Narcissus' Daughter

One.

The thing is, I have a sweet face, so most people don't guess that I've done more drugs than a new-age billionaire. Maybe I don't have access to the variety international connections could provide, but I have time and a good mind. Not to say I'm an intelligent individual: a good mind simply understands systems and the truest fact that life, as we are capable of understanding it, is a series of predictable systems.


But I digress; the first drug I took was Prozac, as prescribed by a psychiatrist to treat my anxiety. This is how it went: I told my mom I was feeling anxious at school. I did not tell her it was because of bullies, who called me fat and grabbed my tits in the hallway to “milk me like the cow I was,” but instead that the cause was a more vague paranoia I could not pinpoint, that kept me up at night without reason and terrorized my waking life.


Why?


Because I knew if I told her, she would call the school, my teachers would know, the boys would be punished but not for long. And when they came back, they wouldn't respect me any more than they had before. They'd smile when the counselor was looking and roll their eyes when she wasn't. Not that I blame them. Children especially, though it applies to us all, believe they are the protagonist of their narrative and are capable, without realizing it, of justifying any action. In a system, no one truly wishes to deviate. We're social animals, and the boys were just doing what boys do.


So, with an imagined illness, I sat in front of a psychiatrist. I looked her in the eye and answered a series of simple questions she delivered. She asked if I had tried therapy before I walked out of her office with a prescription.


"No."


"Well, medication works best with therapy."


She said the same to my mom when we met her in the lobby. I didn't care about their conversation, tugging my mom's sleeve.


"Can we get McDonalds?"


"After we stop at Walgreen, yeah."






Two.

I think the careers we want say a lot more about us than the ones we choose.


When I was four, I wanted to be princess of the moon. Once I came home from the grocery store and told my dad that I saw the Garden of Eden in the produce aisle, but I don't think I was a liar. I believed the world was made by God, and a God of love is the only one I knew, who made colors and beauty and forests and fruit and endless possibilities, my mom's hazel eyes and the pink clouds painted across a sunset; the yellow before a windstorm was a miracle.


Joy was effortless and oblivious because there was nothing to inhibit my thoughts, no sense of reality or urgency. I was the child kept in precocious naivety, seeming both too old and too young for the words I could manipulate. When I was seven, I told my mom, "Sometimes I think that people are just like an experiment," but couldn't explain myself.


That was after I learned to read books, when I wanted to be a historian. I remembered paragraphs of ideas, not the dates or statistics or equations, but I could tell you how Albert Einstein let black entertainers stay in his house when they were refused from local hotels. I could tell you that once a young zookeeper was mauled by a giant anteater because he didn't recognize the signs that it was in heat and had become highly territorial. I could tell you that Tesla claimed to have experienced visions and hated to see pearls on women so much that he forbid his secretaries from wearing them. I could tell you, at length, about how native Australian tribes believed in spirits and saw themselves as guests on Earth, and there were others who thought the same around the world but then God appointed kings.


And I wondered, wasn't God his own king? Did he need the help? Or was he just lazy?


But when I was 11, I wanted to be a biologist. I brought home a hamster and wrote a log about his daily activity. I rarely held him, but if I set my hand in the cage around seven in the evening, he would run up my arm. I bought him a hamster ball with money I got from my auntie. When he died, I wrote the cause of death in his journal and decided I wanted to be a pediatric nurse instead.


When I was 17, my cousin Alex killed himself, was kept alive for a few hours after at Christ Hospital, and I didn't change my mind.






Three.

My first birthday was on September 24th, 2009. At least, it was the first one I celebrated because my dad contested his parents' faith so the family no longer went to the Kingdom Hall and praised Jehovah.


I remember, the girls wore modest dresses and the boys wore dress shirts and ties. My brother's clipped on, but I watched my mom tie my dad's every day we attended service. My mom had no religion in her family but adopted my dad's and her friends' who threw craft parties and hosted polite little brunches with mimosa and pastries, chittering about their children and their shopping and their marriages.


Laurie Friis held bible study on Tuesdays. She let my mom and me and my brother stay at her home after my dad got drunk at the renaissance fair and punched the passenger's side window when we were on the highway. It shattered, a thousand tiny jagged cracks at once, an image in my mind as I went to bed, listening to Laurie say, "Well, God made men a certain way and it's best just to let them have their time when they get like that. Don't cry, sweetie, you know he loves you and your kids. Why else would he provide for you? He’s always been a good worker and that’s what makes a good man.”


Earlier, my mom made him pull over because he was speeding and swerving,  but at the wheel she screamed that he needed to stop acting crazy. The kids are in the car. He kept opening the door. But my mom had a harder time leaving the religion. She said to him when I was a child, "You kids will never know what I went through."


And I don't. On my birthday, she was drunk, and my great grandma was too. They were talking about my grandmother, who had just passed the year before. She was only forty-nine but my mom said, "Heroin is something you're addicted to for life. And my kids are both addicts, I know it. I see it in Krea the most."


My great grandma agreed. She said, "Did I do something wrong? I have four children left. I had nine. And all their children are struggling, except you. And now yours?"


And my mom said, "It's Krea's birthday. We should go back outside. I don't want to talk about this right now."


So I stopped listening at the kitchen door. I ran back outside and sat next to my brother. I watched my mom light a cigarette and leaned over to whisper to him, "Want to snort some of my Xanax?"


"Fuck yeah."






Four.

The only drug I fell in love with was DOC. It's a hallucinogenic amphetamine I helped my friends' order off the internet. They didn't know how to get into the deep web, so I became the queen on their tripscape: Krea, the giver of hallucinations who stays up till six in the morning convincing everyone of their ethereal nature. I said, "Every particle of us will exist forever and we are the children of a dying empire. We're going to have a lasting effect on the history of our species, no matter our actions. We will be good or evil, but people will remember our generation as a whole."


Michelle was my best friend then. She was a year younger than me and liked to take DOC before she went to school. She was coming down from a trip eight hours old, her pupils blown and her face shifting with the colors and shapes of the fire. I saw her head in the flames, her hands pushing the yellow breeze. "Yes. Yes. No, and, we're at the peak of entropy, for our species, I think. I think humans are going to be a short-lived species because of our conscious and the inability to fully comprehend it. I can say to you, I think about my actions, but do we really? Do we really at all? Because I can think one thing and do something else, in the same instance. In that same fucking moment."


"I don't know if we do. At least not all of us."


"Do you think you're special?" We laughed. "I do. I think I'm special. I think you're special, too."


"You are," but I didn't believe it. I looked at my hands and my skin was fractal scales, all sorts of purple and red geometry. I chewed my nail, expecting it to be bloody tomorrow. "But sometimes I think I'm a genius."


I don't remember the rest of the night.


I don't remember most of that year.






Five.

This weekend I turned twenty-one. I have nothing to show for it except a hangover. My mom said, "You need to go back to school. You can't be a waitress forever. What happened to nursing?"


But I find myself planning for it. I think, if I could just get into a nicer restaurant, I'll be making at least five-hundred dollars a weekend. All I have to do is bide my time here. It's not like I'm spending money on drugs anymore. (Except for alcohol, but that's legal, isn't it?)


My mom said, "You are one of the smartest girls I've met in my whole life and I want to know if I did something wrong. Was it me? Was it your dad? I'm sorry I stayed with him so long, but you know we didn't have anywhere else to go."


I don't think she understands that I don't blame her. I can't blame her and I can't blame anyone. Even my dad. Even myself: I watch my memory become less crisp, remembering facts from years ago better than the ones I learned yesterday. I'm clumsy and some of my teeth are already starting to rot. I spend most of my time indoors and get nervous in public. I can't give speeches anymore, like I used to, a bright light at center stage smiling for the entire world.


And I think it's because, at the end of the day, I know I am nothing. I mean nothing. I may be remembered, but how will I know it's me? I wonder sometimes if someone like Hemingway can read his biographies or if Andy Warhol visits art galleries. I imagine him standing next to me, looking at a print of his soup cans.


He turns to me and says, "My biggest regret is not filming my friend when he jumped out a window. Can you picture it here? Everyone would still come to see it. Everyone would say I was the most heartless, but do you know what? Narcissism is the only way to stay alive in this world."


I say, "I agree."


And a family walking by stares but I'm too drunk to care. I think, when the dust settles, when your furniture's gilded, is the mind you had this morning not the one you have now, still limited and repeating for gain, glory, sympathy, and communities real or collectively imagined? And finally, if you are dead, if you are not one of the few immortalized as caricatures of human beings, you will be gone from this plane of existence forever, so none of it matters.


Not a bit of it.