You and I, Me and You
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Authors: MaryJanice Davidson
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For those working through the torment of mental illness, from either side of the therapist's desk.
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acknowledgments
Thanks to the many mental health professionals who were kind enough to get in touch after the first two BOFFO books (
Me, Myself, and Why
and
Yours, Mine, and Ours
) to tell me what I'd gotten right and, even better, what I'd gotten wrong. You know the saying, third time's the ⦠I forget. But thanks!
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author's note
BOFFO's building as described in this book doesn't exist in real life, but, boy oh boy, I wish it did. And despite my catty comments on various Minneapolis buildings, I think downtown Minneapolis is beautiful and exciting. It's well worth a visit, any time of the year. Thanks to the Skyway System, you can explore all of the downtown area in ten-below weather and stay toasty warm the whole time. Because Minneapolis is friggin'
wonderful
. And skyways are cool. They're like portals into Awesome.
Also, when Shiro comments that the newspaper she's freelancing for, the
Minneapolis Star
, isn't going anywhere, she is wrong: it was swallowed in a merger. That happened in 1982, although for the purposes of this book I imply it happened in the '90s.
The Premium Dog Couch enjoyed (sort of) by Pearl the dog does exist, and it's a fine product made by the good people at L.L. Bean. It's nicer than most people's couches!
Also, I've got nothing against the company that makes the Smart Pure coupe. It's just, their car? When I look at it, it's like I can feel my brain bleed.
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fun fact
More people kill themselves at the Golden Gate Bridge than anywhere else in the world. (Coming in at number two is Aokigahara Forest in Mount Fuji, Japan. Ha-ha, Japan, we beat you! Yes, I'm going to hell.) If you jump off the Golden Gate, your chance of dying is 98 percent. So there's a fun fact to digest with your bagel or, if you're me, your ham, egg, and cheese biscuit sandwich with extra meat.
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Typhoid and swansâit all comes from the same place.
âTHOMAS HARRIS,
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
I realized that to make an R all I had to do was first write a P and then draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line.
âPATRICIA LYNNE DUFFY, AUTHOR OF
BLUE CATS AND CHARTREUSE KITTENS: HOW SYNESTHETES COLOR THEIR WORLDS
“I really mean it, Dr. Wolper. I want us to get married.”
“Meli! You still call me âDr. Wolper.'”
“So? What's that supposed to mean? When I met you, you were Dr. Wolper, and that's the way I got to know you. So don't go making any big goddamn deal outta that, too. I'm just a formal-type person. If I were sleeping with the king of France, I'd say, âThat was very nice sex, Your Highness. Thank you for banging me, Your Majesty.'”
âMELI AND DR. WOLPER,
CREATOR
Stop tweeting and texting about your life and just live it!
âLOUIS C.K.
Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Three times is an enemy action.
âIAN FLEMING,
GOLDFINGER
Witwer: “Let's not kid ourselves. We are arresting individuals who've broken no law.”
Jad: “But they will.”
Fletcher: “The commission of the crime itself is absolute metaphysics. The Precogs see the future. And they're never wrong.”
Witwer: “But it's not the future if you stop it. Isn't that a fundamental paradox?”
Anderton: “Yes, it is.”
â
MINORITY REPORT
“You son of a bitch, you moved the cemetery but you left the bodies, didn't you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!
You only moved the headstones!
”
â
POLTERGEIST
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contents
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chapter one
I'm moving in
with my boyfriend, the one I share with two other women, and I'm doing this because we're in love and want to live together and make a family, our own family, and not because I'm desperate to do one normal thing. For once in my life.
There.
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chapter two
Except for the
murders, Moving Day would have gone on with no trouble at all. Okay, the murders and my partner showing up uninvited. And my best friend's OCD being fiercer than usual. And my dog's stealth pooping. That put a yucky tinge on the day. The murders were definitely the worst part, though. Okay, the murders and the poop.
Until Poopfest 2013, though, it was fun. Despite the nagging feeling that I might possibly be moving in with the wrong man.
(No! Even to think it is a cheat!)
Except of course that was ridiculous ⦠Patrick was 100 percent the right man and any
(Stupid bitch.)
(Disloyal.)
âthoughts otherwise were ⦠were â¦
Anyway, it was exciting to direct the movers and figure out which boxes went where. I was well into my twenties but could count on one hand how often I'd moved. I'd lived in a psych wing, and then near a psych wing, for over a decade, and after that in government housing. I'd only had my first apartment for three years when I had to leave because I had recently acquired a dog. And fallen in love! Those two aren't in order of importance.
(Something you might not know: the nice thing about being an inpatient is you're not expected to bring your own furniture, no matter how long you live there.)
This was my first house.
Our
first house, I guess.
And it was beautiful! Utterly, utterly perfect. Which made sense because I was moving in with my utterly, utterly perfect baker. Boyfriend, rather. Who is also a baker, which is perfect because I love pastries. Perfect inside, perfect outside. All things in my life were coming together in a perfect fit. It was finally just so ⦠Hmm, what's the word? Starts with
p
 â¦
“Are you all right?” My best friend, Cathie Flannery, had stopped dragging boxes up the sidewalk (the loading cart's wheels were too dirty for her to be comfortable using it) to come give me a close-over. (Close-over
=
Flanneryism combination of giving someone a close-up and a once-over in the same glance. Yeah, it's weird.) “You look kind of glazed.” She was close enough to make this out as she looked deep into my eyes, which was as unsettling as you'd guess. “Cadence, are you in there? Helloooooo?”
“Stop that.” I waved her back a step. “You know perfectly well I'm driving the body this morning. The glaze is because it's so hot out.”
“It's the week before Christmas. Here in balmy southern Minnesota.”
You might think it was condescending or weird to have someone tell me the season and the state, but Cathie was only covering her bases, and she thought she was covering mine.
Two other people live in my body, is the thing. Sometimes they steal it for weeks at a time. They're squatters; I guess that makes me the slumlord.
(Don't ever tell Shiro or Adrienne I said that.
Please
.)
Sometimes I start my evening heading out for another viewing of
High School Musical
(but never in 3-D; it's hard enough living in a three-dimensional world without piling movies on top) and wake up in mainland China. That can be a problem for all sorts of reasons, beginning with my utter ignorance of all Chinese dialects.
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chapter three
Cadence Jones is
ignorant about being ignorant! That blond giant
willfully
does not speak Chinese. She had the same opportunities I did when we were in China.
Squatters, indeed.
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chapter four
“⦠all right?”
I blinked. I knew I'd lost timeânot much time; it was still daylight, the van was still there, it was still cold, Cathie was wearing the same clothesâbut I didn't dare look at my watch. Not that I had many secrets from her. We grew up in the same town, by which I mean the same lunatic asylum. Except we don't call it that anymore. It's not
nice.
Still, though I loved my friend, I'd never felt she needed to know every single second of every single time my body was hijacked. I don't even tell my shrink about every second. Except we don't call them that anymore. It's not
nice.