned in with a whisper. “And if you do, I’m screwed because I can’t say no to your morning poke.”

“It’s not mono. Don’t worry,” I said, reassuringly.

A little girl with coffee cake crumbs all over her face ran up to Bird and planted her palms on her knees. I thought maybe she was a student or something.

“Awww, hey little girl,” Bird said sweetly as she bent forward to be closer to eye level.

“Was dat?” the little girl asked, pointing her nubby finger to one side of Bird’s face. I watched as the brightness in Bird’s smile dimmed. That small question triggered a deep sadness, that little finger digging and swirling inside of a long-open wound.

“Oh my god, I am so sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into her. Come here, Apple!” Designer Tights Mom said.

“No, no, it’s fine. I’m sure I would’ve asked the same at her age.” Bird put on her sweetest fake smile. She turned her attention back to the girl.

“When I was a little girl, someone gave me a boo boo.”

The little girl pouted and kissed her nubs and placed them against Bird’s face like she was healing them. Bird’s eyes glossed with moisture.

“Okay, Apple, let’s go.” The mother was clearly mortified and snatched the child’s hand, pulling her away.

Bird took in a big slow inhale.

“Hey,” I reached under the table and put my hand on her leg. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. It’s not the first time. I work with kids her age all the time.” She smiled, and scrunched her shoulders, letting out a quick breath as she relaxed them, as if releasing the entire interaction from her memory. “I’m going to grab some tea. Want anything?”

“No, I’m fine. Thanks though.”

She stepped away from our table. I thought about pushing the issue, but we had a deal, and if I was going to know it all, so was she. Besides, this was her opportunity to tell me more if she wanted, and clearly, she wasn’t in the mood to discuss it.

After a few minutes, Bird came back with two piping hot cups.

“What’s this?” I asked as she handed me one.

“You have to try this tea, it’s my favorite. Thai coconut green tea.” There was this unspoken tension I felt as someone with a Y-chromosome. I didn’t want Bird supporting me but she was inherently generous, and she didn’t see the purchases as me taking, just as her sharing.

I needed to get a job.

At this point, I was like a stray Bird found on the street. I needed to choose if I was going to be an indoor cat or an outdoor cat. I couldn’t be both.

“Thanks,” I winked at her. I was tempted to tell her that she shouldn’t have, but I didn’t want to make her feel bad for doing something kind.

“So, on the way over here, I called my boss,” she said. “He said they have openings for a bus boy at a few of their restaurants and kitchen staff, too. You mentioned you didn’t want to be a server, so I didn’t bother to ask about that.”

I wasn’t very good at serving others. I could get snippy. I didn’t have Bird’s almost angelic levels of patience. I also wasn’t very good at jobs, at least from my limited job experience in high school and college. Correction, I could be employee of the year material for weeks or months at a time, but I was always one incident away from snapping or just not showing up and instead staying in bed for weeks. But this time would be different, I told myself.

“I have maybe cooked a can of spaghetti-Os . . .” I confessed.

“I think busing would be a great start. You can always move to kitchen. Carlo said he needs the help, you just need to stop in and chat with him. I told him it might be a few days because you were still sick.”

“Okay. I’ll stop by this week.”

It was official: I was becoming an indoor cat.