6

It started when I was about twelve. My grandmother died from lung cancer. She’d been an avid smoker, claiming it calmed her jittery nerves, and that any thing that had led to her meeting my grandfather was a good thing. He had asked her, fifty seven years before, if he could borrow a light. They’d gotten to talking and the rest, she smiled down at me, was history. She hadn’t stopped smoking when he’d gotten lung cancer and died, stating that she was too old to change her ways.

We had been close when she’d been alive. She had taken care of me after school when I was a child, and my mother kept saying things that told me her illness ought to be hitting me hard, but I never really believed she would die. My grandmother had been a hale woman, had climbed up on chairs to reach tall shelves, could always be found out in her garden, mowed her own lawn every week.
And then she was dead, suddenly to my young self. My mother was broken over having lost both of her parents within three years. She cried and cried while my father tried to comfort her. I remember feeling a brief, fleeting sadness. My family kept assuring me that I didn’t have to hide my feelings, that it was okay to be upset, that sadness was a natural feeling. Thus was my first experience with the knowledge that I should feel something that I didn’t.

It progressed like that, continued like that, for the next few years. By the time I was sixteen I had forgotten what it meant to feel happy, had been told by my first serious boyfriend that I was cold. I didn’t feel even remotely upset when he’d dumped me, though I felt a rankling irritation at all the mutterings and speculations over why I had been so abandoned. That was most of what I’d felt at those times: irritation.

At sixteen, I understood that I was considerably more intelligent than my classmates. My homework every night was a work of moments; the next day, I would listen to the droning complaints of those whom had taken hours to complete the assignments. Rather than focus on my courses, I pursued my own interests during the school day, but managed to get a perfect score on every test and essay. My parents and teachers and guidance counselor held conference after conference: ought they move me up a grade? My academics were absurdly high, on one hand, but on the other, I already didn’t seem to get along well with my classmates. But then perhaps I’d get along better with older students. I did seem rather advanced, after all.

Eventually they moved me in such a way that I graduated half a semester early, and alone. For all their efforts to ensure I’d finally make friends, they alienated me further. I entered college at the winter term and graduated in two and a half years. With no desire to have friends and no real plan for extracurricular activity, I was able to easily handle more classes than anyone else. At eighteen I used the same skills I would later require for my stint with five year old children to convince my advisor to let me take on more and more credits. At that point of my life, I still assumed I would learn how to feel again. And so I explored a realm of physical pain to see if that helped and made the most of my emotionless time. It could only be a phase, I rationalized. No human could go forever without feeling
things.

When I was nineteen, I had gleaned the knowledge that I was considered by many to be quite pretty, when I put myself together nicely. My roommate was intimidated by me. And there was a boy, who lived down the hall, who thought I was beautiful. He told me on several occasions that I was the most interesting girl he knew, that my obscene course load was impressive instead of freaky, and that he admired how I devoured books by the handful. He was well-read, intelligent, three years in my senior. By that point in my life, I was learning how to manipulate people.

He had short brown hair, and he was an economics major. He wanted to be an analyst, and he wrote songs on the weekends. I lost my virginity to him: it was then that I forgave pain for pleasure and became a chaser of adrenaline. He told me that he never minded that I never laughed; he said that it allotted me an air of mystery, a sense of intrigue. We were together all through college and all through my stint at grad school, and then he had to move to New York to get a job. He asked me to come with him. I considered the daunting task of packing up all my stuff, decided it would be boring, and then let him go alone.

I was twenty two. I had told him I loved him for years but never felt it. I never cried over him; I never felt the inclination to cry over him. From that point on, I lived alone. I was not by any stretch of the imagination celibate, having not yet lost the appeal things that felt physically good. But I remained staunchly single and I read hundreds, thousands of books. And, due to my past relationship with a rather intelligent (though not as smart as I was) economic analyst, I played the boring stock market well enough that I only had to work if I wanted to. I usually worked, to try and battle off the boredom. It never worked for more than scant moments.

Eventually even sex got boring. At that point in my life, between where I got tired of getting drunk or getting high and having promiscuous sex all night long and working and reading all day long and never being able to sleep and when I started working with children, I spent plenty of time trying to decide how to employ my considerable brainpower. I learned and mastered language after language, but that all became the same after a while. I worked my body to the point of exhaustion, but that did nothing to excite my mind. I had photographic memory and so I couldn’t re-read books. I had started driving father and father to find libraries with bigger selections.

Living on the right side of the law, no matter how much was considered traditionally immorally, was no longer exciting. I was bored and bored and bored.