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TITLE: Bliss By Tyler Petty 05/01/07 |
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My first impression of Phillip was that he was blessed with ignorance. I know if my life was like his, I’d be miserable all the time. I’d either lock myself in my room and cry all day or go out and do all of the worst possible things I could think of, just to make a point. I’m sure I wouldn’t still be a virgin, and I would definitely know what alcohol tasted like. I bet I would do something even worse, too. But Philip isn’t like that at all. He just gets up in the morning, finds whatever food he can for breakfast, and then he goes outside and draws. He always looks like he’s concentrating so hard on his drawings, but I guess that’s because he can’t really concentrate on anything. Sometimes I wish I knew what that feels like.
I moved into the house next to Philip’s nine months ago. I introduced myself to everyone in the neighborhood the first few weeks we were here, and most of the families were so nice and welcoming. It was the close to the end of summer, so all of the kids were out of school already and I got to meet them and their moms, but the dads were all at work
When I went to Philip’s house, though, no one answered the door. I could tell someone was there, because the lights inside went off right when I got on the porch. They kept their curtains closed, but I could see light coming out around them. It could be that I just don’t remember him doing it before, but I think that later that afternoon was the first time I saw Philip draw.
He sat out on the porch, or sometimes on the grass in the back yard, with his notebook and his crayons. He has a lot of different colors, but I’ve only seen him use three of them. I don’t know why only uses those three colors. Sometimes he would stick his tongue out while he drew, and if I opened the window, I could hear him grunting or squealing. Sometimes I thought it sounded like crying.
He has an older sister, but it took me almost an entire month to find that out. She doesn’t live at their house anymore. Philip really loved her, from what I can tell, but apparently her parents didn’t. I think she got together with this bad boyfriend or something—she might have even gotten pregnant—and her parents kicked her out because of that. From the pictures I’ve seen, she looks a lot like me.
I still haven’t actually met his parents, but I hear them arguing a lot. Actually, all I hear is them turning up this classical opera music really loud, and then I hear crashing and stomping coming from their house. I didn’t figure out what was happening until I found the first picture Philip drew for me.
He worked on it for two straight days, but even then, it looked like something a little kid could have scribbled out in a few minutes. It was a picture of his house. His parents were in the living room, and they had their hands around each other, but they weren’t hugging or anything. They were too far apart for that. There were these little squiggles all around them, which I figured out are supposed to represent music, and his parents had their mouths wide open, which is Philip’s way of showing arguing. Philip is in the picture, too. He’s crouching on the floor with his hands over his ears. I guess the music is supposed to drown out their shouting
He left that first picture, and all the ones after it, taped to the fence that separates our yards. I’ve never actually seen him put one up there, but every once in a while, when I went out to look at our little garden, there would be a picture there. Most of his pictures are repeats. The one with his parents arguing comes back at least twice a month, and there’s a picture of his sister even more often than that. The ones of her with her boyfriend didn’t start until later.
I’m not sure, now, why I never tried harder to talk to his parents. It probably would not have fixed anything, but it might have at least made it better. Even that would have been worth it for him, I guess. I kind of forgot all about Philip for a while after I met Simon.
At first, I didn’t like the idea of moving in to a new high school for my junior year, but my dad’s job got transferred, and with everything that had happened with Luke, my first boyfriend, the year before we moved, I was ready to get away by the time we finally moved. Luke was one of those really nice guys, the kind you love hanging out with because he makes you feel safe, but at the same time, you know you’d never want to marry him or even live with him. He was kind of boring, but when you get right down to it, that wasn’t the real reason I broke up with him. We started dating because we’d always been really comfortable with each other, and we both thought it would be fun. I knew there was not going to be any future with him, but he was nice and sweet and made he laugh every once in a while. I thought he would be a good first boyfriend for me.
I thought he understood all of that, too. That was my big mistake. Pretty soon, I could see that he thought our relationship was more than just something fun to do. He was taking it way more seriously than I was, and I decided to stop it right there before it got any worse. He never talked to me after that, but I would get messages and letters from him a few times every week. After a while I didn’t even read them.
So when I met Simon at the beginning of the school year, I was pretty cautious. I didn’t want to do to another guy what I had done to Luke. But we clicked almost immediately—the first times were when we ate lunch together and during classes—and pretty soon I knew I wanted him. It was only a few weeks later when he asked me out, and now he comes over to my house practically every day. My dad loves him. The three of us eat dinner together and it doesn’t feel weird or awkward at all, even when we hold hands at the table.
One morning I looked out the window and saw that Philip wasn’t outside. He had been there the night before, when I was sitting on the back porch with Simon. He was drawing and we both waved at him. Simon’s really good with kids like Philip, he even talks about working with them for a living, but for some reason, Philip always seemed to ignore him, like he was pretending he wasn’t there.
Later that same morning I noticed two new pictures on the fence. I’m not sure how long they had been there, to be honest. I could not remember the last time I’d looked. I heard an ambulance siren while I looked at them. The first one was a parents arguing drawing. The second was a picture of his sister, who still looked like me, and a guy who could have been Simon sitting on a back porch. The fence was in the drawing, too, and on the other side of it, Philip was crouched with his hands over his ears.
Just then I noticed that there were people in Philip’s house, which was really weird because his parents are never home during the day. I went out front and saw a woman standing there. She was Philip’s mother. I still had not met her, even though I had lived next to her for almost a year and her son had been drawing me pictures of his painful life for just as long. She saw me and asked what I was carrying. I told her about the pictures, and she asked if she could see them. She laughed when she saw the first one, and she cried when she looked at the second.
“He really loved to watch us sing and dance,” she said. “At first he was scared of it, but once he figured out what we were doing, he liked it. He pretended he didn’t because he thought it was funny. Can I keep this?”
“Sure,” I told her. I didn’t think to mention I had close to a hundred pictures just like that one.
She handed the other picture back to me. I tried to tell her she could keep that one too, but she said, “No. I don’t want to see this one. You keep it, or destroy it if you like. It’s too painful for me to look at.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it. Instead I asked a question I had been wondering about for a long time. “What was your daughter’s name?”
“What?”
“Your daughter. Philip drew me pictures of her too. They were hugging and stuff.”
“I don’t have a daughter. We had to try for a long time to have Philip, and then once we realized he was going to be handicapped, we decided it would be too hard to try again. Philip was our only child.”
“Then who’s the girl in all those pictures?” I asked, terrified of the answer but already knowing what it would be.
“Who do you think it is?”
She really does look like me. I always thought that was a coincidence. “Where is Philip, by the way? He’s usually outside drawing now.”
“I found him outside early this morning. I usually read the paper on our back porch before I get ready for work. He was lying in the grass. His crayons were scattered all over the yard, and he was holding a knife in his hands.”
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