The Adderall DiariesStephen ElliottGraywolf Press |
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May; Golden State; Suicidal Thoughts; A Year Without Speed; Floyd Mayweather Comes Up Short; "Your Guy Just Confessed to Eight Murders"; Lissette; The Part About Josie
It's May 4, 2007, the morning after the Golden State Warriors won the first round of the NBA playoffs against a Dallas team that was supposed to be one of the best ever to play the game. I'm not thinking about murder confessions.
I'm taking Adderall, a schedule D amphetamine salt combo, emptying the time-release capsules into glasses of orange juice, trying to break down the casing surrounding the amphetamines to see if I can get all the speed at once. I swirl the juice, press against the beads with the back of a spoon. I take five milligrams at eight, five more at noon. My roommate is gone. He left his door open and his computer sitting on the floor and I shuttle back and forth between his room, where I pass hours playing cards online; and my room, where I stare out the window and struggle to write something and then give up and go back to his room and play some more cards. It's a lonely, pointless existence, but that's what happens.
I head to a party at a small publishing house in the Mission. All the kids are there, eating cake and bean dip and drinking beer. It's five o'clock and they're off work. One girl wears bright red pants that come to her rib cage. She's just back from Germany and says everybody in Europe is wearing these kinds of pants.
I talk with Doug and Brent about the Warriors run, how they barely even made the playoffs.
"I have the Chicago Bulls DVDs at home," Doug says. "I watch the games of the 90s over and over again, it helps me relax. You know the best player on that team wasn't Michael Jordan? It was Scottie Pippen. Scottie could dunk from the free-throw line at any time. He just elevated, and it was done."
I know what he's talking about. I lived in Chicago all those years. I remember the playoffs against New York, Scottie Pippen flying into Patrick Ewing like a warhead destroying a mountain. Of course it was Jordan, and to a lesser extent Phil Jackson, that enabled Pippen to do what he did. He was never any good after he left the Bulls. He had his pay-off, his championship rings, his millions, the rest no one will ever know.
I feel ready to kill myself.
After the party I stop at the cafe. There's a girl from the writing program there, one of the new fellows. She's young, with bright red cheeks and a mop of healthy brown hair. She says she had been somewhere and heard someone say my name. She says it bitterly.
"I'm famous," I say. "Which is why I have so much money. Women follow me everywhere." But I'm joking. I don't have any money. I've had writer's block for almost two years.
I go home and start drinking. By midnight it's done. I'm asleep on the couch, beneath an 8-panel collage my ex-girlfriend Lissette made for me. She made it while she was still living with her husband in a little house on the other side of the Bay, before our relationship broke apart her marriage. Each panel is two feet high and eighteen inches wide and comprised mostly of fetish models cut from mainstream magazines, women in gas masks, men on operating tables stuck full of hypodermic needles. Glossy pictures glued on black cardboard peeling at the edges. It's the only decoration I have. The collage brought us back together for a while but in the end it was the unfinished work of a child, an accurate description of us both.
I have two roommates who won't be coming home. We live in a large, cheap apartment in the outer Mission with strange grey carpet and a view of the water reclamation plant on a hill nearby. So instead of going to my room I fall asleep on the couch and then eventually go downstairs where I toss and dream until morning when I wake up feeling scratchy but fine and I take ten milligrams of Adderall and hope I can do this without doing it again.
My psychiatrist lives just down the street from me. I can walk there. I see her once a month, or once every three months, and she prescribes my pills. The pills make me crazy, I know that, but I don't see the alternative. It's really just speed, no different from the original amphetamine salts Gordon Alles injected in June, 1929, and almost identical to the Pervitin used by German paratroopers in World War II as they dropped behind enemy lines in a state the British newspapers described as "heavily drugged, fearless, and berserk." It's the same stuff injected in high doses in the Haight Ashbury that Allen Ginsburg was talking about in 1965 saying, "Speed is anti-social, paranoid making, it's a drag, bad for your body, bad for your mind."(1)
Without the Adderall I have a hard time following through on a thought. My mind is like a man pacing between the kitchen and the living room, always planning something in one room then leaving as soon as he arrives in the other. Adderall is a compound of four amphetamine salts. The salts metabolize at different rates with diverse half lives, so the amphetamine uptake is smoother and the come down lighter. And I wonder if I'm not still walking back and forth in my head, just faster, so fast it's as if I'm not walking at all.
My psychiatrist is tall and thin and her skin hangs loosely around her face. I like her quite a bit though I’ve never spent more than fifteen minutes with her. She works from her home and a small waiting room is always open on the side of her house. There are magazines there, one in particular ADD Magazine. The magazine is full of tips for organizing your life. There's even an article suggesting that maybe too much organization is not a good thing. Mostly though, it's about children. How to deal with your attention deficit child and the child's teacher, who might be skeptical.
In the writing class I teach, a woman recently turned in an essay about her son who suffers from attention deficit. Her essay was written as a love letter and was completely absent of hate or envy or any of the things that make us human. It was missing everything we try to hide.
"How are you feeling?" my psychiatrist asks.
"Better," I reply.
I had stopped taking the pills for a year, maybe more. Three weeks ago I started taking them again. When I quit taking Adderall I was still dating Lissette. I would go to her house in Berkeley during the day while her husband was gone, and wrap myself around her feet while she worked. Or I would visit her at the dungeon she worked at on the weekends as a professional dominatrix. I would sit in the dressing room with the women and we would watch television. Lissette was the most popular and she would be off with the clients most of the day. She would leave them in the rooms to undress. When she returned they would be kneeling on the floor, their naked backs facing her. She might walk carefully toward them, sliding the toe of her boot across the carpet. Or she might stand away from them, letting their anticipation build, as she pulled a single-tail from the rack. She loved to be adored and the best clients made her feel happy and complete. The walls were thin and I could hear the paddles landing on the client's back with a thud sometimes followed by a scream. When she was done she might come downstairs and sit on my lap for a while, and then we would go.
I have a memory of Lissette in the dungeon, which was really just a four-bedroom basic Californian with a driveway and a yard in a quiet town north of Berkeley, near the highway. She's standing on the back of a couch, grabbing a toy from above a row of lockers. She's wearing panties with lace along the bottom and high heels and we're all staring at the back of her thighs, amazed.
When I was taking Adderall all I thought about was Lissette and when I stopped taking the Adderall I started thinking about other things. Lissette noticed and we broke up. Then we got back together, then we broke up again. Over the course of last year, after I had stopped, I often felt suicidal. I had time, but I didn't know what to do with it. I was a writer but I had forgotten how to write so I sat with my computer. I sat in coffeeshops or I sat at home or I sat at the Writer's Grotto, an old building near the ballpark where a group of authors share office space. I still had a bunch of pills left and occasionally I would take one, just to know the writer's block was real. Then I lost all the pills when my bag was stolen at a bar on 22nd Street six months ago, and that was the end of that.
If you asked me what happened this past year I'm not sure I could tell you. I could say I moved into this apartment on the edge of the city where I can hear children and dogs in the morning and I despise it. I could say I was with and not with Lissette, getting together and breaking up every couple of months. At one point I called her the love of my life. I could say honestly I started to write a novel every day. I could say I went on tour for six weeks with the Sex Workers Art Show and that a compilation of previously written essays and stories about my predilection for - my addiction to - violent sex was released to silent reviews.
I could say I watched the first three seasons of The Wire on DVD and on Sunday nights I went to a friend's house nearby and ate dinner and watched HBO. I ran a reading series in the same bar where my bag was stolen. It was part of a literary organization I founded to raise money for progressive candidates running for congress in 2006.
I edited an anthology of political erotica.
I could say I did all these things and if it sounds like a lot I can assure you it isn't. I'm not married and I have no children. I have friends but they don't know where I am most of the time. I don't work. I live on money I made before, money that is almost gone.
Last year I made $10,000.
I live in San Francisco. Rents are going up.
I'm teaching a couple of classes to get by. I know I should get a job, but it's hard to do that after a while.
On May 5, 2007, Floyd Mayweather meets Oscar De LaHoya at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The fight has been hyped for five months. Floyd will make more than twenty million dollars and De LaHoya will make more than thirty. De LaHoya is heavier and Mayweather faster. Mayweather goes running late at night in Las Vegas, three a.m. sprints in the dark. The underlying drama is that Floyd's father had been in jail for drug running. Floyd trained with his uncle instead.
The boxers move quickly inside the ropes, sweat pouring down their backs like a glaze. Mayweather peppers the older De LaHoya, landing a shot in the tenth that snaps De LaHoya's head back like a spring toy. De LaHoya, well past his prime, comes out hard in the final rounds, his shoulders turning as if on rotors, delivering a flurry of jabs into Mayweather's ribs. Mayweather just barely wins the fight and tells anyone who will listen, "This proves I'm the greatest fighter of all time." But it doesn't. Floyd Mayweather was supposed to win big, and he squeaked by. Floyd's father sits ringside, a guest of his son's opponent. The father has long braids and cheeks so sharp it's as if his face was engraved. After the fight the older Mayweather says he thinks De LaHoya won.
I know everything there is to know about fathers who root against their sons.
The morning after the fight I get a call from Josh, a staff writer at Wired Magazine. He's working on a profile of Hans Reiser, a brilliant computer programmer accused of killing his estranged wife.
I helped Josh track down Hans’ former best friend, Sean Sturgeon. Sean and I have several girlfriends in common and I once did a bondage photo shoot in his apartment when he wasn't home. I don't remember ever meeting him but our paths have crossed so many times it almost doesn't make sense. Josh is calling to say he found out something incredible about the case. "Your guy Sean just confessed to eight murders, maybe nine."
"Why maybe nine?"
"He isn't sure if one of the victims was dead."
Josh says Sean's not under arrest and he's refusing to tell the District Attorney the names of the people he killed. Sean told Josh that he confessed to the DA because he's a born again Christian and thought the jury would want to know, it seemed the right thing to do. Or rather, he posed it as a question, "Don't you think the jury would want to know?" But then he said Hans knew about his murders and he was confessing in order to beat Hans to the punch. Maybe he confessed for both reasons. Or maybe he confessed for reasons that had nothing to do with Reiser or the jury. He denied having anything to do with Hans' wife's disappearance. He told Josh, "Give me some sodium pentothal or any truth serum, put a little ecstasy in there and ask me if I killed Nina. I have never been a threat to her. (2)"
Sean told the police and the district attorney that his victims had physically and sexually abused him and his sister in the East Bay commune where they were raised. He claimed he hadn't killed anyone since 1996. The commune interests me. I know the places where adults come in contact with unsupervised children. Between fourteen and eighteen I was in five different state funded childcare facilities, including three group homes, a mental hospital, and a temporary youth shelter that stuffed thirty children in each room. In those places you can never tell who to trust.
When I'm done talking to Josh I feel like I'm waiting for something. The group homes were a long time ago. It's still morning and I put a pot of water on the stove. I call Josh back and ask him for Sean's phone number.
If Sean committed eight murders it's a huge story, I think. Here is a man willing to wait years to get revenge on the people that stole his childhood. I think of In Cold Blood and The Executioners Song, two of my favorite books, both set around spectacular murders and written by novelists. I know people who have known Sean for more than a decade. I have the inside track. And there's something else about the case; Nina Reiser's body was never found.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I don't know if Sean will talk to me. If he did kill eight people, surely the police would have arrested him by now. And why isn't he a suspect in the disappearance of Nina Reiser?
After calling Sean and leaving a message I bicycle through the city, down Market Street toward the Castro, my right pant leg rolled up so as not to get caught in the chain. My bicycle is my prize possession, an old Peugot I picked up for $150 nine years ago. I live a spare existence. I haven't owned a car since I first got to this city.
I cut right, past the Gay and Lesbian Center and the Three Dollar Bill Café. Something's tugging on me. I had heard of Nina's murder, but never the full story. I had heard about Sean and how Nina's disappearance crushed him. He took to bed, paralyzed with grief. He was in love with his best friend's wife. It was all just passing information. But eight murders? Revenge killings? Eight murders isn't revenge. Eight murders is a serial killer.
I go to the park to meet a girl I know. Someone who has taken a habit of coming to my readings. She's engaged and lives with her fiancé between the Marina and Russian Hill. I've only seen her once before and she'd explained their relationship. It was simple. He was monogamous and believed in monogamy. She cheated on him and always would.
She arrives wearing a black dress and sandals. Her skin is so pale all I can think of is milk. I don't think of my complicity in her unfaithfulness. I don't want to. I don't love her; she's just someone I know. I wait as she walks across the grass in her sandals. A man stops her and asks if she is willing to be in one of his paintings. She talks with him for a moment, her head turned his way, her body pointing toward me. He doesn't have any paint. He wears dark, heavy clothes, his belongings bound in garbage bags around him.
The sun is brilliant and the colorful houses are brightly lit along the hills. On some days the fog catches on their drainpipes like cotton, but today it's easy to see why people want to live here. Easy to see San Francisco for the gentle paradise it is.
We lie on the grass with my shirt pulled up. I forget all about De La Hoya's fight and Sean Sturgeon' confession. I ask her to pinch my nipple and she does but it isn't enough. I ask her to do it harder and soon there is blood everywhere. There are people nearby but they don't seem to notice. For most of it she keeps her hand over my mouth and I close my eyes and drift away. "It's OK," she says.
That's only half the day. There's a barbecue, and then a reading, and then a party. There's always a party. I dance with a girl. "How do you know Eric?" I ask between songs. "I don't," she says. "My boyfriend knows him." I dance better after that. It's still the weekend, after all. It's still San Francisco. Everything is beautiful. Really. It seems perfect. The DJ looks like Napoleon Dynamite and spins pop from the 80s on vinyl. I'm thirty-five years old. The woman I'm dancing with has curly black hair and moves with steady grace, her silk dress rolling in waves down her arms. I feel loose and fine. I take five dollars from another writer, who put his money, inexplicably, on De LaHoya.
"Always bet on youth," I tell him.
It's one in the morning. I don't imagine anything could ever go wrong.
I'm leaning back at my desk staring at a poster for Cameron Tuttle's Paisley Hanover when Sean finally returns my call. "You’re a hard guy to get a hold of," I say.
"I needed to do a little research on you first," he replies. He sounds friendly and sure of himself. Like someone who knows he has something you want but hasn't decided if he'll give it to you.
I get right to the point and ask for the names of the eight people he killed.
"I’m not ready to talk about that yet," he says. "Let's just say there are fewer abusers on the street now than there were before."
He wants to know if I think he should get a literary agent.
I say I think he should get a lawyer.
"Why do I need a lawyer?" he asks. "I'm ready to plead guilty and spend my time in prison as a good Christian."
"They're not going to put you in jail without knowing who you killed."
"Why do they have to know who I killed? Isn't the confession enough?"
I tell him he doesn't need a literary agent.
I'm talking with a man who has already told the police he killed eight people. I imagine they're investigating, or they don't believe him.
"I've been asking around," Sean says. "People have a lot to say about you." I let that lie between us. Something about the way he says it makes me not want to know. And I don't want to admit too many acquaintances in common. I don't want to put anybody in danger, or at least anybody other than myself.
It turns out he's been speaking with Lissette. They know each other from the dungeon. He used to be the houseboy and when one of the girls wanted to practice with her whips she would practice on him. "I hear you're emotionally dishonest," Sean says. That's what Lissette told him. It's exactly the kind of accusation she would make. Her accusations are like koans. I think, You killed eight people and you're accusing me of being emotionally dishonest?
After talking for a few minutes Sean and I make plans to meet in Oakland then hang up. It's the first I've heard of Lissette since our breakup. She knew about Sean's confessions, but she was talking with him anyway, even as she was packing her apartment outside the financial district and moving to the fog belt, on the edge of Golden Gate Park. She had left her husband and then she had left me. Of course, it's more complicated than that. Every relationship is. She would never have left if I fought harder to keep her. She was a jealous girlfriend, and when she told me all the ways I made her unhappy I never really understood. I probably wasn't trying hard enough. Or I wasn't capable.
Lissette used to cut me. She kept a knife by my bed, a present from a client. It had a grip handle. My breathing would slow down when the blade opened my skin. I would close my eyes and feel my body lift from the mattress. It was like being on a raft. One time I was blindfolded and my chest was bleeding and I tried to kiss her, pushing up against the knife, which she held to my jugular.
"You have no sense of self-preservation," she said, planting kisses on my cheeks.
It wasn't true. I had a fantastic sense of self-preservation but it had left me for a while.
She woke me one night two months ago in her large studio in the busiest part of San Francisco and said she thought I should leave. I said I was sorry I couldn't make it work. I had been sleeping naked on the inside of the spoon. She was so beautiful and she looked at me the way a mother looks at a child and I loved that. I put my clothes on and bicycled home across the city. The landscape of closing bars and well-lit taquerias seemed bright, surreal, and full of smoke.
I didn't tell Sean about that.
I didn't tell Sean I found a book of mine in the used bookstore near my house. I don't know how they got it. I self-published it years ago and then took it out of print. It was like finding an old diary. It was full of stories written in my early twenties, most of them centering on my relationship with my fiancé Josie. The plot was: a good girl from a good family falls in love with an artist and betrays him by treating him the same way he treats her. I recognized the boy in the stories, many of them written from the girl's perspective. I thought he was very normal for his age, a little lost. He was a boy who saw the world through narrative; people and events all had arcs. Life tapered toward a conclusion. I can see now that there is a conclusion but no arc. There's life and death and all the barely connected things that happen in-between. The boy I read about was a boy who could have settled on something and turned out OK. What he needed was a goal. Instead he went traveling because he thought he was happier when he was alone.
Yesterday there was a tornado in Kansas. People are angry because the equipment they need is in the Middle East. I see the news in a crowded bar where I'm watching the second round of the playoffs. Utah has called a timeout and for a minute they roll pictures of splintered houses and turned over cars. The governor wants to call out the National Guard but the Guardsmen are serving tours overseas. Then a solemn reporter grips the microphone. The sound is turned off so I can't hear what he's saying, just read the capsule summaries below the screen.
There's a table setup with free hot dogs. A boy in his early twenties drinks near the window. His girlfriend comes in just before the half and kisses him on the cheek. She presses her side against him. It makes me think of Josie, the way she would sit next to me.
It was the summer of 1995 when we first got together. She had just graduated college, was drinking heavily, and preparing to travel in Europe. While she was away I sent long letters, up to forty pages, poste restant to whichever town she was heading to next. They weren't love letters so much as diaries written by hand.
Two years later we were living in Chicago's Ukrainian Village. By then I'd overdosed on heroin and Josie was overcoming a cocaine habit. We spent time on our front porch. The neighborhood was changing, rents were going up, but it wasn't there yet. It was a long way from there. There was so much concrete and if you looked east the concrete rose from the ground and became the buildings downtown. We weren't far from Harpo Studios, where Oprah ran her empire. We were miles from the lake and the city was hot and the Village was all red brick and white cement. I don't remember there being any parks in that neighborhood. Josie had a job at a recruiting firm downtown but I couldn't seem to do it. I worked temp assignments but was always getting fired.
"Why don't you get me a job?" I asked.
"I will," she promised.
Josie had convinced me to return to Chicago with her. I had been living in Los Angeles for six months working as an assistant on a TV show called Second Noah, about adolescents whose parents had died, or whose parents had abandoned them, taken in by a family in Florida. It was supposed to be a modern version of the Brady Bunch but the producers had no understanding of what happens to children without parents at that age. When the show was cancelled I got work as a driver and stole all of the presents out of Leonardo DiCaprio's fan mail, which I was delivering from his agent to his publicist, and gave them as Christmas presents. One of the presents was sheer silk underwear, which I gave to Josie. But they were cut for men and drooped sadly around her thighs. On the drive back from LA, Josie and I almost got married at a 24-hour chapel in Las Vegas, but didn't. To make up for it I bought her an engagement ring from a quarter machine at a K-Mart outside Salt Lake City and we slept the night in the parking lot during a snowstorm. We were twenty-four.
The apartment we ended up with in Chicago was long, with high ceilings. The landlord left threatening, incoherent notes. There was a man on the corner that sold elotes on a stick covered in butter and cheese. We were just two miles, maybe less, north of the United Center where Michael Jordan played.
What I'm trying to say is that I loved Josie, but things didn't work out.
A year later Josie went off to law school in Washington D.C. She offered to stay in Chicago with me and attend a lesser school but I said I didn't want to be responsible for her bad decisions. Then I was accepted at the University of Virginia Law School; I'd taken the law school admissions test at Josie's urging and scored well. I could start the next year and Josie and I would be within easy driving distance. We could hike the Blue Ridge Mountains. I broke up with her instead.
"I just thought we would always be together," she said. And I know part of me felt good about it, like I had won.
For two years, more, before we stopped talking altogether, Josie wouldn't take me back. She met someone else, fairly quickly. Because she was desirable. And I mean not just beautiful, but the kind of woman that smiles a lot, and likes to have a good time, and thinks for herself. She had confidence. She was fun to be around.
Five years after Josie and I split I met her on a train. It was a coincidence. There were ten cars so even on the same train the odds were stacked against us. I was spending a weekend in a city I didn't live in anymore and I thought she had moved away. But there she was in a polyester sleeveless brown shirt, without makeup, reading a paperback. She was like everybody else on that train, coming home from work, except she had better posture. I sat next to her, reading over her shoulder, and she ignored me until I started to poke her and then turned and we started to laugh.
"What in the world," she said, shaking her head and smiling, closing the book on her lap.
She looked lovely, but not as lovely as she would have looked if she had known she was going to see me. If she'd had her lipstick on and some blush, I don't know what I would have done. As it was, she was working as a lawyer for the labor relations board and getting married to Tony, who was one of my best friends from college but we were no longer on speaking terms.
I convinced her to get a drink with me and we went to a bar where the pipes were broken and water poured from the ceiling into buckets set across the floor.
"This is wonderful," I joked. "We're having a drink inside our metaphor."
Eventually Tony came and by that time I was very drunk. He was still tall, muscular and strikingly handsome. I considered hitting him but that was unlikely to turn out in my favor.
"Why didn't you tell me you were dating her?" I asked Tony. "I'd have gotten over it eventually."
"It was you or Jo, and I picked Jo," he said.
After a little more talk Tony said they were considering a move to North Carolina.
"Why would you do that?" I asked.
"Property’s cheap," Tony Said. "And there’s less crime."
They lived in a condominium Tony's parents owned in a run down building at the end of Lake Shore Drive. The neighborhood hadn't changed in years. There was no more crime now than before, but they were talking about something else.
Earlier today I talked with a woman I know in Virginia. I locked the door to my office, turned on the camera in the computer, and took my clothes off for her. She told me to turn around and I did. Then I sat naked at the computer and typed. It was ridiculous. I also spent the day preparing for class. If I can keep teaching I'll be fine. Not really, but I'll have enough money to make it for a little while. The classes are ending in a couple of weeks and I have nothing new scheduled. If I agree to move to some small town that needs a professor I can get on the tenure path. I could buy a house and teach people how to write. I'd have to sleep with my students then. Away from the big city it would be my only option. But that's not really open to me. It's not really what I want to do. Which is what got me on this track to begin with, arranging interviews with murderers, hoping to make sense of somebody else's crime. There's a woman missing. Her husband says he didn't kill her. There's a man who says he's killed eight people but won't say who they are. There are so many unanswered questions. It's been a long time since I knew what I wanted, since I had something to strive toward. I keep floating, head poking above the waves, waiting for a purpose to arrive like a boat in the middle of the ocean.
I never did meet anyone like Josie again. Women like Josie don't make it to their thirties without getting married. If you're going to meet someone like that you're going to meet her in your early twenties. And if you're like me that's going to be a time when you're making your living selling drugs out of your freezer, living in a squat a bullet away from Cabrini Green. You'll have to represent something, like the other side of the tracks, but safe. Someone who, when the time comes, when the party's over, she can turn around and guide to a place where life is a little more predictable. But when the party was over I didn't want to turn around. I didn't want to go to law school or get a real job or love only one person forever though in many ways she was the most loveable person I was ever going to meet. It didn't matter. I had to test my dissatisfaction. She had gone east so I went west. I got a job in a ski resort, bartending on top of a mountain. I learned how to board, and disappeared in the snow.
That was another time. I've been in San Francisco nine years. I'm suffering side effects from the Adderall. There are always side effects. Insomnia, loss of appetite, headaches, obsession, erratic decision-making. Inconsistency. I took my pill early in the day but I'm still awake and full of thoughts. So I lie in bed with my windows open, glad to be alone. It's the middle of the week. I haven't been sleeping and I'm missing appointments. My nails are bitten down and bleeding. All I can do is document it all and see where it leads me. I'm taking my meds and the world will be a different place for a while.
I have a self-published book I wrote when I was with Josie, and another book of unpublished poems. I never show them to anyone. The poems are so full of anger. Anger at Josie for being better than me, for always having the upper hand. For loving her family and being loved by them in return. For being someone who got over things and not recognizing that I was a person that didn't get over anything. But I read that book and those poems and I see something else. I see who I was then.
This is who I am now.