Nevada

         It just so happened that I was born.  It just so happened that twelve years later, I figured that I might as well not have been.

         But the coherent story starts less than an hour before that.  My mother is taking me to the hospital.

         “Mommy, I’m not sick,” I inform her.  Something churns in my stomach – it isn’t anxiety, I have ways to keep away from anxiety – it is fear, cold fear.

         “No.  You’re perfectly healthy.”

         Her agreeing to me is possibly the worst thing that has happened in my life.  Saying that I’m perfectly healthy (which, technically is not true) implies that I don’t need to visit the doctor.  And if I don’t need to visit the doctor, there’s only one reason I’m going to the hospital.

         “Mommy, no! Don’t ! Please! I’ll be good, I promise!  If you’d just take me home I’ll never be bad ever again!” My mother ignores me. 

         “You can’t!  You can’t!”  She is making the point of not looking at me, and pretending, I am sure, that I don’t know what’s going on and won’t mind anyway.

         She can’t, I think to myself, over and over again.  It’s illegal.  It’s illegal, it’s illegal, it’s illegal.  But no, now it isn’t.

         “Hello.  Um, I heard that I could le – uh, drop my daughter off here.”

         “No, mommy, no, no, no!  I’ll never count anything ever again.  I won’t count cracks in the floorboard or kernels of corn or dogs in the park or anything!  I’ll be good!  Just take me home.  Take me home, take me home.”  I am sobbing hysterically by now.  My mother has sat me down on the counter just as if I were a small child.  She is doing many things just as if I were very small and naïve and didn’t know what was happening.  I have cut myself several times on the corner of the counter in my frenzy, but I don’t notice.  “Take me home, take me home!”

         The woman behind the counter seems just as desperate as I am.  “Really ma’am, I only take infants.”

         My mother has been expecting this.  “Oh?” she asks sweetly, “But it was in that big law book that you accept children.  And this is obviously a child.”  I hate how she says this, as if I am a thing, as if she has the right to give me away.

         “Ma’am, I know times are tough, but would you really reconsider?  She really seems to be attached to you.  Have you tried that new pill?  It works wonders.”

         “I will agree that it does, but I simply can’t afford medicine like that.”

         “Ma’am, last week I had a man who earned a dime a day, and he bought medicine for his son.  If it doesn’t work on your daughter, there are other ways.  Please, reconsider.”

         “Mommy –”

         Something has angered my mother, in a way that I have never seen before.

         “Do you know how hard it is to raise a child like this?” she hisses at the lady, “All the counting, all day long.  The screaming when I tell her to stop.  The getting upset when the neighbor paints his windows.  And the pills.  The pills aren’t any better.  The pills simply mean hysterics and crying and getting thin.  I have dealt with this for nine years and I simply can’t stand six more.”

         I simply have never thought of it this way.  But I don’t think she sees how I try to stop.  I don’t like it any more than she does.  But if I don’t – if I don’t – I think I will simply keel over and die, or she will, or the world will set on fire.  Something tells me that it will, and I believe it.  I believe it from my heart’s core, no matter how many times the big doctor tells me it is not there.

         And then the lady does it.  She pulls out a form from her desk, sighing heavily. 

         “Please fill out the form as accurately as you can, and whatever you can’t fill out your child will try her best to do.”

         I just sit on the counter, silently crying, as no power on earth will save me now.  My mother fills out the form at record speed.  The last thing I ever heard her say,

         “Happy Valentines Day, dear daughter.”



         Then she leaves, simply walks off, each step saying the same exact thing.

I.  Don’t.  Love.  You.