Irises

Speak now.

He paused, confused. These days, the voices usually babbled in the background, giggling and gossiping and god knows what else. They whispered when he was on the street. They whispered at night when he was trying to sleep. They whispered constantly, but they rarely made sense.

Speak now.

“About what?” he asked.

Valeria gave him a puzzled look. She put her french fry down. “Are you hearing voices again?” 

Uli blinked back embarrassment. He cleared his throat. “No. I just…I was thinking out loud.”

The voices returned to their whispers somewhere in the background. He wondered if they were as ashamed of themselves as he was.

“What are you thinking about?” Valeria asked, watching him with narrowed eyes.

“I was…” he faltered. “I was thinking about your wedding.”

“Oh boy.” She pushed her plate away and crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re the only one who hasn’t caused me problems about this yet. Are you about to cause me problems?”

“Of course not. No. I…I don’t know.” He sighed. “Aren’t we all kinda young to get married, though?”

She rolled her eyes. “We’re about to graduate college–”

“You’re about to graduate–”

“Mark and I are about to graduate,” she said. “We’re about to go out in the grown up world, get grown up jobs, have grown up bills. We’re not too young to get married. That’s not what this is about. Be honest with me here.”

She was right. He looked away, afraid she’d read his mind if they locked eyes for too long. Outside the diner window, snow settled on the college campus. Students walked in pairs or groups, huddled in winter gear. 

Speak now.

No. Not now.

Valeria leaned across the table and took his hands. Her warm fingers and soft palms grounded him. He pulled his gaze from the scene outside, and the whispering voices disappeared entirely.

“What is this about?” she asked him. “What’s the problem?”

The words wouldn’t come. They sat in his brain, locked behind some wall, and though he pushed, they wouldn’t move.

She frowned,  let go of him and grabbed her backpack. She roped the strap over one shoulder before standing up. “I love you, Uli,” she said, “but you have to figure your shit out.”

***

That night, as everyone else left the apartment, Mark held him back. He put a hand on Uli’s shoulder and said, “You got a minute?”

Uli didn’t like Mark much. Call it jealousy, call it a natural response to someone with whom he had nothing in common save Valeria. An economics major with a full academic scholarship, a job lined up before he even graduated. Every step of his life was planned out while Uli fell more and more behind with each passing year. No matter how sober or how well medicated, he was always behind.

“I’m glad you came,” Mark said. He put his beer down and leaned against the wall of his entryway. “I know it’s weird.”

Uli gave him a blank stare. “It’s not weird.”

“I don’t mean this is weird,” he said, motioning at his apartment, at the mess that was the remains of a small gathering. Valeria had gone into the bathroom, and she appeared to still be there. Mark glanced at the bathroom to be sure before he lowered his voice. He said, “She told me about your history.”

“You’ve known about that for a while.”

“No, I mean the other stuff.” Before Uli could respond, he added, “And just so you know, it really put it in perspective. I had a hard time with my fiance’s best friend being a guy she used to sleep with, you know? Not anymore, though. It’s all good.”

A guy she used to sleep with. Uli put his hands in his pockets and steeled himself. “Anything else?” 

Mark must have noticed the shift in tone, the edge Uli put behind the words. He changed his stance and his expression darkened to something else. Anger, defensiveness, annoyance? He said, “She needs someone who can take care of her.”

“She can take care of herself.”

“Right, right.” Mark’s brows furrowed. “You know what I mean, though. I take care of her. She takes care of me. It’s a two-way street. She doesn’t have to worry about anything with me.”

“She’s a lucky woman.”

“She is. And her wedding is going to go perfectly. Okay?”

“Sure, man.”

Uli left. No other words, no need for additional exchanges. He wasn’t going to defend himself, to push back on whatever picture Mark had created of him in his brain, and he wasn’t going to give himself time to be angry at Valeria. She could share what she needed to share with her future husband.

Uli just wished she hadn’t.

He raced down the apartment building’s hallways, down the stairs. He pushed so hard against the exit door that it swung wide, halted in its tracks, creaked against the wintry wind.

It was dark and muted outside. Snow fell fast, much faster than when he’d arrived earlier that evening. He probably shouldn’t drive home in this, not with these thoughts whirling in his head and the emotions churning in his stomach.

“Uli!”

He glanced behind him to see Valeria rushing out the door. She caught up to him and paused, catching her breath. Snowflakes landed in her hair and on her skin, melting. She wasn’t wearing a jacket, and now she wrapped her arms around herself in the cold.

“What happened?” she asked.

Uli shook his head. “I just need to get home. The roads are gonna be shit if I wait too long.”

“Mark was pissed. What did you say to him?”

“What did I say to him?”

Valeria’s teeth chattered and she stomped her untied boots against the ground. 

Speak now, the voice said again. The other voices joined. Speak now, speak now, speak now. 

He shook them off and took a step closer to her. He cupped her face in his hands, hating that she was cold and wanting to make her warm. Or maybe it was an excuse to touch her again. She didn’t move away. She brought her own warmer hands up to cover his fingers. He leaned his forehead against hers and found himself holding back tears.

“I’m sorry I’m like this,” he said.

“What happened?” 

He wanted to kiss her, to tell her that he still loved her and that he’d worked so hard to do everything she needed. He’d done all the therapy. He took what was prescribed. The worst of it was over, and he was willing to work this hard for the rest of his life if he had to. And he would have to.

“Uli?”

He closed his eyes. “I’m just nervous about the wedding.”

She didn’t say anything. He knew she didn’t believe him.

Speak now.

He asked, “You love him, right?” 

“Uli,” she whispered. “It’s not the same.”

“What do you mean?”

She shook her head free of him, wiped at the snow on her face.  “I mean, I love him enough, “ she said.

Speak now. Speak now, the voices cried.

What could he possibly say, though?

She turned his back on him and went home.

***

Uli stared down at the pills in his palm and contemplated how easy it would be not to take them. Maybe he wouldn’t take them tomorrow either. He’d start that slow detachment from reality, probably not even noticing.

It sounded nice, to be honest. Sure, the last time it happened, it wasn’t fun. He got paranoid in ways he couldn’t understand now that he was out of it. The voices had been indiscernible from everybody else around him, a wall of derisive and intrusive commentary on his day-to-day.

If he went down that path, he’d be in the hospital again soon enough. Someone would get him there. They’d take care of him, and he’d peace out for a while. 

“Action opposite emotion,” he said out loud. It was his therapeutic mantra these days. “Action opposite emotion.”

He took his pills, shut the bottle, and put them away. He went about life, holding on to that tether of reality. 

He went to class, and he studied. Graduation wasn’t happening for him like it was for his friends, but he kept the books open and the laptop juiced up. He studied, and he showed up to class despite everything in him that said otherwise. Including the occasional rogue voice that the meds just couldn’t smother. 

Action opposite emotion.

What about these? Valeria texted.

He stared down at his phone and a picture of a bouquet of roses. He thought it would make him sad. It was hard to feel anything, though. Too much, he typed.

Yeah, she responded. Fine. U coming out?

No.

Action opposite emotion.

In another time, that mantra would push him into going out with her, with Mark, with all their friends. Right now, it meant seeing her as little as possible. He wanted to see her. The voices kept telling her to find her, to the point that they even intruded on his dreams, but he acted opposite that emotion.

She sent a snapchat of her out by the flowers growing on campus. “Where have you been?” she said in the video. “Come out. I miss you.”

He responded without a video. Sorry. Studying for finals.

He passed the wedding invitation every day. He’d stuck it to his refrigerator in his cramped efficiency apartment, and he didn’t have the heart to throw it away so he wouldn’t see it.

Action opposite emotion.

He didn’t attend graduation. He stopped responding to everybody save the group of people who had nothing to do with Valeria. He talked to his cousins, his friends back home, and he contemplated going back to that place. There was nothing else in this college town. Valeria wasn’t going back home anytime soon, so even if he went back to see the high school where they first met, it would still be less painful. 

And suddenly it was June.

***

His dad bought him a ticket home. The flight left on the day of the wedding. Tomorrow.

Uli sat in the park across from his apartment building. He hadn’t renewed his lease, and he watched as other college kids moved their couches down steps and slowly filled the communal dumpster. From where he sat, they were all tiny bodies, and he wondered how many were acting opposite emotion as they tossed out their old lives and headed towards new ones. 

The sun shone bright. He squinted against it, and he thought he saw Valeria heading towards him. He thought he saw her dressed in a long lavender gown, clutching a bouquet.

He’d never visually hallucinated before. This was new.

Then she was sitting next to him. 

“Hey, Uli,” she said, as if it wasn’t strange at all for her to be out here on a bench, dressed to the nines and smelling like perfection. Did hallucinations have smells? She watched him as if he looked just as strange to her as she did to him. “Why have you been avoiding me?”

“I haven’t,” he said and he winced at the automatic lie. 

“You’ve been my best friend for years. I’d notice if you were avoiding me.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He bowed his head and stared at his hands. 

“I was at my rehearsal dinner,” she said after a moment. “I had to leave.”

Worry welled up inside him. He couldn’t help it. “What happened?” 

She sighed then caught him looking at the flowers. They were irises, a few shades darker than her dress. More fitting than the roses she’d texted him. “Do you know why I chose them?” she said.

He shook his head.

“We went to that Van Gogh exhibit that one time, remember?” She smiled at the memory. He almost did, too, but it was too hard right now. He still didn’t know if she was real.

“You love Van Gogh,” she continued. “So you made me come, and they had his iris paintings there. The exhibit talked about how he painted those irises while he was at the asylum in France. The irises were in the hospital garden. That image always stuck in my head. He was suffering and sad and stuck in this hospital, and he still found this beautiful thing.” 

She paused, not smiling as much now. Her fingers traced the petals of an iris. “When you got sick,” she said,  “and you went to the hospital…there were no windows in your room and no hospital garden you could visit. You couldn’t even leave the floor. I would visit you, then I’d come home and I’d think about those irises, and I’d cry because you were so alone. I couldn’t be there with you, and there was no garden.”

He felt a lump in his throat. He pushed it down. “So you got a bouquet that…that reminded you of your crazy ex-boyfriend?”

She let out a small laugh, and then she looked guilty about it. “No, no. I saw this on Pinterest at first, and it triggered something. There was this overwhelming feeling of…of you. I associated it with you, you know? When I got this in my hands today and saw it for the first time in reality, it reminded me of what a relationship actually means. It reminded me that I failed on my part. I left you when you needed me most.”

“No you didn’t. You left because I refused to help myself. I wasn’t listening.”

She shook her head. “At the dinner today, I was talking with my mom about the vows for tomorrow, and I was thinking about those words the pastor always says. I thought about all those dramatic scenes in movies or Taylor Swift songs where the pastor says ‘Speak now or forever hold your peace’, and it played on loop on my brain. Speak now,” she said. She glanced at him, meeting his gaze. “‘Speak now’. That just kept going through my head.”

“Mine, too,” he said.

“I realized that I hoped you’d be there and that you’d speak now. That you’d stop it all for me.”

He held his breath. Even the voices kept their silence, as if they were also afraid they’d ruin this moment. He reached out, put his hand over Jets. She felt real. 

“Do you think I should marry Mark?” she said.

“I don’t.”

“Should I marry you?”

He laughed. “No.”

She allowed a small smile, and then she moved his hand. She put the bouquet in her lap and wrapped her arms around his neck. She pulled him in close. “I’m sorry I gave up on you,” she whispered.

“I’ve gotten better,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’ll always listen to you. If you tell me I’ve lost it–if I’m taking these meds but it all starts to get bad again–I’ll believe you. I’ll do whatever you say. I trust you. I’m going home tomorrow, but if you don’t want to go back there, I can stay here too. I can figure it out.”

“You’re going back home?”

“Yeah.” He dared to ask the question. “Do you want to come with me?”

She sighed and closed her eyes. “Do you still love me, Uli?”

“I do.” He didn’t need to think about it. “Do you want to come back home with me?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

And as the sun lowered towards the horizon, they sat in each other’s presence. Uli didn’t think about the future. He didn’t think about the past. He savored this moment and appreciated the irony of listening to that voice inside. Sometimes it wasn’t bad. Sometimes you heard it say speak now…

…and you did.