Relapse

My emotions were all over the place today. I don’t know what it is. Lack of sleep maybe? My sleeping was a lot of worst last year but I never went from extremely satisfied to extremely pissed off and then back to calm.

This evening, I found myself alone wandering the busy streets of Santana Row, the rich people land of the Santa Clara Valley, a thirty-minute drive away. I reflected on my day, which was mostly amazing. Today at Breakthrough, we had our Olympics, an academic/athletic/whatever competition among all the crews. My crew was pretty discouraged after losing all of the games that led up to relay race, the biggest event. But in the relay race, we placed third out of thirteen, and that brought our crew spirit way back up. The school day ended on a good note.

After school, all the teachers (including Trung) went to a Thai place to celebrate reaching the halfway point of Breakthrough, but I sat out on this one because I had relatives coming over from the other side of the country, and I don’t think I’ve ever met them. My mom really wanted me home in the evening to have dinner and (re)meet them. So I didn’t go to the staff dinner.

But here I was now, evening time, wandering down the streets of Santana Row. I didn’t intend coming back home until after late. I needed time to cool off.

I had somewhat of an argument with my dad, and I overreacted and lost my temper. Even as I was driving off in my car, I could feel the disbelief settling. I hope I didn’t just mess things up. I hope I didn’t put a setback in all of our progress. Up until now, my parents and I haven’t had any bad moments for more than a year.

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(I’m feeling more memories coming up, such as the following journal entry, which I wrote on November 18, 2007.)
“This is the Game”
I woke up 5 AM in the morning on Saturday and by 6 AM, I was leaping over mountains of clothing, papers, books, and simply just junk in my room and was quickly out of my house. All day I was with Trung in another city, and when I finally came back home half an hour before midnight, flipping the light switch at my room’s door revealed that the floor in my room was entirely cleared, lines in the carpet suggested that it was vacuumed, and my papers and books lay neatly on my desk.

I stood there frozen in my doorway, shocked. As though there were invisible bear traps laid all over the carpet, I cautiously made my way towards the center of the room and examined my unfamiliar surroundings. No tricks. Everything was clean. My mom definitely had a field day.

A few things were placed somewhere that I didn’t expect them to be placed. My bag of condoms, instead of being in a drawer where I kept my art supplies, was lying right there on my lamp table adjacent to my lube and chocolate-flavored condoms, which were all also carefully arranged. What was the look on her face when my mom peeked into that bag? Was my mom trying to send me some kind of message by leaving my sex necessities there in the open?

Shaking off the condoms, I kneeled down in front of my drawer of art supplies and reached behind it. I grabbed air. Devastation hit me. Where I had kept nearly every single piece of art or writing that I had done since the first grade was now completely empty. Pictures with crayon color crawling over the lines, stories about Star Fox written in the second grade, my Super Eater comic series that I drew as a kid—all gone.

I slowly rose from my feet but kept my eyes locked on my art drawer. I was silently fuming. My heart was racing. And then I was boiling. Something important was lost.

I scooped up everything in my drawer and made it rain. I swept all the papers off of my desk with my arm and emptied my bag of condoms all over the carpet. I kicked over my table, knocking everything to the floor. I plowed through every wall of my room like a fucking tornado. Then in the middle of the sea of papers, paints, paintbrushes, glue, markers, pipe cleaners, wooden skewers, and rainbow glitter, I made myself a small island where I began shuffling through everything. I moved at a fast pace. Leafing. Rummaging. Searching. I came up with nothing.



The next morning (today), I was in the bathroom doing my hair when I heard a voice cry out from my room. It was the howl of a dying Vietnamese hound, my mother.

“Brian, you are an evil bitch!” (This was all said in Vietnamese by the way, otherwise this would’ve already been pre-FOBified with about three grammatical mistakes.) “How could you do this? You’re a hateful monst—oh, god, I spent five hours cleaning your room yesterday! Come out of the bathroom now!”

I sauntered out of the bathroom and met her glare. Unmoved by her streaming tears, I laid it out to her (in English): “I was looking for something. You threw away a piece of paper that I wrote a very important password on. Without it, I now cannot access my college applications at all, and there is no way to retrieve that password online.”

“Brian, do you think I would throw out all your papers without reading them?” she scoffed. “I put the UC letter with your password next to your laptop last night. Now here it is on the floor!” She kicked the letter.

“That’s not it,” I pointed out. “After you register with that password, you type in your own new one. I wanted to be safe by using a password that I had never used before, and I wrote it down because I hadn’t memorized it yet. You wouldn’t have recognized it to have not thrown it away. It was written on a torn sticky note, and the sticky note was totally unlabeled. Just a seemingly useless piece of paper with a bunch of random characters.”

She stared at me slowly trying to comprehend every piece of information I had throwing at her. I blinked about three more times before she finally brushed past my shoulder and out my door, silent with defeat. A minute later, she came back up with a huge garbage bag and dumped it out over my floor. Sniffling, she began sorting threw everything that she had thrown away. She never looked up once. It was too pathetic to watch, so I grabbed my car keys and headed out of the house, not planning to come back until very late.



I stepped back into my room at 10 PM tonight. The floor to my room was entirely cleared, lines in the carpet suggested that it was vacuumed, and my papers and books lay neatly on my desk.

There was no small torn sticky note with a bunch of random characters on my desk; there wasn’t one anywhere. She didn’t find it, and honestly, I expected her to not be able to find it because she really had no chance. There never was a piece of paper with my UC application access code written on it in the first place.