Get Well Soon, Tim
When I was a child, I would often see things called ‘floaters,’ which were really microscopic organisms living on the surface of my retinas. I consistently saw them when I was anxious, or focused my eyes in a particular manner while staring out the window. I thought that I’ddeveloped the vision necessary to see astronauts in outer space, and became worried whenever they drifted too close to the sun.
The floaters appeared whenever I was in school due to my anxiety conflicting with feelings of existential boredom, which coincided with extreme loneliness, which coincided with my desire to be left alone. I was shy, and social interactions caused these contradictory emotions on a daily basis. For example, I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time when Scott McDonald told me that he did not want to sleep over my house on Saturday, because, according to Scott McDonald, anything was better than the idea of sleeping over my house. Eventually, these emotional disagreements became a familiar paradox and a reminder that life was not fair or congruent.
I figured this out one day after watching a series of floaters spin across the sky. My teacher had begun to notice what a distraction the window was and moved me to the front of the class so that I would pay closer attention. The student sitting next to me was named Jonathan, a child who also had varying dispositions that ranged from rabidly social to completely awkward. I remember the shock while staring at the teacher in a zoned-out state of melancholy, when Jonathan, in one swift motion, stabbed me in my forearm with his ballpoint pen.
The attack was completely unprovoked, and sort of felt like a dream. Then the excruciating pain registered. As a result, I open-hand slapped Jonathan in the face and scream-cried in front of the entire class. It felt awful, but this unfortunate turn of events was actually a tremendous relief. Pain consumed my brain so that it could not produce any negative or anxiety-inducing thoughts. I didn’t see any floaters for the rest of the day, and Christine, the school nurse who I had developed a crush, even signed my arm ‘Get well soon Tim,’ right above the stab mark.
I didn’t care that she wrote ‘Tim’ instead of ‘Ben.’ I didn’t wash my arm for a month, and every time I felt anxiety creeping up, I would look at Christine’s signature, and remember what it felt like to be endeared. I would think about how humans are like lost dust motes floating across an eyelid, caught in a beam of light, hoping to be seen, and being seen when hope vanishes. None of it made sense; it’s just the way that things were.
A Blanket Made of Moving Colors
Growing up, I was often mentally abused by my cousin Levi, who was much bigger and smarter than me. Levi wanted to be a therapist when he was older and made me take personality tests to reveal my psychological makeup. He always diagnosed me as intellectually disabled, and would announce to our entire family that my brain was dead. When this happened, it would make me feel a jolt of anxiety.
Anxiety to me felt similar to looking out of the corner of my eye when something I expected to see was not there. In those instances, I would imagine floating out of my body to watch what was happening below without a care. I felt like a ghost, holding my breath as I shivered, waiting for the moment to pass. It was unbeknownst to me at the time, but this tactic of escape would eventually cause a seizure.
It happened after I mistook the expression “Let’s have a round of applause” for, “Let’s have a round of a pause,” and stood motionless while everyone around me clapped his and her hands furiously for Levi, who was recently accepted into the gifted program at school. As a child, this was very confusing to me. I felt sorry for Levi because the kids in the gifted program had much more homework.
I felt anxious, mostly due to my perplexity, and imagined floating out of my body. Then suddenly, before anyone knew what had happened, I was struck by a minor epileptic attack. It felt like a blanket of moving colors washing over me, warming my head. What I’d actually experienced was called auras, which were perceptual disturbances that could lead to bigger seizures, and were a serious warning sign.
After this diagnosis, my family treated me like royalty, but I could have cared less. I knew that they were only acting kind toward me because I was sick. So instead of embracing their compassion, I anxiously tried to relive my seizure: the odd smell, the taste of pennies, weightlessly floating up then down, up then down. I always remembered that first fit because it was the only time that Levi was ever jealous of me. That alone made it one of the best moments of my life.
The Discrepancy Between Life and Death
I tried to be a photographer after receiving a point and shoot camera for my birthday. First, I sought to take pictures of strangers, but most people had problems with a random child photographing them. So I tried to take snapshots of wildlife instead but found that it took far too long for me to set up the camera, and often the animals would scamper away, causing my photos to come out blurry and distorted.
Eventually, I decided to take pictures of nature because nature was beautiful and didn’t move. One day while walking through the woods, looking for something that might be worth capturing, I came upon a dead buck. A bear trap had the deer by its leg, and no one had found it yet. I took pictures of its open eyes staring up at the lens as if it were still alive. Then I lifted it by the antlers and rested its body against a tree in a pose that looked totally unnatural, but made for a good picture.
After that it seemed wherever I went, death followed. Walking down the road on my way home from school, I saw a squirrel get caught in the headlight of a truck going sixty miles per hour before being partially smashed by a pair of oversized tires. I took a few snapshots of the squirrel, trying to lift the curves of its mouth with a twig so that it looked like it was smiling. The next day I was in the park, taking pictures of a dandelion when a dog approached me and began to hump my leg. I stared for a while, watching and wondering what the dog was trying to do before it suddenly just fell off, dead.
At first, I thought that maybe the dog was just playing, but when its mouth started frothing, and the owner ran over yelling, “What the hell did you do,” I knew it was dead for real. I took out my camera and began taking pictures of the dog. I tried to wipe its mouth with my sleeve and got a few good pictures that made it look semi-alive. The owner was beside himself. He accused me of casual cruelty, and of trying to play God.
Soon the entire neighborhood had been warned and told to keep their pets at a safe distance from me. The animal care & control unit was sent out to investigate whether or not I had been torturing my own dog, Yoda, but they could not prove that any abuse occurred. I felt embarrassed and ashamed.
The word ‘snapshot’ was originally a hunting term, but my intention was never to kill. All I wanted was to take striking pictures. Losing the community’s trust made me feel as if I too were dead, or as if my relationship with the outside world had died. I tried to dissect the universe to find something on the inside that mattered or made life worth living. After coming up empty, I committed to never giving up, no matter how hard or lonely life got. I would keep trying to find something that mattered, even if it took the rest of my life to do so.
Benjamin DeVos is the author of 'Madness Has a Moment and Then Vanishes Before Returning Again', a book of short stories forthcoming with Dostoyevsky Wannabe. His work is published or forthcoming in Word Riot, decomP, and Alien Mouth, among other places.