Best Mistake

03 | illicit

goddamn, my pain fits
in the palm of your freezing hand

I catalyzed a suicide attempt in my sophomore year of high school. There was a brief moment when I considered abstaining, when I tried to talk my way out of being involved in this grotesque premeditation. At the time, I taught underclassmen at the local library. Eighteen hours a week printing test samples and shadowing high achievers who constantly grapple against their peers to get my fairly low-priced tutelage so they can maintain their grades. There were only three students I welcomed for the duration of the year. A Loid Forger who lived in a foster home because his father had been killed in-between deployments, a Sasha Blouse who had a hard time complying with the librarian's strict no eating rule, and Takumi Usui. I was an agreeable quasi-teacher, prone to being subjected to confessional spirals during the time it took for them to completely grasp the material, but only as long as they managed to reach the target. During study breaks, I encouraged open communication, and only two of them voiced their concerns about reaching the set milestones in time. That Takumi sparsely joined the conversation felt more like a kindness than a slight. He was a good student, more inclined to a personal approach through text messages, which I diligently scheduled to occur after tutoring session ended and before bedtime. During our conversation, I couldn't tell if he answered out of sincerity, or if he only endured it because he had to.

———

I was not loved and I was not unloved. To invite acceptance, you first have to be seen. So the story of my obsequiousness that once emerged innocent but subsequently grew into something tumorous is also the story of the first man who saw me. The man who shared the same blood as Takumi Usui, Gerald, a businessman who was pathological in the maneuver of his schemes. He was the seventh benefactor I'd met in my grandpa's charity ball. Handsome, a definite Punnet square of dominant British genes, so clear that shattered a hundred times he still appeared indistinguishable. The first day we met, he was smoking a thick cigar on the balcony two floors down the event hall. He told me that he had a tumultuous family and that he and his brother were no longer speaking, and there was something so easy about his immediate familiarity that I told him about my mother's severe alcoholism. How I found more liquor than cosmetics in her vanity table. How our conversations always started civil and ended in extreme violence. How it had only been a week since Thanksgiving dinner and she was already hitting me with her wine bottle. This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure perfection and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of a similarly situated party. I was pretending not to be moved by the consequences of my fawning. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the neglect of my anatomical function.

———

I was happy to be included in something, even if it was a mostly one-sided conversation with a man in a different continent. We texted on my lunch breaks and he delivered a flower bouquet for my birthday. I waited by his hotel door the few times he came to settle business with my grandpa. I sat on the plush carpet and watched him read with his head low and let him run his fingers through my hair. When he asked me how bruised I was, I lied. When I told him my mother had never cooked a homemade meal, he made me a burnt omelette, and sometimes he would call and make me tell him the extent of what I had to endure. But still there were moments I felt his tolerance, a surprising straightness about the use of his free time, unsubtle inquiries about the amount of space I routinely take up as to not limit his range of motion.

———

On our fourth meeting, he plucked my hand from the table and asked if I was capable of violence, the café's irregular rotation of noir jazz a murmur against the weight of his gaze. Even as he tried to preserve the part of me that was apparently untouched, sometimes I felt he was trying to scare me. As teenagers are, I was especially responsive to this challenge, determined to level the playing field. So I hunted down Takumi's insecurities as Gerald asked, and weaponized them the way a tamer trains his starving lion, with a bleeding flesh in his fist. There was something automated about Gerald's bidding, an offhanded perpetual motion, the inevitability of blood in his hands and the unconscious priming of a similarly situated party to do what they were meant to do, his attention elsewhere as he laid the groundwork and pulled me there with him. The way he would talk without prompting or encouragement, as if all this time he had been waiting for a captive audience. But there were moments that neutralized my fear, moments he softened his voice as I was doubting my participation, and between the lines was a mutual understanding that we were both grasping for reasons to make our solitude acceptable, that we were alone despite living in a world that contained people like Takumi, a language developing between us not so much romantic as it was breathless with shared resentment. So when he asked me to pull the trigger, I took this to mean that to him, I had become irreplaceable. He had considered me and noted my competence, my quintessential performance, the possibility that even within my small, juvenile universe, I might have something to offer.