Me, Myself, and I

gut

It felt like it had happened to another person entirely, in a house in Idaho rather than New York, a child rather than an adult. Dad had seemed all too chipper when he swung my bedroom door open, holding a giant black "grown up" suitcase. I'd answered him by pulling the sheets over my head, but he'd been unfazed, whistling as he made my way around my room, pulling in random objects in the most disorganized chaotic mess of a packing job I'd ever seen.

I slowly lowered the sheets from my head, just in time to see him roll up my wall poster of the Empire State Building.

She hadn't been gone that long.

"Dad, what are you doing?"

Manic grin. "It's what we're doing. We're doing something big. Huge."

I rolled over, seeing the bag half full of useless crap already. "What?"

"We've sat around this house for too long Julia. Far too long. And when you do nothing for so long, you have to do something. Something big. So that's what we're doing." He rolled up the poster again after staring at it again. "Where do you want to go?"

I shot up straightspined. "Go?"

He studied the poster. The empire state building must've glistened at him. Somehow. "New York. We'll go to New York."

"No."

"No Albany?"

"Mom was from New York."

That wounded him. But he recovered, tossing me the poster. "All the more reason to go."

Suddenly I was smiling. "New York?"

"New York."

"Seriously?"

"Serious."

And I knew what he was thinking, what he didn't say. There was nothing left for us in Idaho. We weren't even running from problems anymore. More running towards them, if anything. And while the uplift quickly sunk, as I was on an endless elevator ride at the time, the high of running straight towards the problems, of creating some for ourselves, was all I needed. I unpacked and repacked my bedroom three times. My grandparents weren't happy, especially since Dad refused to put the house up on the market, but they got over it soon enough, saw us off. That's all we could ask for.

Then we went. And he had another idea. An experimental group therapy program. Will you come?

"No," I'd said.

"Come on, Jewels."

I'd been struggling over math homework at the time. "Why don't you get your degree before you jumpstart another project?"

It had been a low blow, considering I knew that he was working on his book at the time, A White Heart in a World of Grey Solutions, recording the trials and failures of career changes and suicide prevention. Neither of us really thought the work would take off, but one fancy award later and he'd had enough funding to do anything he wanted. So, what to spend it on? Oh, yes, a volunteer therapy program. Sorry, support group. Make it affordable. To rich and poor kids in some random city in New York. Sometimes I wondered if he was just trying to create a more interesting plot for a sequel.

"Just, the first month. You might be surprised," he'd said.

And I agreed because I loved him. And I hadn't made any friends yet. And a part of me hoped that his program would somehow work for me, too. But a father does not make a good psychologist when his own kids are involved.

Details get overlooked.