Lost Tales of Kirev

First Birthday

There are a few reasons why the amphitheater is different today. The first is the rain. It collapses to the ground in fluttering sheets. It (meaning the sky, I suppose) also hailed this morning, and we could've gotten baseballs, but I only received clear pebbles that bounced off the hood of my bright blue rain jacket, landing as dollops of cold in my pockets and my fuzzy boots and melting in my mouth. Every time I woke up last night, I heard thunder. In the morning, one of my friends told me that the room of one of our friends had flooded, and she was late for her class.

Here in the theater, there seems to be proper drainage. Still, everything is getting soaked. Shaking pearls are strung on the ends of the pine needles, and a quiet roar pools in my ears. Under the roof of the upper landing, I can avoid getting drenched, but the cold, unusual for May, envelops me anyway. The black metal of the same chair I sat in a week earlier is frigid, and the bars on its back press through my thin layers. I shiver and tuck in my knees. I only brought my rain jacket today, not expecting simultaneous rain and cold, and it doesn't have anything in the way of insulation. I don't either.

Change is uncomfortable. As much as you may want to shake things up for the better sometimes, familiarity tugs at you like a scent from childhood. In the end, I was the one who made the decision to go to college (I think), but the first night in my dorm room, I cried. Not because I was in another state; I had been away from home for months on end before. I curled up on my mattress pad and hid under my galaxy-print comforter because didn't know what was coming next. I was at an event horizon, and the black eye of uncertainty stared me down, seeing right through my sleeping dragon onesie to my soul. My roommate offered me tea, and I asked for peppermint. The kind I always had, on the rare occasions I had tea. I like to think it was raining, but it was too cold for that.

Every color seems enhanced, deepened in the wet. The gravel is dirty coral, the trees black and orange, and the stage (the tiled ground) dark brown and maroon. In the humidity of the last few days, the ivy has grown bouquets of fresh, chartreuse leaves which curl towards their roots. Even the mountains, previously spectral, are now vibrant. As cloud after cloud hurriedly passes them by, their browns, greens, blacks and whites stand apart from each other, distant and distinct, like a color-by-number. I notice, for the first time, a large, red stone cliff jutting out of one of the mountainsides. It has a gash in the middle, perhaps a tall cave opening. The fog is reaching out to touch it.

It's hard to see in the moment that dramatic changes can be positive. Aging is a cascade of sudden, violent transitions that throw you into a loop of tentativeness and panic: the first day of school, the last day of school, your thirteenth birthday, your eighteenth birthday, your first birthday alone. Crying on my twentieth birthday felt incorrect somehow, but I did it anyway. I had only been at college for a month, four months fewer than the other freshman. My roommate wrapped licorice (my favorite) in the school newspaper, but I was allergic to the wheat in it. At dinner, a table containing more friends than I thought I would ever have was surrounded by big, shiny dinosaur balloons that would crinkle if you squeezed them. Loud enough for the whole cafeteria to hear and join in, the girls in party hats and radiant smiles sang Happy Birthday to Someone Else, laughing. I sat alone.

That was Monday. Around Wednesday, I found out that my gluten sensitivity wasn't as strong as I remembered. On Friday was board game club. I had decided to bring an allergy-friendly cake, but at the last moment, I was too nervous to pick it up by myself, off campus. After class, it appeared in my dorm's lobby, much to my embarrassment. My mom told me that the family of my cousin's new husband lived in the area and had taken pity on me. I didn't do very well in the games that night, but everyone complimented the cake. It apparently tasted like the real thing. I remember being surprised that there were enough people to finish off the cake that night (except for a half-slice that I savored over the next few days). I knew all of their names, too. And they knew mine. They sang, and we laughed together.

"Are you one of the students working on the play?" I blink to attention and crane my head over my shoulder. A man with not much hair is hovering in the doorway. I say no. "Oh," he says. "I'm just going to poke around a bit." He tiptoes out onto the landing. Drops crash into puddles, softer, then harder. "It's a shame they're going to be rained out," he says. "They've been working so hard." He leaves, apologizing and wishing me luck with whatever I'm doing.

Another reason why the amphitheater looks different: two square platforms, raised with vertical metal pipes to be just the right height to step onto (I think). One is at center stage, and the other is off to stage left. They seem large enough for four people to act on top, with some space between them. Right now, their floors of patched-together fabrics (tiger striped, faux leather, blue striped, etc.) are covered with clear plastic tarps. Rain patters onto them, filling the valleys between miniature mountain ranges. There are chairs placed unevenly around the edges in an attempt to keep the plastic from flying off, but it still flaps free in places. I watch from above as a young woman walks down the aisle of the theater and straightens the plastic before dashing back inside. It's no use; the wet has already crept underneath, and the wind quickly unsettles the waterproof sheets again, making them crackle and shudder.

It's taken me a long time to realize that I have to make space for my emotions. I'm still not great at it, but I used to believe that every reaction I had was an overreaction, one that needed to be buried, not in blankets, but in work or social activities. Usually work. The doctors convinced me that my emotional dysregulation was a symptom of a disorder that required fixing via medication and therapy. Autistic emotional dysregulation isn't something that therapy can remove. It can only be worked around and coped with. As Annie Kotowicz told me through the little book of autism that my mom recommended, "Recovery [from meltdowns] is smoother with the safety of self-acceptance." So I let myself cry, when I can. It's the quickest route to catharsis.

I usually cry when I am faced with something too unfamiliar.

Despite the ivy's rebirth, fake ivy, bearing all sorts of colorful flowers that should grow elsewhere (like sunflowers), has also been added to the bare walls. The ivy hangs loose, or from black netting and chicken wire, waving when the clear plastic convulses. Above the false Picasso, which is hardly a focal point anymore, someone has hung a triangular depiction of various robed women in eye-straining blue ink. The triangle has torn in half, right down the middle, dividing one woman from her cheek. The rest are unfazed.

I don't like being labeled as an emotional girl, a crier, but I imagine that's what I look like at first glance. Holding back tears while simply talking with a professor or eating fried rice makes me stick out like a thumb on a hand. Whoever wrote the social rules never took me into consideration. People want me to change, but don't like it when I must change and I instead pop, imploding into an arctic river.

I listen. One bird, hidden within a tree, sings a melodic call, like a squeaky spring stretching out and in, and across the theater, under the roof (where there must surely be a nest), another responds. The song is different, but it has the same pattern: a zigzag of notes ending in a questioning tone. There is a flash of red, and the male flutters up to the roof. The female emerges. They sing and dance together, briefly corkscrewing through the sky. Then, a black speck apparates, and the red blurs again. Two points of darkness converge, and the crimson smudge lands on a light post, a moth squirming in its beak. Dusty gray wing fragments spray upwards as it chomps. The rain has stopped.

Urges to cry and urges to change are facts of life as natural and unstoppable as rain. So, I try to remind myself that, like all things, uncertainty and discomfort are temporary. When you walk through the freezing rainstorm, you'll eventually be home, warm and dry, rain shell shed. Even life-changing events will, somewhere along the way, return you to a sense of normalcy. Remembering that makes the stroll less painful, more eager. You work up the strength to snatch the death's-head out of the air. Around 4 AM, the last lightning-bolt strikes, the clouds turn white, and morning comes, rainy, but bright. You only have to remember to wake up and see it.