LITMIR.BIZ

      Oryon

       Change 2–Day 359

      Is this working? ———?

      I’m not sure I remember how to do this anymore, after what? Four months’ hiatus from dutifully Chronicling every high school heartbreak and hangnail. (Not to mention all the useless thoughts and absurd fears that crossed my mind ever since being bestowed with the knowledge that I’m one of the rare, lucky Changers walking the planet.)

       Pshhhst.

      You want to know the biggest thing I’ve learned over the last two years? Everything is temporary.

      Every. Thing. Is. Temporary. Life, love, strep throat, dandruff, icebergs, me.

      I have one more week of being this thing Oryon, and then I’m going to be some other thing that turns up in my bed as mandated by the paperwork inside the packet that the Changers Council will drop off on that dreaded morning. Also known as: Change 3, Day 1. Not even a tiny bit psyched about that. Don’t want to think about it right now. So I’m not going to. Why bother anyway? Because hey, everything is temporary, yo. Which is another way of saying, you have no control over anything, ever, so stop fooling yourself and sweating something you can’t actually do anything about. Sounds comforting, right? In theory it should be. And yet in reality, I can’t seem to act like I’ve learned this vital lesson about the leaf-on-the-wind, transitory nature of existence. Because, shit still matters to me.

      Like, Audrey. Like, not being able to talk with Audrey since . . .

      . . . Well, since you know.

      We hooked up.

      (Still can’t believe that actually happened. I’ve played it over in my mind so many times it feels more like a scene from a favorite movie than my real life.)

      Audrey. Sweet, beautiful, lovely—and probably deeply (and rightfully) confused—Audrey.

      I still have no idea what happened after I disappeared on her. I’ve imagined every scenario in my mind. I know she was upset, like, jump-up-out-of-bed, gather-and-clutch-your-clothes-to-your-bare-chest-and-flee-the-apartment-before-running-haphazardly-into-moving-traffic upset. And she likely stayed that upset for a while. But did she ever try to contact to me when the rage dissipated? If it did dissipate. Which I wouldn’t blame her if it didn’t. I mean, she thinks I’m a psycho-liar-face-creeper who either bagged her best friend, or stalked them both, or some other stomach-churning combo of garbage-person scenarios.

      I didn’t reach out to her. Couldn’t. What with the abduction. Followed by four months of reprogramming lock-down at the Changers “Restoration and Rehabilitation Retreat” (RRR), which buried me deeper underground than the Titanic’s colon. Even in federal prison you get to go out in the yard for a couple hours a week, wait in line for the pay phone every now and again. Not so much at the Changers Secure Housing Unit, where you can’t even burp without someone checking a box on a clipboard, all under the guise of “restoring physical, mental, and emotional well-being to your many selves.” And okay, sure, after the trauma of the whole Abiders kidnapping ordeal, I probably needed it. But the one-two punch of loss of control and the shredding of my dignity, such as it was, well, let’s just say I now refer to that whole period of my putrid life as the “Tribulations.”

      That’s another thing I learned: it helps to name things.

      I wish I knew what to call my relationship with Audrey. I guess I don’t have one anymore. Beyond the one in my imagination. Audrey lives in Memory Town now. What a dick-move on my part­­­­­­­­­­—to make her believe I loved her. I mean, it was the truth that I loved her. Like I’ve never loved anything or anyone. I still love her. I guess the issue was who exactly was doing the loving. I told myself it didn’t matter. I let us both get swept up in the fever and just went with it like young people across millennia, continents, cultures, and galaxies do. Some guy named Anil and his girl Sujatha are probably curled up in the back of his dad’s car on a steamy dead-end street in the outskirts of Mumbai right now. And a girl named Michèle and her crush Sophie are running down the steps of the Paris metro holding hands, their pink and blue hair catching the breeze from a train blowing into the station down below. Audrey and I were no different.

      But I was. I was different. Am different. And I kept that to myself. What did I think was going to happen? What starts in a lie can only end in a lie. I set myself up to be the bad guy and poof, now I’m gone. For good. Never to be redeemed. Later, Oryon. Except for us Changers, there is no later.

      Audrey didn’t even get the pleasure of flipping me off in the hallways or watching her friends ice me out or having her missing-several-links brother splinter my tailbone one unsuspecting Friday after the football game. (Unless he was in fact one of my Abider kidnappers, but even then I can’t imagine Audrey knew. She couldn’t have. Could she?)

      Bottom line—if I really believed everything is temporary, I wouldn’t be obsessing right now, the first day I’m sprung from RRR. I wouldn’t be sitting here thinking how horrible it must’ve felt (still feels?) for Audrey to have trusted me so completely and sincerely, only to discover me as a fraud. Or what she thinks indicates I’m a fraud. Which, I totally am the definition of.

      As Nana would say, “A pig’s ass is pork.” Lies for good reasons are still lies. Any way you cut it, it looks bad for Oryon, who, come Monday morning, will vaporize and be replaced by someone else, the who of which hardly matters, because it won’t be Oryon and Oryon is the boy Audrey loved.

      Great, now it feels like I’m about to hyperventilate. Breathe. Breathe. Man, I’m still so messed up. It’s crazy-making, this merry-go-round of thoughts and doubts and fears and what-ifs. Plus, I WAS FREAKING LOCKED IN A BASEMENT AND LEFT TO ROT WHILE MY BEST FRIEND DIED IN MY ARMS. Sorry, Changers Council, that ain’t a stain easily bleached away no matter how much brain retraining or “life is a series of never-ending stories” continuum crap you lay on me.

      Okay. I need to calm down. Get a grip already. Know what I can change and what I can’t. I can’t change how Audrey feels. I can’t change what happened to Chase.

      I can change how I respond right now. I can practice my “mindfulness meditation,” one thing I got out of RRR that isn’t the worst.

      I am simply being here and now. Let’s take inventory: I’m sitting on this old bed, in a new bedroom, in a new house, cardboard boxes filled with my familiar things all around me. Close my eyes. I’m simply breathing and sitting here on my bed, no big deal. In, out, in, out. I can hear the garbage truck rumbling on the street, birds tweeting in the branches outside the window, feel an itch stirring in the hairs on my forearm. I’m not going to scratch it. Just notice it’s there, along with all of the other sensations in my body that are going on right now, pleasant and unpleasant. (Mostly unpleasant.) The rapid breaths I can’t help, that come from somewhere in the center I can’t quite reach, have no dominion over me. My dry mouth, a slight soreness on the left side of my throat every time I swallow.

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