I left my apartment building and welcomed the cold air that hit me the moment I stepped outside. It would have been less irksome if I wasn’t most often forced to skip the socks and don a
pair of slippers, but it had become easy to ignore. Venna believed that my toes would end up falling off one day. She was probably right.
          I crossed the street quickly and laced my way through the thick crowd of people. Trudging to the building that stood on a stretch of land about four streets away was difficult on foot, and getting there on time was nearly impossible, no matter how early I left home. It wasn’t traffic that kept me from making it on time, or the hustle and bustle of the ant farm I was pushing
through, or accidents along the way. It was me. I was perpetually late.
          I tried to keep up a fast pace as I made my way down the first block, but gave up and resorted to just walking. There was no sense in trying to make it on time, anyway. I unquestionably, whole-heartedly, irrefutably, undeniably did not like my destination. I did not like how uncomfortable the chairs were, I did not like how they so often continued past the
allotted time, I did not like the over-exaggeration of problems to invoke mind-numbingly theatrical sympathy, and most of all, I would not, could not, did not like that I was unable to go a week without attending it.
          When I finally reached the red brick building, I was out of breath. I climbed the rickety steps, dragging my feet on the wooden floor. It was almost completely silent around me; My footsteps were the only sound echoing throughout the building. The building was an old,
deserted middle school that the city was trying to renovate. They planned to reopen it as a youth center. There were several groups that took up camp in the building for meetings a few times a
week, but mine was the only one on the fifth floor.
          I walked down the narrow hallway to the very last classroom on the left. Everyone was already there, sitting in the usual circle, whispering amongst themselves. I took my regular seat
and dropped my bag on the floor. I crossed my arms and focused on the ceiling fan.
          Marie, the pixie-sized group leader, sat atop the dusty writing desk at the head of the room. She always wore an excited smile, which only disappeared into seemingly true sadness when someone was relaying some sob story or other. I always called its sincerity into question, even though she had never given me a reason to doubt her.
          “Welcome, everyone!” Marie said, her brown doe eyes wide and her smile taking up almost the entirety of the bottom half of her face.
          Different variations of “hello” echoed around the room, but I didn’t open my mouth.
          Marie looked at the redhead to her left. “Why don’t you start, Anna? We’ll go around in a circle. What’s been going on with you, lately?”
          Anna sighed. “Things are getting worse. I completely blacked out while I was crossing the street to go to work and hit my head on the gravel. I was taken to the hospital and woke up with my clothes covered in blood and a sharp pain in my head, and I don’t remember where I
was going or anything before it happened.”
          “Are you okay?” several people asked.
          “Seven stitches.” She said and removed the red fedora she was wearing, revealing a long cut across the right side of her head. A chunk of brown hair was pulled out, and her scalp was still red. There was crusted blood around the messy stitches, and the scar was jagged. Whoever had fixed the wound clearly had very little experience, or just didn’t care about his job. It looked like he had been attempting to stitch up a shoe, rather than human skin. My heart dropped into
my stomach, and sadness ran through me. It sounded extremely traumatic, and the scar looked like it still hurt. I imagined how painful just the memory of it happening must have been.
          My eyes glossed over, but I immediately blinked them away. I forced my face to smooth over into apathy again before anyone could see.
          Eddie, the old man sitting next to her, asked, “Can I touch it?”
“Alright.”
          He place a few fingers gently on the scar and traced the stitches. He gently rubbed them, and little flecks of blood fell away. Then, he hugged her. She hugged him back tightly.
          “Eddie?” Marie asked.
          He shook his head and took Anna’s hand. “I have nothing to say, today. Just came to support all of you.”
          “You’re alright?” Anna asked him.
          “As I can be,” he said. “Move on, Marie.”
          Marie moved on to Morgan, who was the only one in the room who was not subject to seizures. Instead, she was a single mother of a twelve-year-old boy who was diagnosed with epilepsy at age two.
          “Mason has been acting up, lately,” she said. “He has a terrible attitude and has refused to take his medication multiple times. He’ll throw them out and keep screaming that he would have
seizures anyway, so what did the medication matter? I started to put it in his food, but he quickly figured that one out, and stares at me while I’m making him anything. As you all know, his
father is absolutely no help, and Mason getting to be too old for me to force him into anything.”
          “When did this rebellion start?” Marie asked.
          “I was taking him to his little league baseball game about two weeks ago. He was so excited; practically jumping up and down. It was going to be the first game he actually got to bat. I was so proud, watching him from the stands. When he finally got up to play halfway through the game, he stood on the plate, and held the baseball bat up to his shoulder. The ball came shooting toward him, and just as he moved his arm to swing—” She choked up and burst into
tears.
          Marie knelt in front of her and held her hand, and everyone went to hug her. Morgan just kept sobbing, unable to formulate another sentence. Her nose was started to leak, and Marie went
through her purse to find her tissues. I watched her rummage in her bag, knowing that I had tissues in my back pocket. I wanted to help. I wanted to get up, and give them to her, and hug her
tightly, and tell her it would be alright, and say that things always pass, but I didn’t. I didn’t move. I didn’t talk. I didn’t even look like it was affecting me at all. Everything about my demeanor expressed that I felt no need to leave the discomfort of my plastic seat just to say a few meaningless things that would give her no real help at all. Fifteen people were already crowded around her, and one extra pat on the back would not make anything better. I generally wasn’t
much help to anyone; no matter how hard I tried, it would come off as cold and uncaring, making everything worse instead. I stopped trying.
          I balanced my chair on its back legs and waited for everyone to return to their respective places. Every one of them—including Marie—gave me some form of reproachful glare, several of them clearly wishing I would just leave. I kept my face as apathetic as ever, but set myself
back down into a less condescending position and folded my hands in my lap.
          When Morgan managed to pull herself together, Marie moved on to Lena, a middle-aged woman who had, had some kind of brain injury that triggered seizures. Her medication was only
semi-functional. She didn’t complain very much, but she always had something to talk about with the group. I didn’t mind her, and I don’t think she minded me, either.
          “I’m okay,” she said. “Just got the EEG results. They aren’t what I was hoping for, but
it’ll be fine.”
          My brain shifted gears and observed the people in the room; each of them lived day by day battling a condition that I could never even begin to understand entirely. The members of
this group in particular couldn’t be more different from each other.
          There was Eddie, an eighty-year-old war veteran who was dismissed from the army due to an episode he had undergone while in service. He had lied about having a disability before
enlisting, and even though he only worked in the kitchen, he was ruled a liability and was sent packing. He left Vietnam for the United States, where he fought extremely hard to make ends
meet. He worked five or six dead-end jobs before finally settling on working in an auto-parts company. He never married; he had once expressed that he was too big a burden for anyone to
handle and still live a normal life.
          Then there was Lydia, who was the prettiest and seemingly happiest of the entire bunch. She was always wearing a smile, though I had often seen her sporting scars due to accidents
during an episode she had. The way she treated her illness, the flippant way she talked about it, led me to believe that perhaps the bright, blinding smile that never wavered was really just a
façade. No one struggling with this disease was that happy, and if they were, they either needed a psychiatric evaluation or a national holiday commemorating them.
          However, the person I thought led the most heart-breaking life of all was the girl who shared my name. On some days, she just looked down at her tiny hands in complete silence during the entire session, but on the days she spoke, almost everyone in the room was moved to tears. She was very small, and had mousy unkempt brown hair that always fell across the right side of her face. I had seen the thick strands fall away only once before, revealing the long scar that spread from the corner of her mouth, across her right cheek, and up to her ear. The scar was very thin, but the girl was so pale that it shined brightly against her skin.
          She was diagnosed with epilepsy when she was eight, and shortly after, both of her parents passed away in a car accident involving a drunk driver. She was moved from foster home to foster home, many families deciding to give her up because of her seizures. She was only
seventeen, and she had lived with seven foster families and in two adoption centers.
          None of the people whose care she had been placed in gave her proper treatment. She was never taken to a specialist, was given medications that did not work, and was berated for having the fits that everyone around her claimed were nothing but a rebellious cry for attention.
She had spent the majority of her life alone, and yet she so rarely complained.
          I looked away from her and turned my attention to Marie, who sat on the desk, listening intently to whoever it was that was speaking. No one knew anything about Marie but her name.
When asked about her life, she only ever smiled and avoided the question, countering it with another of her own. As I watched her lean forward slightly to completely immerse herself in whatever story was being told, I wondered why she had even created the group. She wasn’t paid for it and received absolutely no benefit from running it.
          I fit in with these people better than any of us realized, but they had only heard me speak once, and all I did was tell them my name. I had no stories to tell them, and they stopped asking me. I did not need their sympathy. I was not struggling the way they all were. I was fine. My life was fine.
          I looked back up at the fan and watched the useless plastic blades spin in slow counterclockwise circles. I thought about leaving. I was sure that several members would be relieved by my absence. I think a few of them felt awkward in my presence. They could never read my expression. They didn’t know if I was sympathizing with them or judging them. I let them believe what they wanted. Letting them hate me was easier than talking.
          Someone nudged me, and the real world snapped back into focus. I was so surprised that my chair flipped backward and I toppled to the floor, my head slamming hard on the linoleum.
Several hands reached to help me up, but I took none of them. I stood, rubbed the small bump forming on the back of my head, and waved a short goodbye to everyone before leaving the room quickly.
          I closed the door behind me before anyone could comment, and then made my way out of the building. I started walking back toward my apartment, but decided to stop at a food truck on
the way. I ordered and stepped aside for the next person; someone came up behind me.
          “Boo.”
          I jumped and turned to find a laughing Adam standing there. I punched him lightly in the arm and smiled.
          “You didn’t scare me,” I said.
          “Don’t lie to yourself,” he said.
          “What do you want, jerk?”
          “Thinking maybe I could take you out.”
          “When?”
          I tried to pay for my food, but he quickly took out his wallet and paid. “No time like the present, Ari.”
          “Sorry, but I’m busy.”
          “What could be more important?”
          “Than you? Everything, Adam.”
          “What are you doing tonight?”
          “Not much, but Venna— “
          “For the love of god, don’t.”
          “I don’t understand why you hate her so much.”
          “I’m sorry, but your friend is extremely annoying.”
          “Do not talk about—”
          I cut myself off as an all-too-familiar feeling washed over me, immediately lighting a fire of panic in the pit of my stomach. It was as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water over my
head, dowsing my entire body in freezing cold and running shivers down my spine. Bile started to build in the back of my throat, and I swallowed to keep from choking. In that split second between complete normalcy and ultimate panic, I remembered that I hadn’t taken my pills, that day.
          Adam shook her gently. “Are you okay?”
          I kept myself from hyperventilating with difficulty and managed to say, “I need to go. Not hungry.”
          “You look pale, Ari.”
          “I have to go.” I took my slippers off and started walking away quickly, hoping that he wouldn’t follow.
          But he did. He caught up with me and tried to hold my arm, but I pulled away and kept going. I didn’t even look in his direction.
          “Ari, is everything all right?”
          “Fine,” I managed to say. The feeling was gone, but I knew it would return the moment I put my slippers back on. I needed to get somewhere safe as quickly as possible, and he was
complicating my escape.
          “Can you put your shoes on?” Adam snapped.
          “I need to get home.”
          “People are staring.”
          “Sorry.”
          I ignored him. I continued walking toward my apartment, earning the usual brand of disgusted stares from strangers passing by and seeing my bare feet. Adam was embarrassed to be
seen with me, and I couldn’t blame him. I was embarrassed to be seen with me.
          “Maybe I’ll just see you later,” he said.
          “Okay.”
          “Bye.”
          I waved, and he stopped walking. I knew that he was watching me walk away, and at that moment, not a single part of me cared. The only thing racing through my mind was a prayer that I would be able to get home before I completely lost control of my body. My heart was
pounding; The faster I went, the harder it beat, and the harder it beat, the faster my body would numb. It was a vicious cycle I couldn’t stop, and I was quickly running out of time.
          One block away, I stopped moving. My body was on fire. I was one block away. One block. I could see my apartment building from where I was standing; I could see my bedroom
window. Panic was inflating my lungs and I was struggling to breathe. All I could do was stare at my window and inwardly beg it to come closer. I could feel the numbness settling in. People were making their way around me, looking at me strangely, wondering what the hell this fully grown woman was doing holding her slippers in her hand in the dead of winter. I shut my eyes and clenched my jaw. I squeezed my fist so tightly that my nails dug into my skin. It wasn’t painful enough to catch the rest of my body’s attention.
          Then suddenly, the feeling was gone. I took off down the sidewalk like I was being chased by a rabid animal. I had never run so quickly in my life. I hadn’t known I was even capable of going so fast. The world around me was a blur. Nothing existed, anymore. All that
went around in circles in my head was the possibility of making it onto the other side of my door before I couldn’t move, anymore.
          I made it into my building and took the stairs two at a time. I walked down the hall and stopped in front of my apartment. My shaking hands found difficulty getting the key into the lock, but I managed it. I made it inside and found a knife on the table, but I toppled to the ground and slammed my head on the floor. I lost consciousness before I could get to it.

          Some time later, my eyes opened. Everything around me went in and out of focus. I tried to open my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I made to sit up, but not a single body part was listening to me. I laid lifelessly on the floor, lucid but immobile, making a great effort to
breathe regularly. After several attempts to speak and move, I gave in and let myself sink into darkness, once again.
          Another hour passed, and my eyes fluttered open. This time, my body was fully functional. I went into the kitchen and opened a cabinet forcefully. I snatched an orange bottle off of a shelf and emptied three pills into my hand. I swallowed them without water and tossed the bottle back where it had been before. I didn’t bother closing the cabinet before going into my bedroom and sitting on the bed. I put my head in my hands, trying to push the day’s memory out of my mind.
          “Maybe that’s the price I had to pay for actually trying to be normal,” I mumbled to myself. I shook the thoughts from my head and picked the knife up off the floor. Part of me was relieved that I hadn’t gotten a chance to use it. It wouldn’t have made a difference; I would have probably hit my head and collapsed, anyway.
          I jumped in the shower to clean whatever dirt my body collected from the street. I reveled in the hot water. I checked my demons at the bathroom door and gave my body my full attention.
I ran shampoo through my hair twice and scrubbed my feet until they were redder than they should have been.
          When I finally got out and dressed, I found my favorite book, Autumn Leaves, on the floor. I curled onto the couch with it. I had been through it so many times that I had committed the words to memory. I wasn’t really reading. I was reciting.
          I stopped on one of the pages and read a passage out loud. “It is better to be hated for what you are, than to be loved for what you are not.”
          How poignant.
          I put the book down, but I didn’t sit up. A myriad of thoughts swam in my head. Many notable people claimed that the darkest part of night always came just before dawn. It had to get horrible before it got infinitely better, but I wasn’t so sure that this was always the case. How
long did the night have to be, before it got better? Surely not twenty-two years. Nothing good lasted twenty-two years, and nothing bad ended after twenty-two years. At some point, the bad things are just the baseline of normal life; accepting the cards that we are given make it an easier hand to play.
          It was cynical, cold, negative, and many other things, but true.
          I grabbed a pen off the table and wrote a nonsense response to the passage on the page. I ripped it out, folded it into a bookmark, and stuck it into the book. I tossed it toward a bookshelf, missing it by a longshot, and then turned on the television. I had no intention of moving again until I woke up, the next day. A moment later, Venna came barreling through the front door and plopped onto the couch next to me. She put her feet up on the coffee table, and then leaned her head back and gave me a tired smile.
          “You look like I need some pizza,” she said.
          “You look like I need a drink,” I said.