We're all mad here

“How many days have you had that sweater on backwards?” my roommate Leila asked, sounding concerned.

I rolled over on the couch, tossing an empty water bottle onto the large pile that had amassed in our living room before correcting her, “Backwards and inside out.” I then flopped face first onto our hideous magenta throw pillow and sighed.

“You haven’t been talking to Olivia, again, have you?” I could tell that she was eyeing the beat-up little cell phone, which was erupting into a series of telling vibrations in my palm. I opened my hand and listened to the phone thud thud thud onto the floor. The battery popped out and put an end to the vibrating.

I took my face out of the pillow to answer Leila. “Only kind of…She’s been calling and crying and apologizing all morning.”

“Oh god.” She sighed, rolling her eyes.

I sat up and began nodding in agreement. “I know. Don’t worry, I know. She’s still a piece of shit. It doesn’t change anything.”

She made her way over to our mini-fridge and poured herself a glass of lemonade as she spoke. “Honestly, Olivia cheated on you on Valentine’s Day. It’s never gonna get better with her. You just have to let go.”

Even though her words were nearly identical to the thoughts that had been running through my head ever since my now ex-girlfriend had drunkenly confessed to fucking a stranger at a house party, it was still hard to hear. I grinded my face into the pillow and told myself I wasn’t going to cry. Leila suggested that getting off campus might be good for me. I agreed, reluctantly.

***

Because of Mardi Gras, Magazine Street was squirming with anxious parade-goers killing time before the next batch of floats showed up. Leila’s friend Ana and our mutual friend Morgan accompanied Leila and me on our outing. But the lack of elbowroom in every store we entered, mixed with the fact that any given Mardi Gras-goer is at least eight times louder and six times more obnoxious than when parade season is out of session, left me feeling more irate than ever. The traffic as we headed back to our dorm particularly grated on my nerves. As I watched joyous people set up for the next parade, hatred burned from somewhere deep inside my soul. I felt like Grendel or the Grinch; I would have stolen Mardi Gras and gobbled up drunken New Orleanians in a second, if it had been a realistic possibility.

We made it back to home just as I began to wonder if Mardi Gras increased or decreased New Orleans’ flammability. Upon returning, I immediately resumed my position on the couch and stopped responding to my friends’ attempts to converse with me. Eventually, everyone cleared out, and I was alone. I locked myself in my room. The day before, in a rage, I had knocked everything that had once been on a shelf onto the floor, including picture frames, which now laid in glittering shards on the carpet. I had ripped all of the sheets off of my bed and thrown them around my room. Irked that I could find nothing else to knock over, I curled up in the middle of the floor and covered myself with a blanket. I called Olivia and immediately began screaming at her when she answered. I did not stop screaming for two hours. Eventually, I screamed myself to sleep.

***

My best friend, Andrew, found me the next morning, asleep on the floor.

Confused, he said, “Liz, your room killed itself.” I poked my head out of my blanket and stared at him. “Is your sweater on backwards and inside out?” he asked.

I said meekly, “Olivia cheated on me.”

In an instant, he scraped me up off of the floor and cradled me like a mother would have. I didn’t say anything; I just let him hold me. Andrew broke the silence a few minutes later. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

I looked up at him and shrugged. “What can I do?”

“We have to do something. Make something. Build something. I don’t know. We can’t just sit here.”

“Like what?” I perked up a bit at the thought. Being depressed is only interesting for so long.

And then the idea struck him. “We are going to make a sculpture. We can use the water bottles. We’ll make it in the quad. Let’s go. We are making a sculpture right now!”

I had been saving empty water bottles for the past four months because my school had no recycling program for plastic and throwing them all away seemed like a waste. By this time, Andrew and I had six large trash bags full of empty bottles to work with for our art project. We carried all six bags into the middle of the quad outside of my dorm and emptied them out into one big pile. We sat down cross-legged and started taping pairs of bottles together at the neck.

“Should it be a message?” Andrew asked, pushing his curly brown hair out of his face. “A fuck Valentine’s Day, fuck relationships, fuck love message?”

I nodded. “I could do that.”

Though campus was mostly a ghost town due to Mardi Gras festivities, people were continually dropping by to ask what we were doing with so many empty water bottles. Some stayed and chatted with us and helped us with our project. Others looked at us like we were insane and moved along. By the time that we had finished painting all of the bottles and it was time to start zip-tying them to the fence in front of my dorm, it was already getting dark. Andrew and I snapped a picture of our day’s masterpiece just before the sunset. We took one last look at our artwork, a rainbow of bottles that spelled out, “I DON’T KNOW WHY I LOVE YOU,” before parting ways.

As I walked inside my building, footage from a Mardi Gras parade was playing in the lobby. The glimpse that I caught of masses of merry people grabbing for beads, spilling their drinks, and screaming happily, as they watched giant paper mâché monstrosities go by, did not irritate me as it had the day before. If anything, the mess on the streets reminded me of the disaster I had created in my own room. At that moment, I realized that we have a right to let ourselves go mad ever so often, for the sake of our mental well-being. Though I generally dislike parades, crowds, intoxicated people, cold weather, and floats, I was not entirely left out of the 2010 Mardi Gras celebration. For those few days, I allowed myself to go mad with the rest of the city (though for different reasons and in a different fashion than most).

I turned away from the T.V. and took the elevator to my room. Once again, I was alone with my mess, but this time I was finished living in it.  I knelt down and began carefully picking the shards of glass out of my carpet, one by one.