Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

“It’s fine. Listen, I gotta change.” I grabbed clothes and then went to the bathroom, where I undressed, toweled off the sweat, and then let my body cool down in the air, my feet cold against the floor. I untied my hair, then stared at myself in the mirror. I hated my body. It disgusted me—its hair, its pinpricks of sweat, its scrawniness. Skin pulled over a skeleton, an animated corpse. I wanted out—out of my body, out of my thoughts, out—but I was stuck inside of this thing, just like all the bacteria colonizing me.

Knock on the door. “I’m changing,” I said. I removed the Band-Aid, checked it for blood or pus, tossed it in the trash, and then applied hand sanitizer to my finger, the burn of it seeping into the cut.

I pulled on sweatpants and an old T-shirt of my mom’s, and emerged from the bathroom, where Mom was waiting for me.

“You feeling anxious?” she said askingly.

“I’m fine,” I answered, and turned toward my room.

I turned out the lights and got into bed. I wasn’t tired, exactly, but I wasn’t feeling too keen on consciousness, either. When Mom came in, a few minutes later, I pretended to be asleep so I wouldn’t have to talk to her. She stood above me, singing this old song she’d sung whenever I couldn’t sleep, as far back as I could remember.

It’s a song soldiers in England used to sing to the tune of the New Year’s song, “Auld Lang Syne.” It goes, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” Her pitch rose through the first half like a deep breath in, and then she sang it back down. “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

Even though I was supposed to be basically grown up and my mother annoyed the hell out of me, I couldn’t stop thinking until her lullaby finally put me to sleep.

THIRTEEN

DESPITE MY HAVING psychologically decompensated in his presence, Davis texted me the next morning before I even got out of bed.

Him: Want to watch a movie tonight? Doesn’t even have to be set in space.

Me: I can’t. Another time maybe. Sorry I freaked out and for the sweating and everything.

Him: You don’t even sweat an un-normal amount.

Me: I definitely do but I don’t want to talk about it.

Him: You really don’t like your body.

Me: True.

Him: I like it. It’s a good body.

I enjoyed being with him more in this nonphysical space, but I also felt the need to board up the windows of my self.

Me: I feel kinda precarious in general, and I can’t really date you. Or date anyone. I’m sorry but I can’t. I like you, but I can’t date you.

Him: We agree on that. Too much work. All people in relationships ever do is talk about their relationship status. It’s like a Ferris wheel.

Me: Huh?

Him: When you’re on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who’s doing it ever talks about anything else. I have no interest in dating.

Me: Well, what do you have an interest in?

Him: You.

Me: I don’t know how to respond to that.

Him: You don’t need to. Have a good day, Aza.

Me: You too, Davis.

—

I had an appointment with Dr. Karen Singh the next day after school. I sat on the love seat across from her and looked up at that picture of a man holding a net. I stared at the picture while we talked because the relentlessness of Dr. Singh’s eye contact was a little much for me.

“How have you been?”

“Not great.”

“What’s going on?” she asked. In my peripheral vision, I could see her legs crossed, black short-heeled shoes, her foot tapping in the air.

“There’s this boy,” I said.

“And?”

“I don’t know. He’s cute and smart and I like him, but I’m not getting any better, and I just feel like if this can’t make me happy, then what can?”

“I don’t know. What can?”

I groaned. “That’s such a psychiatrist move.”

“Point taken. A change in personal circumstances, even a positive one, can trigger anxiety. So it wouldn’t be uncommon to feel anxious as you develop a new relationship. Where are you with the intrusive thoughts?”

“Well, yesterday I was making out with him and had to stop everything because I couldn’t stop thinking about how gross it was, so not great.”

“About how gross what was?”

“Just how his tongue has its own particular microbiome and once he sticks his tongue in my mouth his bacteria become part of my microbiome for literally the rest of my life. Like, his tongue will sort of always be in my mouth until I’m dead, and then his tongue microbes will eat my corpse.”

“And that made you want to stop kissing him.”

“Well, yeah,” I said.

“That’s not uncommon. So part of you wanted to be kissing him and another part of you felt the intense worry that comes with being intimate with someone.”

“Right, but I wasn’t worried about intimacy. I was worried about microbial exchange.”

“Well, your worry expressed itself as being about microbial exchange.”

I just groaned at the therapy bullshit. She asked me if I’d taken my Ativan. I told her I hadn’t brought it to Davis’s house. And then she asked me if I was taking the Lexapro every day, and I was, like, not every day. The conversation devolved into her telling me that medication only works if you take it, and that I had to treat my health problem with consistency and care, and me trying to explain that there is something intensely weird and upsetting about the notion that you can only become yourself by ingesting a medication that changes your self.