Pseudo

Dick Cavett introduced me to a new term, “autopilot.” It’s what people with depression put up when they have to show off as cheery or happy.

I’ve been running on autopilot for nonstop now. All day I put on this display, only to have my insides decay and destroy themselves. Honestly, I don’t think I can go on. I am tired pretending I am happy. Every time I have to put on this show, I die a little more inside.

My friend tried to comfort me, she told me everyone is probably faking it. She’s probably right. I would believe her, but I can’t. I know actual happiness exists, for god’s sake, I’ve felt it. It was decades ago, but I felt it.

I see those couples walking down the street, hand in hand, loving each other. Why do I believe I need that to be happy?

I think I know why. I’ve been lonesome all my life. I’ve been abandoned by everyone at some point. Some people enjoy solitude, I once did. I grew out of it, once I realized solitude couldn’t help me out of all my problems.

I’m tired of putting this act. One day I hope to have a great mental breakdown in public. It happened once before, and it was great.

I have lied

Everything here is true. It is.

Or so I thought.

I’ve realized that if this was to truly benefit me, I’d post the parts that actually caused pain in me instead of simply outlining the problem.

But to be honest, I doubt there is much hope for me.

Vrooooooooooooooooom

My uncle is dead.

My mother’s older brother.

I liked him, he was a nice man. Average height. He looked like a younger version of my grandfather. I always remembered him because he was bald. He had that personality similar to the tough, but loving American football couch. I loved him dearly.

I remember on various occasions, how he used to tease me and my brothers, I rarely saw him, but when I did I enjoyed every second of it. I remember how sometimes he showed up while my brothers and I played soccer, he would join in and after a while we would talk about the national and club teams.

I remember his home. It was beautiful. He had a dozen or so dogs, a couple of peacocks and some horses. His home was large, windows flooded by sunlight. Oceans of grass, trees all around his home. He was a lawyer. A good one. Just like his own father. I visited his office once. It was amazing. It was in a cylindrical building, the window was amazingly large and gave a view of a landscape of a city I loved so dearly. He was well off, his son was to follow in his footsteps, his daughter was an artist. His son reminded me of his father, his tone of voice, his way of showing love. His daughter was of an other era, left behind by the sixties, she painted with wild colors and created beautiful work.

Five years ago, my father arrived with news for my mother. As I came down the stairs I heard crying and screaming. For the first time in years I felt vulnerable, scared, I hesitated to descend those stairs. The screams of agony from my mother made me wish I was deaf. I peaked in the kitchen to see what was happening; there in front of the door was my mother on her knees, crying, my father stood in front of her, trying to console her. The thoughts of what could have happened inundated my mind, I avoided their attention as I tried to figure out what was going on. Never did it occur to me he was dead.

I went back upstairs, ignoring what had happened, ignoring the tears streaming down my cheeks, ignoring the cries of my mother, ignoring how vulnerable I felt.

Later, my father told me, he told me what had happened. My uncle was dead. Not murdered, not killed, not assassinated, but dead.

It took some time before I was told what really happened. It was my mother who told me. She said he got some mysterious note telling him to go to a business meeting in a dangerous area of town. His secretary told him not to go, my uncle had enemies since he was a lawyer. He said he was going and a friend of his decided to accompany him. They arrived at the location, my uncle got out, a motorcycle raced by, “Vrooooooooooooooooom!” My uncle’s friend commented on how the motorcycle driver must have been crazy driving so fast, he heard no response, he walked to the other side of the vehicle and saw on the floor his friend, bullet ridden and dead.

I don’t know if what my mother told me was true or not, it sounds more like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. My mother always liked that play, especially the scene were Caesar tells his wife: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” She’s repeated those lines countless times during my lifetime. As far as I’m concerned, I choose to believe what my mother told me, not for my own sake but for her own.

Estas listo para aprender a hablar?

While I spent my school days learning to write and read in Spanish in the first grade, I spent my afternoons learning to speak it.

Have you read or seen the play Pygmalion, or the film My Fair Lady ? I had to deal with a phonetician of sorts. If you English speakers out there have ever tried learning Spanish, you have most likely endured the challenge that is the double-r. It, too, was my enemy.

My mother would take me once a week to a phonetician. A lady in her thirties, maybe forties. She would sit me down and begin by making me speak in English. She made me speak a language I already knew. She wasted my hours and my days saying words and sounds I already knew. How I wanted to yell at her, tell her to teach me to speak Spanish. I was tired of being mute in this new country. I was tired of being unable to communicate with children my own age. I was tired of being abandoned in the playground during recess because I couldn’t distinguish between the words “hurt” and “smell” (duele and huele).

I would argue with my mother, telling her I hated going to those classes. She told me I needed them, I said I didn’t. That woman was not helping me. Only later did my mother learn that the phonetician wasn’t teaching me Spanish.

Eventually, by myself, without help, all alone, abandoned, isolated on the school playground, I learned to pronounce the double-r correctly. No thanks to that phonetician.

Estas listo para aprender a escribir?

Leaving the United States and entering Colombia, I had no knowledge of the Spanish language. I’m not even sure if I knew any Spanish before to begin with. So there I was, five years old and in the need of learning a new tongue. The window of opportunity for learning a new language was still there, so that was good news. Yeah, perfectly good news. My parents signed me up for a bilingual school. So I was going to dominate the English portion from the start, good news.

But when it came to Spanish, a decision was made, I was to waste my extra time learning Spanish. Understandable, right? Well, the way they decided to teach me made as much sense as cutting my legs off and jumping in a pool full of sharks. During the school day, after an hour or so, we were given a fifteen minute break. Students just ate snacks, sat outside, talked. Nothing special. Meanwhile, I was shown to the door and walked towards a small closet-like office placed under some stairs, were an old woman waited for me. She was the equivalent of the mother superior of my elementary school career. She would sit me in this room, by her side and made me read cards, made me tell her if that word was a verb or noun, she made me read stories out of books and answer questions at such a fast pace. I detested those fifteen minutes, I sat in a small, hot room, hungry, while my peers socialized and ate outside under the warm sun. Life sure knows how to treat me well.

My first grade English teacher once saw me writing the number six. She froze, as if I had just proved to her Kennedy was shot by Hoffa who was living on a secret military island in the Bermuda Triangle. She asked me to rewrite the number six, I did. I started from the center, as opposed to the standard way of starting at the end. She gave of a sigh of relief, it all made sense now, my ugly handwriting was not entirely my fault, it was my previous teacher.

Next time I arrived at the closet, I saw a giant scroll of paper, the largest sheet of paper I had ever laid my eyes on. The next time I would see paper rivaling that size, I was to be touring the local newspaper’s printers. I knew something bad was going to happen. The lady sat me in front of the paper, handed me a pencil and said to me something about repeating the characters of the alphabet. My heart sank into my stomach and drowned, my lungs collapsed upon themselves, my intestines tangled themselves up in an attempt to run away. I wanted then and there to die. I grabbed the pencil, looked at the paper and allowed myself to feel as miserable as possible. I began with the letter “A.” I wrote that damn letter until I could have closed me eyes and written Macbeth without even noticing I was writing. I could have picked up a pencil with my other hand and written out the complete works of all the Beat writers and poets. My hand was pounding with pain, asking for a break, and the breaks only came when the pencil needed to be sharpened. I must have wasted more pencils that year than most people did in their lifetime. I felt like a medieval monk copying the same Biblical verses over and over. I do remember one time breaking down when I walked in there, I refused to work and sat there staring out the window, watching people walk by and the grass sing in the sunlight. I cried, I wanted out I wanted out I wanted out. I was hungry, I was unhappy, I wanted out. After a while, I began my work became more and more mediocre as a I realized that I was bound to waste my year in that room no matter how hard I worked. Once I reached the letter “Z” I almost shouted with joy, I finished it faster than usual. I thought I was free, my days as a printing press was over. How naive. The lady pulled a new sheet and commanded me to start all over again, I must have cried.

When I returned to class, I walked in with my head down. Tired of working for a heartless woman. I loved the English portion of the day, I zipped through it with ease. But then the Spanish teacher walked in and I knew my day was going to get worse again. She would take all the other students to a large table were they would read. I sat at my desk simply doing nothing, sometimes crying. I wanted to be there, but I couldn’t. Once I tried to ask her to go to the restroom, I couldn’t speak Spanish. I tried asking for her permission to go, but she didn’t speak English. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to communicate an idea to someone who cannot understand. I made a fool out of myself in front of my classmates and the teacher. I went back to my desk, put my head down and cried.