More Happy Than Not: Parts 2–4

And I would make that choice without a doubt because the bottom line is that Genevieve is my girlfriend and I’m her boyfriend, and Thomas and I are just friends and that’s that.

I swear Gen’s face flushes. He’s playing the game close to his chest. I normally wouldn’t care except it’s with my girlfriend.

How to Play Two Truths and a Lie: everyone shares three stories or facts about themselves and then you take turns figuring out everyone’s lie. It’s the perfect icebreaker game.

Nate’s real name is Natalie but she’s been reinventing herself as a dude for the past four years with thick braids, fake gold medallions, fitted hats, and basketball jerseys.

You would only see shadows hugging, indiscriminate.

While playing this game might be even worse than being intimate with her, it’s both the right and wrong time to stroll down memory lane.

A mother of twins, M-3237E, was afflicted with agoraphobia after witnessing a bomb go off during a marathon.

You’re being impulsive about Leteo.

I can’t hit up Brendan either because I’m pretty sure he’s pieced together all the Thomas-shaped pieces of my cataclysmic puzzle.

They’re telling me to seek out oblivion where rest and happiness await.

“Did any event precipitate these feelings?”

“But you’re my best friend and I miss having you around. I know you don’t actually have a thing for me. Drinking confuses people like that, so we’ll call the whole thing taboo and not talk about it for the next ten years or so. Let’s hang and talk about Sun Warden while I apply to a job to—”

We’ve ventured far away from my block and stumble on to a hiding space behind a wired fence, in-between a meat market and a flower shop, businesses of death and life.

Genevieve fought to sit next to Nicole so they could swoon and stuff over Robert Downey Jr. but Collin argued this was a dude’s movie and the dudes should get to sit next to each other.

This sensual Genevieve that confuses me switches off and the real Genevieve is back.

Mom thinks that his recent jail stint tipped him over the edge, that his many chemical imbalances caught up with him.

He’s a cheeky little bastard that’s always smiling.

A middle-aged woman banshee-wails from her seat, rocks back and forth, and punches the walls.

The treatments used for those suffering from anterograde amnesia aren’t all that different from the ones used for Alzheimer’s patients.

Genevieve looks around the waiting room with its stark white walls and crazies and patient employees.

She averts her eyes and whatever she’s about to ask, it’s clear she’s reconsidering.

I wish I could’ve just been exorcised or spent the summer at a conversion camp or something.

Something primal explodes from my aching throat, and the mirror smashes when my fist connects.

I know she’s not being haughty about it, but I don’t like how matter-of-fact she is about someone no one knows better than I do.

My swollen eye is less swollen, but it’s still pretty much an eyesore everyone can’t help but stare at when I’m just walking down the street.

That sentiment didn’t survive any longer than a shadow-basilisk did against a black sun phoenix, but in the moment it made me happy to believe it.

Who the hell knows what that entails?

We crawl through the open spot in the fence into the side where history is pulsating with memories of our first time, second time, third time...you get it.

Both Mrs. and Mr. Lake—their first names lost on me—look taken aback when they open the door; it’s the wounds on my face, no doubt.

Kyle, an oblivious “only child,” walks into his room and laughs at me.

There are two birthday cards from my eighty-year-old aunt with dementia; I’m not as surprised that she sent two cards as I am that she remembered my birthday at all.

She says something about neurons and synapses and medial temporal lobes and the hippocampus, and even though it’s all doctor-speak, I do my best committing it to memory because I can already feel the words slipping away.

She says something about neurons and synapses and medial temporal lobes and the hippocampus, and even though it’s all doctor-speak, I do my best committing it to memory because I can already feel the words slipping away.

“Maybe more,” Evangeline says in that clinical and robotic tone.

There’s one of a girl talking to a boy made of leaves; another of an ocean monster destroying a girl’s sand castle; a third of a girl falling out of a tree while a boy sits idly by eating an apple.