13. Vitamins

Short wispy hairs were popping up along Carys’ hair line. They looked out of place amongst the all the other strands of dirty blonde hair. The new baby hairs were comically short and were growing in a darker shade of brown than her hair had ever been before. It was at least two shades darker than the rest of her hair – a shade you could call chestnut brown. Although the fledgling hairs were darker, they were also much glossier than the rest of her hair. As she looked at herself in the mirror, a beam of light reflected off the tiny hairs and she swore she could see glittering stars and diamonds just like in shampoo commercials.

The baby hairs were what many people would probably call the most unfortunate bangs that had ever existed on the face of the earth. Or maybe most people would call them the ugliest bangs ever seen since the beginning of all eternity. Something along those lines, anyway. The exact opposite of a heavy fringe, the little wisps of hair formed a sparse set of bangs. To put it one way, you could see more forehead than you could bangs. But, that wasn’t the only thing wrong with them. They were short short (microbangs?) and uneven at that. Just like the hair on a newborn baby. Not so cute. Something only a mother could love. Of course there is always a necessary phase that all new things must go through before they can be loved by someone other than a mother – by an impartial judge. It’s that adjustment phrase. The time it takes for you to grow into whatever it is that is new. Maybe it’s your hair, maybe it’s your ears. Babies certainly take time to grow into their faces. You know, the time it takes for their baby fat to come in and fill in their cheeks and the strange divots in their faces. Anyways, her baby hairs were in that not quite right phase.

But none of that really mattered. The regrowth of hair was confirmation that hairs really had been missing in the first place and the whole thing hadn’t just been Carys’ overactive imagination. When they started popping up, she felt a stronger sense of vindication than she did of relief. She wasn’t going crazy, it wasn’t all in her head – her hair was falling out. Or, rather, it seemed now that it had been falling out. Each half an inch strand was a piece of evidence that proved her sanity.

It was morning. She took a big sip of water from her glass. She was about to take her vitamins. She swallowed pills and vitamins (any kind of tablet really) in a bit of a strange way. Instead of popping the vitamin into her mouth and then chasing it with a quick shot of water, she took a large sip of water, pushed the tablet into her mouth, and swallowed as quickly as possible. As she stood at the kitchen sink, her mind began to wander – thinking about everything that she still had to accomplish that day. It was only six thirty in the morning. She momentarily got forgot about what it was that she was doing. Was she drinking some water? Or was she getting ready to take her vitamins? She had put the vitamin in her mouth already, hadn’t she? In the midst of her confusion, her mouth took it upon itself to compromise. She half swallowed, half held the water in her mouth. Some of the water went down her wind pipe and she started to choke. Bending over the sink, she struggled to cough up the water.

Choking on vitamins.

12. Assembling Breakfast

Two white ovals were precariously rolling about the cutting board, scuttling around the sliver of avocado and bits of sliced banana. One had just teetered up to the edge of the board and was contemplating taking the half an inch plunge to its demise when Carys turned away from the kettle on the stove and snatched it up. It was safe in her hand for barely a second before she held it up to the rim of the beige bowl on the countertop.

Crack, crack, crack. A thin fissure spread across its previously flawless surface. Clear liquid began to ooze out as an orange mass pressed against the two edges of the crevice – struggling to force its way out. Gently, Carys severed the last bit still connecting the two edges together and split it into two pieces. She held the two halves together over the bowl for a moment, letting the liquid drain while transferring the orange mass from one broken piece to the other. Then, she placed the half with the orange mass into the other and set the broken mess down on the paper towel she had left on the countertop earlier.

Crack, crack, crack. She softly thumped the second egg against the edge of the bowl. Holding the two pieces of broken shell close together as to not let the yolk escape, Carys cautiously separated the egg white from the yolk. Together, the two egg whites barely filled a quarter of the bowl. She placed the second broken egg down next to the first and rolled the paper towel up around the pile of unwanted orange yolks. She tossed the pile of devastation into the trash and then turned back to consider the unassembled bits and pieces of her breakfast laying out on the cutting board.

The lightly browned piece of toast was still too hot to touch. “I’ll cook the eggs first,” she decided, turning back to her bowl of egg whites. She whisked them briskly with a fork, but was just slightly too rough. A runny bit of egg whites spilled out over the rim of the bowl and onto the wood counter. Ignoring the mess, she walked over to the stove and poured the eggs over the spinach waiting in the hot skillet on the burner. The egg whites were nearly translucent and the spinach looked like it was being drowned. Spatula in hand, Carys watched the pan and waited for the eggs to change color. Gradually they became a crisp, clean white. The color change made the spinach stick out like a pine tree in a snowy forest. Absentmindedly, she shuffled the eggs and spinach around with the spatula until the eggs stopped running around the pan.

Carys clicked off the burner and walked back over to the cutting board to test the temperature of the toast. She tentatively pressed the tip of her pinky finger to its surface. It was sufficiently cool. After cutting a crisscross of lines into the bit of avocado, she picked up the entire piece, turned it upside down over top of the toast, and squeezed. A cute little pile of green mush fell out and she spread it evenly across the toast. Carys spun around to get a plate out of the cabinet behind her. She slid the toast off the cutting board onto the plate and then added the eggs and spinach from the skillet. She pushed the eggs up close against the toast, making room to add the banana to her plate without forcing it to touch anything else.

As soon as she finished arranging her plate, the kettle began to shriek. This particular kettle gave no warning of its impending unpleasantness. It went from happily bubbling away to screaming bloody murder: “Get me off of this thing!” She pressed the off button for the burner and relieved the poor thing from its misery. There was the thinnest slice of lemon at the bottom on the mug that was patiently waiting next to the stove. She poured the hot water into the mug and watched as the lemon slowly floated up to its lip.

11. Cat Bingo

There was a small boy that Carys knew. He was small both in statue and age. Very slender with pointed features, he habitually wore a peculiar expression on his face – a mixture of confusion and clandestine amusement. Most of the time he sat almost completely still, only moving his hands as he silently played with the assortment of pencil stubs and eraser rubbings piled in front of him. Every so often, he would peer up at Carys with his pale brown Bambi eyes, tilt his head just a tad to the left, and purr, “Meow.”

He was a quiet boy who loved cats. All kinds of cats. The black ones with the matted fur that gave you bad luck when they crossed your path. The dirty brown, lanky tabby cats that had been through the ringer on the streets. But, most of all, he loved the fluffy, white kitties that curled up on your lap and snuggled the tip of their nose into the crook of your arm.

Once in a while, there was a game day. Usually, he didn’t participate in games. He preferred to sit quietly by himself – seemingly crafting some imaginary, secret world inside of his head. On this particular game day, however, the boy was filling in his Bingo card just like all the other children. The theme of this game day was “sports” and the children were given a few minutes to write the name of a sport into each box on the card. Basketball, soccer, curling, water polo – any sport was fair game. Of course, the more obscure the sport, the less likely it would be called during Bingo. The kids’ Bingo cards reflected their personalities. The boys who badly wanted to win only wrote the most popular sports – baseball, basketball, and so on. The kids who hated the idea of “copying” anyone else rubbed at their eyebrows while trying to think of as many unique sports as they could – synchronized swimming, soft tennis, beach volleyball.

As Carys walked past the boy, she glanced down at his Bingo card. In one box, there was a cat swimming in a pool, free stroking down the lane in an adidas swim cap and goggles. In another, there was a cat shooting a 3 pointer as the other cats on his teamed cheered him on. A third picture was a cat on skis, slipping and sliding down a mountain, the wind whipping through his whiskers. Cats playing sports.

Cat Bingo.

10. (Still) (Life)

Carys refilled her tumbler with more hot water. She’d been reusing the same tea bag for the past two hours. This batch tasted more like water with a splash of lemon juice than rosehip tea. It was a bitterly cold morning – no warmer than 20 degrees. The wind was whipping through the masts of the fishing boats docked in the port next door. She could hear a faint clanging sound whenever one of the metal grommets clipped a mast. Inside, it was only marginally warmer – the building hadn’t been renovated in a few decades and was falling into disrepair. It was poorly insulated and the heating system was antiquated and could only heat a single room at a time. She had lucked out, however, and received a desk directly next to the heater. She was almost always on the verge of too hot, but she could never take off her jacket. She just felt too guilty when her coworkers were shivering from the cold. The warm air only traveled so far before it began to cool.

Warm and toasty, Carys began to pick at a dry patch of skin on her index finger. She’d washed her hands so many times that day that no amount of lotion could keep them moisturized. Whenever the flu went around, without fail she would catch it. It was a well-known fact: If it’s winter and some kind of germ is going around, Carys would get it. Actually, not only would she get it but she would be down with it at least two times longer than anyone else. But, she had promised herself that wouldn’t happen this time. Full flu prevention tactics were underway: excessive hand washing and ludicrous amounts of tea (watered down or otherwise) included. She drew the line at wearing a mask though. That was one of those customs that she just couldn’t wrap her mind around. A few years earlier, when she was just starting her job, she would have succumbed to the social pressures and put one on to cover her mouth and nose. But, as time went on she discovered that the only things you get from wearing a mask are a headache and that sick feeling in the back of your throat. Wait, maybe she’d take that back – there was something beneficial about wearing a mask. If you actually had a cold and you didn’t have a tissue on hand they were very useful for concealing your runny nose.

Her focus on the document open on her computer was wavering. One of the perks of sitting close to the heater was the ease with which she could fall asleep in any situation. She could even fall asleep mid-conversation if the heater was on high enough. The sound of children’s voices excitedly shouting outside shook Carys from her daze. It sounded like they were playing Red Rover on the playground and someone had successfully breached enemy lines. Looking back down at her desk, she noticed the cap to her tumbler was still not on – allowing all the heat to escape. She found the cap half hidden underneath a pile of worksheets at the edge of her desk, but she struggled to put it back on. Her right hand had been bothering her recently. Maybe she had strained a muscle and it just needed a little time to heal or maybe it was hand cancer and she’d need to have it amputated. Her ability to come up with a differential diagnosis on the spot was quite impressive. Her self-diagnoses were very forward thinking as well – she was open to all kinds of disease. No discrimination here.

Carys wrapped her hands around the tumbler and soaked up the heat while looking at the colorful pictures of castles and towers that covered it. She’d bought it while traveling in the city a few years before. It drummed up thoughts about her upcoming trip. She was looking forward to being back in the city. She missed it – the lights, the sounds, the action. Whenever she was there, she felt at home. She got too much attention in the small town where she lived these days. In the city, she was just one of many. It was the perfect combination of anonymity and companionship.

Bzzzz. She jumped a little in her chair, startled by the sudden noise on her right. Someone had switched the heater off.

09. Reflections in the Mirror

Carys was flying home from her winter vacation when she had the most vivid dream. It was the kind of dream where colors turn into sunbeams and pierce your eyes. The kind where you can’t run away from the small child wielding the butter knife because – surprise! – the ground just transformed into wet cement and now you’re stuck. Carys was sitting in the middle seat of a middle row in the back of a packed economy class cabin. The abrupt jerks and falls of the airplane permeated her dream and created an unbalanced world in which her footing was constantly unsteady.

The surroundings of her dream were familiar to her, but they were brighter and more vibrant than reality. She was in her living room at home, sitting on her olive drab couch. A full length mirror was standing in front of her. Carys pushed her overgrown bangs out of her eyes and peered into the mirror. Her reflection stared back at her – it was brushing its hair. Mirror Carys’ hair was medium brown at the top – with some natural blonde and red highlights mixed in, brassy yellow from her chin down, and blonder towards the ends where each strand began to split into two. It was the same as Carys’ hair. Her reflection was holding one section of hair at a time in its left hand while running a brush through with its right.

As Mirror Carys let go of one section to pick up another, Carys caught a glimpse of something the color of burnt toast. What was that? Her reflection moved on to the next section of hair – oblivious to the mysterious object on its head. Carys tried to will Mirror Carys’ hand to go back and examine the spot. But instead, it moved on to the next section of unbrushed hair. I have no control over my own reflection. Carys reached her hand up – Mirror Carys’ arm didn’t move – but Carys could still feel her own head. She used her fingers to feel around the area where she’d seen Mirror Carys’ deformity. Her fingers brushed up against something rough protruding from her scalp. It felt stale and patchy – bits of it crumbled off onto her fingertips.

Almost instantaneously, she got that tight feeling in her chest – the airplane feeling. The airplane feeling was a combination of claustrophobia and bathophobia. Her fear of falling was overpowering. Carys was the kind of girl who cried on the kiddie “roller coasters” at Disney World. You know, like Thunder Mountain. It was the pressure of fear. It pushed against her face and chest like the g-forces that you feel during takeoff. It was that feeling you get of not being able to control your body, the one when your face is pointing one direction and you can’t turn it even just the tiniest bit to the right. As Carys’ fear became more ravenous, she felt a familiar tingling sensation spread throughout her arms into her fingers and her legs into her toes. Her cheeks started to burn. All she wanted to do was fling her body onto her bed and pretend that she didn’t exist. But, the fear of the unknown suppressed her desires. She may have been too scared to look to see what the flaky, burnt patch on top of her head was, but she was also too scared not to.

Taking a deep breath, she looked back into the mirror. Bracing herself, she tried to push back the section of hair that lay over the abnormality. Mirror Carys’ arm didn’t budge. But, there it was. The section of hair that was covering the spot on Mirror Carys’ head disintegrated into nothingness and revealed what was hidden beneath. It was a perfect circle – maybe 3 inches in diameter. It was barren, nothing but a brown, crusty patch of lifeless scalp. Carys froze. A buzzing noise filled the room around her. It was like that humming sound you hear on airplanes. She looked around the room, trying to find the source of the sound. Nothing was out of place. She looked back into the mirror. The Carys-in-the-Mirror’s mouth was agape – it was screaming.

Carys jerked awake. The cabin was dark, lit only by the dim haze of TV screens and a few reading lights. She was burning up – beads of sweat had formed, glueing her clothes to her hot skin. She peeled off her grey knit scarf and felt a flash of cold as the recycled airplane air touched her neck for the first time. Her hips were uncomfortable from sitting in the same pretzel position for the past few hours. She unhooked her feet from the seat back pocket and lowered her feet to the ground. Breathing a sigh of relief, she tried to cross her legs – the left over the right. The movement was met by pain. Maybe it’s time to stand up.

She climbed over the man in the black jacket sitting next to her with whom she had been passive aggressively fighting over the shared armrest for the past four hours. He was asleep now. She made a mental note to gently slide his elbow off the armrest when she returned. She shuffled down the aisle to the bathroom located in the very back of the plane by the galley. Two flight attendants were standing by the drink cart, gossiping. Carys checked the door of the bathroom for the vacant sign and then pushed her way inside. It was dark and cramped. As she slid the lock shut, the light switched on.

Carys pulled at the bottom of the left leg of her sweatpants – lifting them up past her knee. She contorted her upper body to check the back of her leg. There was a fresh bruise sprouting up just underneath the bend of her knee. Again. This always seemed to happen to her – mysterious bruises on airplanes. She dropped her pant leg back down and turned to look at herself in the mirror. Carys smiled. Her reflection revealed yellow teeth. They were the color of an old yellow page book that had been left in an out-of-order phone booth for half a decade. Purplely-brown blotches covered the front of two of her bottom teeth. She rubbed at the stains with her fingertips in the unforgiving fluorescent light of the airplane bathroom cubicle.

08. Things not meant for you

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” – A Buddha Wannabe

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Do you ever have one of those days where no matter what way you do with your hair, it’s annoying? It’s like you are super aware of every strand of hair on your head, right? Carys was having one of those days. She braided her hair in the morning after she got out of the shower. It was still wet at the time and the braid left a damp spot on the shoulder of her sweater. After it dried, the shorter bits around her face kept falling down and covering her eyes. You know, the parts that used to be bangs, but now have grown out so long that you couldn’t call them that anymore without sounding silly? As she was sitting face to face with student after student, she kept pushing the rogue strands out of her eyes. Today I want to ask you some questions. Are you ready? One strand kept ending up directly against the left side of her nose. What do you want to be? Scratch, stratch, scratch. A baseball player? Oh, really?! After she came home from work, she pulled all of her hair up on top of her head – into a giant bun. Some beauty gurus on youtube might call it a top knot. But, even that was annoying. It felt like the weight of her bun was slowly pulling out the baby hairs along her hairline. So, Carys took her hair out of the bun and just let it hang down over her shoulders. Still, something about the feeling of hair on her ears, on her neck, on her shoulders was irritating. In the end, she settled for a high pony tail with a cotton headband. She still felt overly aware of her hair though.

There was a quote that Carys really liked. In fact, she liked it so much that she wrote it down on a yellow notecard and pinned it to the bulletin board in her kitchen. Sometimes she repeated it aloud to herself while chopping up vegetables to cook for dinner. “In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” She first came across this quote a year ago, maybe. When she read it that first time, she noticed that it was attributed to the Buddha. Now, thanks to a quick internet search and an informative website (fakebuddhaquotes.com; real name, look it up) she knew this is, in fact, was not the case. It seems some modern intellectual was inspired by the Buddha to compose this click-to-share quote for facebook. Regardless of this recent discovery, she felt like the quote was meant for her; like it could have been written by her. The last bit of the fake buddha quote is what she really connected with: “how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”

Letting go was something that Carys had never done well. You could say that she just didn’t “do” letting go. Some might even say that she put a vice grip on any and all things trying to escape from her. It was true, she’d hold onto things that were dead and gone until the bitter end – until someone pried her bloodied finger tips off, one by one. As a matter of fact, the way that Carys let go was the opposite of graceful (read: awkward, unattractive, inept). The internal struggle was this: How could she know when it was time to call it quits? When was it time to throw away all the work she had put in? When was it time to claim it was all just sunk costs? Her fear: She would let go of something that was still salvageable; something unfinished. How could she know when there was no longer any flicker of hope?

You see, Carys liked fairy tales. She like princess stories. She liked love stories. She liked Barbie and Ken. In the stories that she liked (that she loved), there was never an unhappy ending. The stories always ended with the princess being rescued by her price and the couple living together happily ever after. By girl meeting boy, falling madly in love, and never leaving that state of pure enchantment. In her mind, even her parents were part of a love story. In fairytales, there was love, there was hope, and there was happiness. Logically, Carys knew that fairy tales weren’t true. She knew that reality and fairy land were two separate and distinct entities. But, she couldn’t reconcile the fact that her dreamworld and her living world were so radically and shockingly different. If the reality wasn’t a fairy tale and life wasn’t perfect, what was the point of anything? Pessimism.

She had heard something like this in a t.v. show once: “Maybe pessimism is something we have to start applying daily…like moisturizer. Otherwise, how do you bounce back when reality batters your belief system and love does not, as promised, conquer all? Is hope a drug we need to go off of or is it keeping us alive? What’s the harm in believing?” (Sex and the City)

So she thought.

07. Detachment

1. “The state of being objective or aloof.” 

2. “The action or process of detaching; separation.” 

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“Make a commitment to feel attached to the end result.” This was a line in an article she had read on one of those self-help blogs recently. The article was talking about self-expression and how to overcome fears of interpersonal conflict. As she read through the article, this particular line had caught her attention. She reread the line again. “Make a commitment to feel attached to the end result.” The word “attached” jumped out at her. It was like a piece of blue and red word art that had been pasted into a sentence typed in Comic Sans font. Attached. Attachment. 

She was lying tucked underneath the two thick comforters on her bed. There was a miniature sized red briefcase sitting open on the imitation mahogany table next to her. Carys glanced down at the table and her eyes were met by her own smiling face staring back at her, surrounded by a blue backdrop courtesy of the DMV. An open bottle of Little Penguin sat behind the crimson case. Behind that, there was a box of yellow Mirado pencils. The pencils were unsharpened. They sat in the black and white box in pristine condition, waiting to be used. Her room was filled with the smell of damp laundry. She had hung her freshly washed clothes from the curtain rod, waiting for the heater to dry them.

Carys aimlessly clicked through apps on her iPhone. When she looked through her past calls log, there was only one name that appeared over and over again. Attachment. She thought back to when the name that had filled up her call history had been a different name. She imagined future days when that name no longer would appear anywhere in her life. It was inevitable; the ebb and flow of life would slowly scrub away any last remnants of that name and the person associated with it.

Her hearts strings would be pulled tighter with each stroke of the eraser. Pluck, pluck, pluck. With time, and with pain, each string would snap, one-by-one. The strings of attachment would fray – leaving little bits of useless love that could no longer connect to anything. Detachment. 

06. The Lost Cause

“A person or thing that can no longer hope to succeed or be changed for the better.”

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Her body shook as she pushed air deep into her lungs. It felt like she was trying to squeeze a size eight foot into a size seven and a half shoe. There just wasn’t quite enough space for her toes. Carys breathed in.

Recently, she hadn’t been able to figure out what was reality and what was fantasy. At night, her hair fell out strand by strand until she was left with a bald spot from her crown to her forehead. In the morning, she stared into the tall mirror next to her couch, parting her hair in multiple places to check her roots. They seemed intact. They seemed attached. But, when she ran her fingers through her hair to apply conditioner in the shower, she was left with a nest of stray hairs between her knuckles.

Then, there was the note she had made on her work calendar the week before. She had circled a 9:30 a.m. appointment using a red pen. From the circle, she had drawn an arrow and then a star next to the “8:00 a.m.” section of her calendar. Looking at this note later on, she remembered that the time of her work meeting had been changed to an hour and a half earlier. When she arrived at 8:00 a.m. that day, no one was there. After a laborious period of time, spent checking her facebook notifications and instagram feed, she called her supervisor to find out if there had been some kind of emergency. He reminded her that the meeting wasn’t scheduled to start until 9:30.

The already blurry line between what is real and what is imagined was becoming even more tangled and fractured. What was made up – or invented – inside of her head was blending with what already existed independently in the world around her. This mixing of reality and unreality posed a series of answerless questions to Carys. Could she change an inevitable outcome just by thinking up an alternative? Or was it all just a lost cause?

She could picture the wall of black game pieces surrounding her – all but one path available to her was blocked. It was inevitable, on his next move her opponent would place the last piece of the wall; closing the last pathway and winning that round of the game. Facing an inescapable loss, she considered her options. She could forfeit that round immediately, thereby deciding to no longer fight that battle; to no longer exert energy on an certain failure.  Or, alternatively, she could continue to fight until she heard the reverberation of that last black piece hitting the wooden game board – solidifying her loss. That was the ultimate question of them all: Should she continue to fight a loss cause?

Her life was supposed to turn out the way that she had always imagined in her head and if that wasn’t the case then it just wasn’t fair.

She wore purple devil horns, left behind from the red wine. 

05. The Wind

The whining of the wind echoed in her ears from the moment she first heard it that morning. It was a screechy, high-pitched cry created by the wind that whipped across the local fishing port and through the covered veranda that enclosed the school building. The ringing noise that the screaming wind left behind bore its way deep into her skull. She sipped at her cup of coffee – the inexpensive, not so great tasting kind that the office manager had brewed two hours earlier. She grimaced and wished for headphones.

The wind had rattled her apartment building throughout the previous night. But, the wind by her home had a distinctly different sort of cry from the shrieking of the wind that lived by her work. Rather than shrieking and whining and screaming (“Please let me out of here!”), the wind that had ravaged the walls of her bedroom the night before instead spewed expletives and insults at her. It was exploding with anger.

The wind took out its aggression on the colorful beach towel she had mistakenly left drying on a hanger on the laundry pole set up on her porch. Throughout the night, she heard the clashing and banging of the metal hanger slamming into her sliding glass door. She awoke frequently – ever thirty minutes or so – to the clang.

“Open up, stupid.”