AQP SERIES HOW DID I GET HERE: WOODY MOORE
How Did I End Up Here?
Since I moved home, I’ve been thinking about my high school crushes. There’s the Estonian boy with the chiseled jaw and shoulder-length blonde hair who looks like a Disney prince. He was the second person I met when I started international school in Italy. He used to play violin barefoot in the auditorium. And then there’s the skinny Mexican boy who founded our school’s funk band, Trotsky’s great-grandson. We went to Paris at the same time, and I slept on the floor of his Airbnb. It had slanted popcorn ceilings, magazine clippings all over the wall, and a mannequin head on a shelf. We talked about visiting Jim Morrison’s grave together, but I ended up going with a girl who had never heard of him. There’s the Ukrainian boy who let me read his short story about radioactive fish. I sort of confessed my love for him only to find out that he was already secretly dating my roommate. And of course, there’s the Danish girl who painted nude portraits of elderly women. I daydream, just like I did then, about them rescuing me from natural disasters, evil stepmothers, suicide attempts, that sort of thing.
Every time I come back to these daydreams, they get more detailed and convoluted, like the One Direction fan fiction that I wrote and kept in a three-ring binder under my bed in middle school. I would write about living in a small town in Canada (where anything could happen), owning a horse, and meeting 1D (they were undercover to escape the paparazzi). Something would spook my retired racehorse turned hunter-jumper champion and it would throw me over, and Harry would come to my rescue in a beanie, sunglasses, and a fake mustache. We would fall in love and travel to Devon, Pennsylvania together, where I would win all blue ribbons at a horse show. That was about the same time I discovered masturbation.
I’m embarrassed thinking that I’ve hardly grown up at all. My new fantasies involve running into my crush, the Trotskyite, while he’s busking in Brooklyn. He invites me to come see him play in a bar. I bring my imaginary boyfriend with me to see him play and we all go back to my crush’s apartment. We drink cheap wine and he lets me play his acoustic guitar. The boyfriend is jealous of our obvious connection, and he starts making fun of my songs. My crush yells at him and kicks him out. Then he tells me that he loves my songs and he fingers me on his gross sofa.
When I’m not thinking about them saving me, I think about what might happen if no one saved me, and something terrible happened, and they just heard about it. Of course, they might not even find out—I haven’t spoken to any of them in years. But if they did happen to hear that I had burned up in a fire or jumped out a window, would they wish they had gotten to know me better? Would they love their idea of me the way I loved my idea of them? I know it’s crazy, but it’s not like I’m the only person who thinks this way. Half my friends probably daydream about what people would say at their funerals.
I did almost burn up in a fire, though. I thought I was hallucinating. I’ve been having these episodes when I’m waking up pretty regularly for over a year. Normally I see a man in my closet or a swarm of bees in my bedroom as I’m waking up. I scream, they disappear, I calm down. But this time I was oddly calm. I heard alarms, and they didn’t disappear so I figured that I should probably go downstairs. I put on my shoes, grabbed a phone and mask, and started to head down the steps when I realized that my roommate’s bedroom door was still closed (for the purpose of this essay, I’ll call them Elrond). I knocked and yelled “Elrond! Wake up!” I opened their door. From bed, they muttered, “Coming,” and I started downstairs.
When I got outside, I saw a fire the size of my whole loft apartment on the deck of the apartment right above my place. I registered the fact that all my belongings might be destroyed forever, including all of my journals and my record collection. But it took me a lot longer to realize that about fifteen minutes had passed, and I hadn’t seen Elrond since I left them in their bedroom. My chest got tight and it got harder and harder to breathe. But then I called them, and they were on their way out. They had thought it was a false alarm, despite seeing a chunk of the roof falling outside their bedroom window.
I got a hotel room that night, and I asked my roommate if they wanted to stay with me. I emailed the school where I was working and told them that I wouldn’t be able to come in the next day. I was so relieved that I didn’t have to go in; I was almost happy that my apartment building had caught on fire. Elrond was relieved too. They explained that they had seen a “shadow person” in our apartment, and that fire usually gets rid of shadow people. They reasoned that my hallucinations were likely caused by this dangerous type of demon and that now I should be able to get some sleep. I lay down and tried to sleep, but Elrond, who was also teaching and had not submitted their backup lesson plans, sat right next to me in our only bed, their keyboard clicking and screen glowing until five.
Finally, they put their computer away. They asked if they could take their robe off. Confused and tired, I answered “sure,” only to find out that all they were wearing under their bathrobe was a t- shirt. I lay awake in the hotel bed for two hours, with Elrond snoring and underwearless, before I crawled out of bed and went downstairs in my pajamas for some coffee.
The concierge felt bad for me and treated me to a free breakfast, a box of tampons, and whatever clothes I wanted from the lost and found. I picked up a University of Oklahoma Class of 2021 shirt and some basketball shorts for Elrond. That t-shirt has become emblematic of this weird time. I had to live in the hotel for the remainder of my time in Baltimore, and I slept in that shirt throughout my stay there. When my mom came to get me, she was horrified that I went down to the hotel breakfast every day in my pajama shorts and the same shirt without washing either.
She came to get me because I tried to get myself admitted. Which was really just me being dramatic. I wasn’t going to kill myself or anything, I just needed someone to talk to. I spent a whole weekend freaking out. It started as a weird feeling in my chest. Well, it probably started with the fact that I was weeks behind on my grading (I sent by Teach for America to Baltimore ) and that I hadn’t done any of my work for grad school.
I had one friend there—she was amazing, but we were too busy to see each other much. I dreaded going to work every day. I loved the kids and administrators, but I wasn’t ready to be a teacher. I had virtually no training, and no experience working with children living in poverty. Many of my students had experienced trauma. They were all good kids, but I was working harder than I ever had in my life and I wasn’t helping at all. I couldn’t manage my students’ behaviors in a way that kept them safe or allowed them to learn. I couldn’t keep from beating each other up, much less keep them socially distanced. I had no idea how to balance teaching the grade-level instruction that they deserved with the foundational skills that they just didn’t have. Many of my students had hardly attended virtual school during the height of the pandemic. Some couldn’t read. Some didn’t understand the base-ten system.
I was failing every single day. And then I went home and I talked with angry parents, tried to grade, tried to lesson plan, and tried to complete assignments for graduate school. My therapist called it a “baptism by fire.” I didn’t enjoy anything. I let the dishes pile up. I didn’t vacuum or sweep for over a month, I wore dirty clothes to work and hardly brushed my hair. I lived off cereal and coffee. I woke up at five and went to bed at ten or eleven except on the weekends.
Every Saturday I would get an overpriced latte and a pastry from a coffee shop near my apartment. I would walk past the farmers market to Sound Garden, the record store in Fells Point and I would buy something and then walk home. This little ritual was the only time I felt like myself. Sometimes I’d stop and buy clothes at the flea market. I got a pair of work pants that are six sizes too big for me and a sweater vest. It’s a little stupid how happy it made me to buy these things. I found a first edition record by this early all-girl punk band called the Slits. I had read their guitarist’s memoir, and owning her record made me feel close to her. I felt like an archeologist. That record was sitting out during the fire, and the vinyl was okay but the sleeve was ruined.
The fire did some damage to the fourth-floor apartments, but it was the water that caused most of the problems on the third floor. The sprinklers had gone off in my apartment and the water from the fire hose had seeped through the ceilings. My records were soaked and stuck together. My mattress was drenched, and most of my printed books were illegible. Luckily, my friend Rebecca’s painting was okay. She painted an abstract swirly thing right after we went to our first concert together. Back then, we had been dating guys who were close friends. Then we all broke up, but Rebecca and I stuck together. She had given me this painting for my birthday the summer before senior year, and it was completely dry, despite the water dripping down the wall it hung on.
Walking through my waterlogged apartment the morning after the fire was a bit like being picked up by tornado and being dropped in Oz. The mushy carpet made squishy noises under my feet. My journals were full of ink bleeding into new patterns. I didn’t feel awful at first. Just strange. Like I was living someone else’s life. Like when I smoke weed. One time, I got high and a cop asked me to puke inside a bag. I thought I was dreaming and there would be no consequences, so I threw up on his shoes. This made me feel like that. Like it doesn’t really matter what happens, like I’m living someone else’s life. Which is kind of freeing, I guess.
The sense of unreality slowly molded into this uncomfortable feeling of being in limbo, and I ended up at the hospital. It was a Saturday, and I had gone to get coffee and a pastry and had bought a record and went to the flea market, but that didn’t make me feel like myself. My chest was tight, and my heart was beating too fast. I wasn’t sure if I was manic or anxious or if I just had too much coffee. And of course, no one wants to help you on a weekend if you aren’t suicidal. I was so close to calling 911, flushing my klonopin down the toilet and playing dead until someone came to get me. I thought about taking some, just to make it more convincing. But I was too scared, which I guess is a good thing. I wasn’t going to cut myself—that’s never been my thing. Eventually, I called some number on my psychiatrist’s website. I didn’t realize it was the emergency room. I just thought it was some bougie psych hospital like the one I had been to for eating disorders.
It was not bougie. And going to the hospital made me feel even further away from everything that I knew about myself and my world. I waited in a room for ages, and my phone was about to die, so I had to stop talking to my mom. Finally, they let me into a room with a nurse. She told me that they would be taking my blood. I told her I hadn’t had anything to drink all day except one coffee and that I was scared no blood would come out. She reassured me that any time they drew blood, blood would come out. They made me take off my clothes and put on a hospital gown. I had to take off my bra because the underwire was contraband. It turns out, most of what I own is contraband, including a spoon that I had no idea was in my backpack. They took all my belongings and sorted them into different plastic bags making note of every item, which took about an hour because I hadn’t cleaned out my backpack in over a year. I had about a hundred pens, and they counted every one. They tried to take my blood, but as I anticipated, no blood came out. They had to give me a bottle of water and try again.
Finally, they took me back to the psych ward. Inside were three identical looking bald men. I referred to them as the triplets in my head. I waited for around seven hours without a book or anything—all of my things had been put in a locker. The only thing to do was stare at the TV. The Ravens were playing, and they kicked some record setting field goal that bounced off the goalpost and went in for a win. It was a big deal to the security guards.
I don’t really care about football, and I was dying of boredom. The room was dark. I had a recliner and a blanket, but I couldn’t sleep. I thought about radioactive fish boy breaking me out of this place while a nurse wasn’t looking. I eavesdropped on the other patient’s phone calls and conversations with the staff. Every once in a while, someone would come in and take one of the triplets out with them. Then they would come back with some forms to sign. They would explain that when someone was voluntarily admitted, they were signing away some of their rights, they would be held for three days and then they could leave except in rare cases when the psychologist determined that it wasn’t safe for them to leave, blah blah blah.
The food wasn’t totally disgusting, but they didn’t give us utensils. I was starving; I hadn’t eaten anything but a pastry that day, so I ate a whole quesadilla and two chocolate chip cookies. But they didn’t slice them into pieces, so I had to tear it into pieces and eat them with my hands. I made a mess.
Right before I got my psych eval, a new guy showed up. I was excited—no one else seemed to feel like talking. I had hoped I would make an unconventional friendship with a weird old man here, that it would be like a movie, and maybe the new guy would be the one. He came in limping; he’d been walking barefoot for days and had blisters on the bottoms of his feet. His hair was long and dirty. He didn’t want to talk. They took him back, but afterwards they didn’t explain what he was signing, like they had for the other patients. They just told him where to sign.
Finally, I got an eval—I told them that I didn’t want to die or hurt anyone, so they let me out around 11. I went back to my hotel room and slept for the first time in days. I decided that I couldn’t go back to work, so I quit my job and moved home to Florida. Now I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.
I met with a new psychiatrist today, and she asked me, “Are you always like this?” and I asked, “Like what?” She’s in her residency, and looks like a teenager, but still told me that I was only 23 and had plenty of time to figure things out. Says Doogie Howser LCP (I’m sure she’s actually at least 25). It’s too late for me to apply to grad school this year, and I’m not even sure if I could handle it, even if I did get my applications in got accepted.
My parents still live in the house I grew up in. I’m staying in my childhood bedroom, which of course feels much smaller now. Last weekend was Halloween: I carved a pumpkin for the first time in years and roasted pumpkin seeds. When I was a kid, I would dress up as Dorothy every year. The Wizard of Oz was my favorite movie. My second favorite was Creature From The Black Lagoon, with its underwater scenes and a sexy damsel in distress. My family used to go to this crappy restaurant because it was called Woody’s Barbecue. I could pretend it was named after me, and it had a mural of Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow on the wall. My parents would always introduce me to the waitresses. They had good curly fries.
This place feels different every time I come home. I don’t have any friends left here. I love my parents, and they take care of me, but it’s weird not talking to anyone my age. And I find it hard to relate to the girl who grew up here. I tried to throw her away when I left, to find myself in a Euro-Eat-Pray-Love sort of way.
I’ve been having more sex dreams than normal in my little twin bed, maybe because I haven’t been on a date in ages, maybe thinking about the missing twin. Not that it would be a good idea. I think if I did, I would fall in love with the first person I met, but then again I do that even when I’m not lonely. I’m pretty much in love with everyone, all the time. I see my salvation in everyone. It makes me feel like a bad feminist, this wanting to be rescued. Why can’t I be the girl who saves herself? And maybe I will be, someday. But now I just want to lick my wounds and be around old friends. I want to go home. But I am home.
I just finished a song that I had started writing in high school. I used to write love songs with open chords (this was long before I had my first kiss and learned to play barre chords). This song only has three notes. It’s about an awkward hookup that leads nowhere, and it ends with the line “Is it weird? That I’m still writing songs about you?”
Woody is a graduate of Davidson College, a singer and songwriter, and currently resides in Jacksonville, FL.