Chasing Nirvana

Eighteen

Summer ended early that year Jimmy died. Her body was flown down to Milton for a funeral, but I didn’t attend, and no one seemed to care. Not her mother, not Scooter, not my parents. No one.

I was vaguely aware of the shock the town people felt at her death but it was momentary. Life resumed, as it always did. Fall came and I had to drag myself back to school. Every morning, I walked down the hallways at school, expecting to see her in a class, or at detention with Principal Hefner, or in a fight with someone, but she wasn’t there. My mother hovered around me with suffocative affection, as if, by contact, I was going to kill myself as well. Ironically, my father came home a lot more often nowadays. Said his work was easing up, but we all knew better. I had not argued with him all these while for nothing, after all. We didn’t say much to each other, but when we did, it was always in nice and polite manner. I was nice and polite a lot these days.

Every night, I snuck out of the house and waited across the street from the old Fitzsimmons house. One of these days, I told myself. One of these she would reappear with a smile and a casual shrug, saying that she had lost track of time and forgot to tell me that she went on a road trip. But she never did.

And when I sleep, I dreamt of her. We were on the edge of a cliff and my hands were pushing her down. 

*

I once met Jimmy by the creek, just after the first time she cut her wrist. She was sleeping on the tree trunk over the creek when I went there after school, and I had stood there for a few minutes just watching her sleep. The sunlight, weaker than it had been during summer, dappled through the gaps between the leaves over us. It casted shadowy patterns over her skin, glowing soft and alabaster even after her attempts at self-destruction, and made her look like some sort of exotic wood nymph. Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. A little girl with a world of problems.

– Some people have their own paths to follow, even if it meant going through their life at full speed and crashing –

She had woken up when a bird twittered close by and her eyes twitched as if in answer to it.

“Do you know how you tell if you’re growing up or not?” she had asked with her eyes still closed. Like every other time I had been in her presence, I found myself at a loss for answer.

“Er…no?” I said.

“It’s when you don’t see anything new anymore,” she had replied. “The older you get, the more the things around you reminded you of something and someone else. Even when you see an object that you haven’t seen before, you think to yourself, ‘Oh, this looks like something so-and-so would love’. Being old has nothing to do with age; it’s about when you walk through life seeing everything and everyone you love in the faces of other things and other people. The more you love, the more you see, until you don’t see anything new anymore.”

She opened her eyes and sat up. I handed her the pack of gummy bears I had picked up for her along the way, and jumped up to sit on the trunk beside her.

“Even when you met me?” I asked, watching her fished out the red bears first to set them aside. “You saw someone else face in mine?”

“Yes,” she replied sadly. “Yes, I saw someone other than you.”

I felt as though the air had been punched out of my lungs. It was one thing to come to the conclusion that she didn’t love me the way I did her, but it was another for her to admit it. My body felt hollow, my head suddenly brimming with too many thoughts. It hurt like little bitch.

“Who?” I croaked.

“Wouldn’t we love to know just who I saw,” she said softly. “Sometimes I just see empty faces and not feel anything.”

This was getting too weird for me. I shook my head and decided to change topic. “Why are you separating the red ones?”

“Because I love them the best,” she answered. Abruptly, she picked them all up and flung them far out in front of us. They landed into the creek water with little plops, tiny red drops that cut through the surface the water only to land on the sandy bed without a purpose. “And now they’ll be free.”

I wished I could be surprised at her sudden gesture, but I was somehow getting used to the way her erratic thoughts ran about her mind.

“How long can you stay for today?” she asked.

“Until dinner,” I replied. We were both asking small questions, each dancing around our elephants in the water. “My dad wants me home for dinner.”

“How nice,” she replied. “Mine just bought a new house in suburban San Francisco; he wants me to move there. Apparently it’s quiet enough that –” she raised her hands in air quote “– I won’t feel any further disturbance to my current state of mind.”

“Hah,” I said.

“I despise it all,” she told me. “I despise the way we all have to move on and move along. We should all curl up in our misery and never let it go.”

“That sounds like a terrible way of living,” I told her.

“Why?” she asked. “We carry it along with us anyway, pretending that we’re all okay. That we’re strong enough to get over our own emotions.” She looked down at the bandage around her wrist and smiled a wry smile. “But then again, I’m a pretty terrible person. You shouldn’t spend so much time with me.”

“I like spending time with you.”

“Why? I’m weird and suicidal and crazy. I make you feel confused and out of sorts. I’m pretty sure I make everyone around me feel that way, but that’s their problem. Your mother absolutely hates me, your friends at school thinks I’m a big slut. So why would you spend your time on someone like me?”

“Just because,” I said. “I just like you. It’s pretty standard; boy meets girl, boy likes her, boy wants to spend time with her. There must be hundreds and thousands of books on this type of thing – Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Tolstoy – yet people still asks this type of questions.”

“You know, Nathaniel Davis,” Jimmy said as she regarded me sideways. “You’re a pretty interesting person. You have this whole small town jock thing going on on the surface, but get past that and you’re about as weird as any of my favorite poets.”

“But not as weird as you,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Never as weird as me. It’s a good thing too; the world doesn’t have enough space for people like me.”

And that last part haunted me, how she didn’t feel as though she belong in this world with us.