Me, Mental.

I never really have felt anything. I have never cried from sadness, never yelled in anger, never screamed in pain; never fell, surely and deeply, in love. My mom just tells me I am “strong and reserved” but maybe that just code. Code like “ Every night I look around my room for what to pack so I could leave this town” uttered by my older brother, my idol, in a tearful confession to my mom, heard through too thin walls. Depression. That what his doctor thinks. Code like my mom driving to a town only an hour away, yet my kid brother runs two blocks towards the highway, only to be picked up by a kind neighbor. My mom has 'Separation Anxiety' book marked in her copy of the manual on mental disorders. Maybe my lack of feelings is just a tap, tapping of a switch, spelling out ‘Asperger’s disorder’. So I can be shelved with my two other siblings, labeled and rolled up. My older brother ‘Depression’, and my younger ‘Separation Anxiety’. Me right next to them ‘Asperger’s Disorder, possible Dyslexia’. My best friend believes she has Asperger’s too. She has ADD and OCD, little initials spelling out big problems. Or are they really problems? Every single little label could lead to a dangerous path. Drugs, more ‘disorders’, peer rejection, loss of rights. 'Couldn’t we just stop before this get out of hand?' 'No!' scream the collective voices of every doctor and their like, 'We must fix you to be perfect!' (but they whisper 'We must get paid'). But a little voice, so quiet I almost can’t hear it, whispers too, in the back of my mind then growing louder and louder, 'no, no, nO, nO, NO, NO, NOO! WE CAN STOP.' Stop this crazy train before it careens off the tracks in a downward spiral, down to the darkest pits, to crash through the floor and go deeper to those caves that when you were little, hell, even now, make you scream, those ones that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Well, there we can’t see those labels, so maybe that’s for the best.