The road to Fergus Falls was straight as a plumb line.  I noticed the houses in Barrett, on the way, seemed like time capsules after my charge noted the signs seemed competing for most run down in that out-of-the-way berg.  The courthouse at the T-stop in Elbow Lake is a lovely building, well situated to produce the maximum effect for those going our way.

This is not really your story to tell, my Self whispers to me as I write.  This is her story.

Oh Self, I answer, this day has been my day too.

Her doctor (the more accurate word is psychiatrist) said “overnight, or maybe a few days.”  Her voice was unnatural over the phone, the directions she gave me to the hospital insultingly thorough.  

My former mentor, with whom I do my best to no longer speak of all my secrets, told me it happens in threes.  He’s on two.  His count for my week is at three; my count wants to be four, just to be contrary.  She counts only as one in each of our weeks, if you go by his reckoning.  Thinking of the count, the three that wanted to be four, my Self accused me of somehow causing this with my painful discontent.  Since I found the situation changed this afternoon, it has accused me.  All the day I have known better than to take on that guilt, yet all the day it has weighed heavy upon me whenever I think of the pain I wrote out to my own boy late into the night.  

She had an epiphany, you see.  It was I who recommended my one-time mentor to her, citing unusual knowledge and an extraordinary ability to listen sans judgment to even the most peculiar revelations--except maybe the last time, but even then he refrained from any parting shot.  She’s better at taking what she needs than I am.  He came and heard of her epiphany last night, which got my wheels turning in the oblique direction of personal insufficiencies, which got me thinking of so many things that I usually put away so well, which got me to write my own boy in mental agony at 2.5 A.M., which prompted a phone call from him this morning.  That’s what you get when you mention a sometimes desire to hurt yourself.

A call is lovely, even when prompted by an inland sea of miniature sorrows, but today revealed two friends in need of things I don’t know how to provide.  At least I could drive her to the hospital.  She said “fucking psychiatrist” and her psychiatrist said “possibly just overnight, or maybe a few days.  Tell her to bring some clothes.”  All I know of mental facilities is gleaned from movies--out of which no-one ever gets, like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest--and the story of a friend of a friend who wound up semi-permanently in a psychiatric institution after a doctor’s incompetent meddling exacerbated schizophrenia, or perhaps caused the schizophrenia outright and then made it worse.  The gorier scenarios have more fun with my worried imagination than the tamer possibilities.  

I could drive her to the hospital when she needed me to, but for my newer friend, farther afield, I feel completely useless.  I expressed as best I could in my oft-mangled syntax that it broke me up to think of such a good person in pain, mysterious pain that I probably couldn’t alleviate even in person much less over such distance but which I wished I could.  Such expressions felt hollow and insufficient.  There is hope that such feelings of insufficiency, of not doing enough, are the result of a broken idea of how I ought to be instead of anything that could be carried out in reality.  I gradually become less wary of this hope, but this hope is far from achieving certainty.  If you were better, my Self assiduously told me when I carefully wrote my wish to help, you would change things instead of just wishing.  I told it that more constructive advise would be appreciated.

This is my story.  Capturing fear and pain in eloquent prose helps me feel better, as if by controlling the language I also control the situation I describe so carefully.  Recounting the Difficult Story in variegated language to various friends in their varying states of friendships and receiving their varied reactions to all I had to say taught me that.

The hospital was an hour away.  I bustled into work an hour before my shift was to begin.  “Did you get my message?  My roommate needs me.  Should I try to call somebody to work for me before we go?”  Thanking me for being considerate enough to call, they told me not to worry, that they’d already begun trying to get somebody, that I shouldn’t worry about it.  My roommate, who has called me Jesus Christ and a bodhisattva and her best friend from time to time, needed to wait for her fucking psychiatrist to call her back, and was doing so when I bustled back into the apartment from making sure my humble occupation knew I would be deviating from the plan that evening.  Waiting for her doctor to call back and provide the all-clear and the directions to the hospital was a strange, tense, anticlimactic interlude.  I wanted to demonstrate strength under pressure.  I wanted to cry.  I didn’t do the second, and I may have carried off the first.  

The interlude before that call felt like the eye of a miniature storm.  What do you say in the calm when you don’t know if you can handle the recommencing of the gale?  You say that your employer is understanding, and you compliment her choice of clothes, and you double check that she has everything she can foresee needing.  You give her two pens because she’s bad at remembering where she put her nice pen, or the other pens of yours that she had borrowed.  I over-acquire ten-packs of clear plastic Bics that say “CRISTAL” on the packaging and have the slightly raised logo close to the ballpoint tip where I can scratch it while I’m thinking of what to write next, so I can spare her pens.

When she came in from an entire morning of medical and psychiatric evaluation--because her epiphany occurred at about the same time as a change in medication and was accompanied by recurring low-grade fevers--I was still sleep-naked under the covers, talking on the phone with my own boy.  A call is what you get from your noncommunicative boy when he fears for your safety, but by then the conversation wasn’t making me cry; we were talking about the Academy choices in the actor and supporting actress categories for this year.  He wouldn’t have been able to abide it if anyone other than Cate Blanchett had won Best Supporting Actress, but felt that the man who played Miles in Sideways was rather snubbed at not receiving a nomination.  Before she came back from her medicinal morning, my own boy had explained to me that the way I had defined 'important people' was the way most people defined popular people.  My roommate is popular.  My former mentor presumably has to beat them off with a stick.  Neither my own boy nor I are popular, though relatively speaking I would assess him as more popular than I am, because at least he’s got me flocking to him.  He’s rather reserved to be flocking anywhere, even to me.

She wanted to go in alone.  We stopped at the Fergus Falls Dairy Queen less than a mile from the hospital; she craved the chocolate-most delicacy to be had for three dollars or less.  She treated me as well since I’d been kind enough to drop everything and drive her.  We ate our ice creams which are actually soft serve in the hospital parking lot after I’d circled a time and a half, confused by the signs that demarcate a third of the parking spaces.  Hell if I know what FFMR stands for.  She wanted a hug and to go in on her own.  My hug felt awkward to me, possibly because I had to set down my ice cream (she only wanted half of hers after all and was thus ready to go before I had finished mine) and get out of the car.  Physical affection of any kind comes generally awkward from me.   

My mind wanders like the Israelites walking forty years in the desert; if I could just narrate in a straight line the story would be told so much more quickly.  Also like the Israelites in the desert, sometimes the point is not just to be done quickly.  Sometimes you need to take some time, make sure you’ve learned everything you need to learn before you’re shut of an experience.  

I went to talk to my former mentor about our mutual one-of-three girl, and things.  Her perspective is so different from mine.  She told me about how her talk with him went, and the things she noticed and the way she described things are in some ways so alien to me.  I long since got the impression that the things I take for granted are things that astonish other people, and the things that cause in me wide eyes are often things others take for granted.  Remembering how she described him made it more difficult than usual for me to focus my thoughts around him.  Among the many divergent topics of this particular evening, I finally found the courage to ask him if he’d be willing to help me were I ever to be in some kind of emergency of which he would be aware and able to help.  He said he would.  My roommate had said, when I asked her a similar question last week and then told her that my own boy and my former mentor were the two others I would feel comfortable trusting if I were in a crisis situation, that of course he would help me.  I prefer to ask for myself.  

He said, when I worried aloud to him about it, that her stay will almost certainly not go beyond the advertised “few day” maximum.

She said, before getting out of the car to venture into the unknown alone, that I’d have uninterrupted masturbation time for a few days.  The thought had occurred to me as well, but I’d rather worry about how I’m going to find time to myself than about what she might be going through in Fergus Falls.  It comes in threes, he said.  She’s had an epiphany and a hospital visit already.

It’s only Tuesday, the weekday most known for being overlooked.  What can the week possibly have left to throw at us?  Don’t answer that.  Please.  Thank you.