I Really feel In Neon — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
I’m late. Again. I can’t put on the polo Mom just washed. She used fabric softener. The shirt has miniature bumps, like sandpaper dragged across my shoulders, and the color; that washed-out navy, presses against my throat.
I sit in my room, staring at it, hoping to come to a truce with my school clothes. I try an undershirt tucked into my khaki skort. It’s working double duty, covering the tag and helping my torso survive the sandpaper. But my arms still feel it. And that color. It is suffocating.
I start to cry.
Mom says I’m too old to cry when she hurls open the door. She shoves the polo over my head, sends me off to school, the place with the humming lights. My friends in the neighborhood tell me I’m lucky to go to private school. I ask if their lights hum. They say no. They don’t understand the question. Their lights probably hum too, they just don’t hear it. I only know the fluorescent lights humming all day in my school feel like punishment.
Every class holds caution. Miss Shirley, who teaches Bible class, prints on the chalkboard board. “Cursive makes less scratches,” I tell her once. She doesn’t understand.
Science is the worst. The silver boxes hanging over the lab tables, fluorescent tubes encased in metal, each humming in a completely different key. It’s a war of clashing notes. I could hear the intervals fighting.
The projector in history hums in G3, tolerable at first, until it overheats and climbs sharp all the way to B, tightening like a wire pulled too far. I wait for the pop that never comes. It makes me nervous.
Thirty pencils in math class scrape against wood beneath thin paper. Matthew grinds his pencil to a nub and keeps going. Graphite against wood. The sound hits bone.
At Gym, the whistle like a blade splits the air.
English is safe, except the teacher smells like cumin, or hummus, or curry, and the scent sits in the back of my throat all period.
Music is refuge, except for the spit valves. The metallic splatter on tile. I swallow hard. If I get placed next to Laura Norman in choir again, I may die. I need to buy her Tic Tacs.
By noon I am exhausted—but not from learning. From bracing.
I like going home to an empty house. Mom is out with my brothers, while Dad is still at work.
Silence.
Mom asks why I didn’t start my homework or clean my room. I say I’m tired.
What I mean is, I am saturated.
I don’t have language for sensory overload yet. I only know that by the time I get home, there isn’t enough of me left to start anything else.
Unable to begin.
Unable to decide.
Unable to move without first dimming.
I feel like a human kaleidoscope on a carousel, everything turning, nothing settling. I don’t learn I am autistic until years later. Until then, I assume everyone feels this way and that growing up simply means enduring it better. It never occurs to me that other people aren’t hearing the lights that I still hear clearly.
I turn forty in a month.
Yesterday, before a meeting I was leading, I took my pantyhose off in the car. I had thought I could keep them on. Then itch that started small, bloomed. Within minutes it was all I could think about. I was taught, a pencil skirt without pantyhose is scandalous,The meeting went fine. I only clawed under the table.
Though I’m not sure what was said. I was present, but not listening. There were thirteen chairs around the table. Why thirteen? The garbage can smelled like yesterday’s donuts. Old sugar, not sweet.
Although I was leading the meeting, I couldn’t follow it. Later, my husband told me how it went. I was just happy it was over.
As we drove home, he didn’t ask how I felt. He waited through an indeterminate stretch as a of road and silence.
He asked in his sweet, quiet voice if I wanted tea or a cocktail. I was already naked. I have mastered taking off my clothes almost as quickly as the front door closes.
Pima cotton pajamas. They were calling to me. Then I heard what he’d asked, perhaps long after he asked it. His voice is baritone. A cello on settling on a middle string. I answered, finally.
“Both.”
He smiled. I sat in my yellow chair with both drinks. He brought my fuzzy blanket and kissed my head. People used to tell me to calm down, like it’s a choice. For me, it was a dimmer switch I didn’t have. I wasn’t dramatic. I was fluorescent. And fluorescent things don’t dim on command. Light isn’t the problem, the room is.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
