Brandon liked me. He had liked me all along.
“Some people might wonder, why would Rachel think I would have gone out with Crystal if I liked Rachel better? The thing is, people like us, who don't enter into a lot of relationships, we know that we don't always go out with the person we like the best. Sometimes, if you don't know someone likes you, you just settle!”
“Did you settle for Crystal?” I asked Brandon, with my mind.
“No! I didn't mean that I settled for Crystal, I really liked her!” Brandon said.
“Okay.” I tuned out of the conversation, and went to use the bathroom. While sitting on the toilet, I could still hear Brandon.
“What the hell? Rachel misread me! I can't believe that Rachel heard me wrong! I did settle for Crystal!” Brandon was telling this to Chance.
I didn't acknowledge this in any way. I didn't think any thoughts back to him. I'm not sure why I didn't. I think it was because I didn't want to acknowledge that I was arrogant enough to think that everyone would have rather been in a relationship with me.
The spiritual mission was… the search for the ugly soul!
On Facebook, I had written that I was on a spiritual mission. I thought about the universe, and the infection, and how God was trying to rid himself of it by casting out the ugly soul.
"Weird Zombie Girl was oblivious to the fact that she stares at people with a weird look on her face. Rachel went through school, oblivious to the fact that she looks at people funny."
I imagined that I had this problem where I would stare at people, and I was unaware of it. This happened on purpose. I was designed that way.
"If you catch Rachel staring at you, that means she thinks you might be ugly."
I remember how one day in study hall, a girl I was friends with was telling a story I later realized was an obvious fabrication. I thought it was funny so I was trying to make eye contact with this other girl and smile but she looked away funny when she saw me looking at her. I thought it was embarrassing because it indicated that I believed that story. A year or so later, there was a moment where this same girl made eye contact with me over something else and smiled, and I thought, no, this girl is not ugly. This is not the ugly soul.
Another time, in math class. I was looking in this one guy's direction and he looked at me funny because he thought I was staring at him. Later that year, one of my friends made up with a story about how I had a huge crush on him, and told him, and he seemed to believe it. When I was friend requesting people from high school, I was in a weird state and I came across his profile, I sent him a friend request, but also sent him a message about how that girl made that up, because at that time you could send messages with friend requests. Then I was embarrassed that I had done that, I was just so easily embarrassed, and then I do something to relieve it that makes me more embarrassed. I imagined him saying, "Obviously you had a crush on me, why else would you be staring at me?"
Because he might be the ugly soul. I wasn't really looking at him though.
EDIT: The underlying reason I did this was an emotional security test. This was not a situation this guy was judgmental of, and he was proud of me for adding him anyway, because I almost neglected to, then out of nowhere thought I was punishing him for nothing. When he accepted the friend request, it was before I did picture reading, but it was so strong I noticed it anyway, that he looked grateful. Because the Rachel Zuhl situation was weird.
Anyway, I later sent him Weird Zombie Girl friend requests. People who received actual friend requests did so for various reasons. I sent it to this guy, to indicate that I had determined he was not the ugly soul.
I remembered sending Jordan that message. “You're the girl that's so pretty it's a curse.” I imagined that what this message had really meant was, not that her face was pretty, but her soul was pretty. And being so nice to people all the time was a drag.
I imagined that what Jordan was thinking when she got this message was, “Maybe that explains why she would never look at me.” I wouldn't look because I was intimidated by her because she was so pretty. This was true. But now, I imagined that the real reason I never looked, was because I was already so certain she wasn't the ugly soul, I didn't even bother looking at her.
I stared at myself in the mirror a lot, because I thought I was ugly.
I remembered staring at Nick. Really staring at Nick. And thinking God, this guy was so ugly.
I stare at ugliness. I found him. I FOUND HIM! The ugly soul!
Nick was the ugly soul. The reason life on Earth was created was to cast him out and send him to hell, but take everyone else back to heaven. Except, people weren't accepting Jesus Christ as their savior, and instead were damned to an eternity of torment, a punishment only fit for the one ugly soul.
I took a shower. Afterwards, I went in my room, the towel still wrapped around my body. I was hesitant to drop it. People were watching me. Finally I just did it. I dropped it. I smiled slightly. I was an exhibitionist.
I put on some clothes and sat down on my bed, on my laptop. I felt the wheels turning in the mind of God. "Oh she's an attention whore! Let's ignore the attention whore! We always ignore attention whores!" I considered making this my Facebook status.
"Rachel, no! That's not a very good status. Don't post that." Brandon was telling me.
I had a strange sense of confidence about this, so I argued with him. "No, this is a great status update. It came straight out of the mind of God." I touched my fingertip to my head.
I went ahead and posted it. I thought about John. How people at Innercept had said about him, "oh, he just does that for attention, ignore him." I thought that was kind of odd because maybe, somebody does something for attention because they really need attention. I thought about my Facebook. I had just posted a status about masturbation and hardly anyone said anything. I had posted a really funny video of a cat falling out of a ceiling and only two people liked it. Sure, people had me on their friend's list. But they were ignoring me. I liked other people's posts. I imagined that they thought I was weird for doing this because you were only supposed to like or comment on your real friend's posts, not your random Facebook acquaintances. People from my high school had accepted my friends requests originally, only because it was Facebook etiquette to add people whom you were acquainted with. Now it was Facebook etiquette to ignore me.
I didn't actually know anything at all about Facebook etiquette. I imagined there were all these funny rules I was unfamiliar with.
After I posted this, I heard Brandon saying something. "I was trying to tell Rachel I thought that was a great status update. It came through wrong and she thought I was telling her not to post it."
I imagined that someone on my friend's list was talking to this one guy I went to high school with, Lloyd. The whole thing about lasagna pan and Brandon bugging my house was starting to get out. People knew what was going on. They knew I was the second coming.
I sat next to Lloyd in 8th grade computer class. We had assigned seating. Lloyd was always a jerk to me. Him and the guy sitting next to me on the other side would always talk over me incessantly about shoes. They were obsessed with shoes. One time, I caught Lloyd looking under the table at my feet. He said to the other guy, "Doesn't Converse make gay shoes?" Because I was wearing Converse sneakers.
I never even sent Lloyd a friend request when I added people from high school. I came across his profile, but he hardly had anyone from high school as friends, so I doubted he would add me, whom he was always a jerk to. However, I had added him to Weird Zombie Girl, and he had accepted both friend requests.
"This girl, Rachel Zuhl, she's the second coming of Christ. Right now on Facebook she's making fun of Facebook etiquette. She added everyone as friends a couple years ago."
"She didn't add me!"
"Well, she added most people. She probably didn't add you because you were rude to her."
"I only did that because I liked her."
"Well, she didn't understand that."
Lloyd was really, really bummed. "I can't believe she didn't add me as a friend! I would have accepted."
I heard this. This was happening right then, right in this present moment, unlike some of the other stuff I would sometimes hear that happened after the fact. I looked up Lloyd on Facebook and sent him a friend request. He accepted, almost immediately.
I took this immediate acceptance of the friend request as evidence that I was not delusional.
Chance changed his cover photo. I thought this must be something significant, like it was a hidden message to me.
The new cover photo was a painting. I asked Brandon and Chance, "What's the name of this painting?"
"Dante's Inferno."
I googled that. There were paintings called that. But not the painting Chance had as his cover photo. I searched and searched.
I googled Dante's Peak. "No, Rachel, it's Dante's Apocalypse." I googled that. None of these came up with the right painting.
On one of the painting I found, the premise was something about the Antichrist.
The message being, "Rachel, people are going to think you are the Antichrist!"
"Huh, you're right! So what we do is, we don't come out to the media directly with this story, we make it into a really, really complex work of 'fiction.' The right people will know it's not fiction."
Looking up paintings reminded me of when I went to Italy with my family. I remembered how I had a memorable, very spiritual dream where I was a princess. My name was Princess Solia.
I googled 'Solia.'
There was a brand of flat irons called Solia. "Rachel, you don't flat iron your hair. Guys prefer it when girls don't flat iron their hair. Because their hair looks thicker."
I knew it!
More stuff started to come to me, psychically. I thought about this guy Ben who I had gone to high school with. This was the same guy who told me the bullshit story about going to graveyards and digging up dead bodies and playing baseball with them. Of all the crazy stories I heard people tell in high school, this was the one I didn't believe.
Even though I didn't believe his story, I actually really liked Ben. Ben and I used to be Facebook friends. I would comment on his posts, and one time a little while after I had written a comment I thought was intelligent, I noticed he had removed me as a friend.
But now that I was psychic, or so I thought, I could see that that was not the reason. Ben liked my comment so much, he hacked my Facebook, because he liked me. He had then found all the embarrassing messages I had sent to Brandon, and then the one where I said that I didn't believe he went to graveyards and dug up dead bodies.
"YEAH I DID, I WAS ARRESTED FOR IT!"
I imagined that the one crazy story I didn't believe was the one true story. Ben wasn't exactly stable. He copied my messages, found my book in google documents, and spread these things around Portland.
I sat on my bed and whispered to myself. "Because I didn't believe the really weird true story!"
This was a metaphor for the other "really weird true story," the story about Jesus. Bad things happen to you if you don't believe the really weird true story.
I imagined that people read my book, and some didn't believe it was a mental illness I had. However, some people believed I had just made the whole thing up.
The debate died down, however, back when I stopped believing in myself, and on my blog I referred to my condition as a mental illness.
Some of the stuff in my delusions was so intelligent, it didn't make any sense to people of average intelligence. It takes intelligent people to recognize and understand intelligent stuff.
The debate died down and all but disappeared, but then back when the end of the Mayan calendar was nearing in late 2012, people started thinking about it again, because they associated spiritual stuff with me. That's why "Rachel Zuhl" was suddenly being constantly googled in Portland.
I remembered a while ago, I had written a post on Facebook about how I needed people to read my book. My aunt in Oregon responded, and I responded, saying that it was only open to Idaho residents at this time. Abel, Jeremy's friend, had liked that comment, and he never likes any of my stuff. I thought that was really odd. I imagined the reason was because everyone in Oregon had already read my book.
I remembered how I had a post that said, "I'm not bipolar it was Kundalini syndrome." Todd had liked it. Because Todd had read my book, and that was the side he was on.
I remembered when Ted lived at our house. Ted would ride all around town during the day on his bike. I imagined that he had met people, and told them that he was living at my house and I was giving him head, but no one had believed it. Because I wasn't like that. But then, it said that in my book. And that was odd. But still, people didn't believe it. They thought maybe we had planned that together.
"But the day of the lord will come as a thief in the night…"
I remember when I had $600 in my room and it was stolen, when Ted was living at my house. I imagined that that hadn't been Ted after all. It was kids from my school, they had stolen it in the middle of the night and put the empty wallet in Ted's room. They knew they could get away with it and blame it on Ted.
And it was all biblical.
I was thinking about how I didn't really know that much about Portland. Todd had offered to buy me a doughnut when I mentioned Voodoo Doughnuts. The reason for that was because if you had eaten one fresh, you would know that it was worth the wait. They were that good.
Then I thought, maybe there are things about Portland that I know about that other people didn't know.
I was standing downstairs. "Do other people know about the chip dip lady?" I was doing this for the cameras.
My mom and I were at Costco one time when we bumped into the chip dip lady. She's this lady that comes up to you and asks, "do you like chips?" If you say yes, she will give you her recipe for delightful chip dip: mix sour cream and taco seasoning. Then she will go off, approach someone else, and give them her chip dip recipe. This lady does not work for Costco.
It was odd the first time it happened, but a month later my mom was at Costco again, and she was again approached by the chip dip lady and given the same recipe for dip.
"Yeah, for some people, God wants them to spread their religion, others, their recipe for chip dip." my dad said.
Most people in Portland probably didn't know about the chip dip lady.
I thought about everything that I had now discovered, that people in Portland had read my book. People knew who I was. People knew who I was in high school too, invisible as I felt.
I had thought that I wasn't looked down upon in high school, since no one made fun of me to my face. I hadn't realized that high school isn't like elementary school. In elementary school, people make fun of you to your face. But in high school, people get two-faced. They will be nice to you to your face, but trash you behind your back.
“The day I started taking Adderall was the best day of my life,” I had written in my book. Suddenly, I realized that this was not actually the best day of my life. In reality, this was the day that ruined my life.
As much as I didn't believe it, some guys liked me when I was a little bit heavier. Not when I got skinny. On top of that, I realized, all the girls hated me. They hated me because this was Lake Oswego, people were oriented towards appearances, and they were jealous of me because I was skinnier than them.
I remembered what I had written to Jordan. “You have what all the girls want. But if they had it, they wouldn't want it. Because of the way everyone treats you.” I didn't want what I had. Being skinny wasn't all it was cracked up to be. All the girls hated me because they were jealous. Why would you be jealous of someone that everyone hates?
I would stare at myself in the mirror a lot. Because I stared at ugliness.
“She must think she's so hot. Yeah, well you're still ugly.”
Like they thought I was checking myself out in the mirror because I thought I was hot.
I would sit in class, and play with my hair, touch my hair, I couldn't get my hands off my hair. This was another side effect of the Adderall. This was a tweak.
“Go on, Rachel.” Brandon said to me. “Look up playing with your hair on the internet.”
I did, clicked on a link that came up. It described playing with your hair as an “act of seduction.”
I laughed. Ha! I wasn't trying to be seductive! I was tweaking!
On facebook, for a while I had gotten into the habit of making funny fake anti-meth ads my cover photos. “Chewbacca playing baseball isn't normal. But on meth it is.”
“Running through fire isn't normal. But on meth it is.”
“Reading Calvin and Hobbes with your microwave isn't normal. But on meth it is.”
I thought of a new one. “Playing with your hair all the time isn't normal. But on Adderall it is.”
I headed out for a walk. I had Brandon in my head all the time. Occasionally, I would forget about him, and I was just in my own space. In my head, I imagined a girl who looked high out of her mind, playing with her air, biting her lower lip, looking like she was on crack. “Look at her! She's trying to be seductive!”
Brandon started laughing. Dammit, I had forgotten that he could read my mind! I burst out laughing.
“What is it?” Chance asked.
“Rachel thinks, 'Look at her! She's trying to be seductive!' and pictures a girl who looks like she's high on crack.”
I continued to laugh.
Rachel. Stop laughing. Brandon whispered this to me gently but firmly in my ear.
I looked up and saw a bunch of cars coming. Brandon was trying to help me not look like a total weirdo in front of the passing cars.
I stopped laughing temporarily, and then started again. I couldn't stop laughing. Sometimes I would laugh about something. Sometimes I would be laughing about nothing at all. I kept thinking about the crackwhore Brandon had caught me picturing.
“Ok Rachel. It wasn't that funny.” Now, Brandon was here with me, in my mind, and he could keep my laughter in check. I remembered back when I would laugh on and on about Matthew III, no one had been there to keep me in check and tell me it really wasn't that funny.
When I looked up the meaning behind playing with your hair, I was remembering a time when I was reading a teenage magazine, and it suggested that guys like girls who play with their hair. My own playing with my hair had nothing to do with that, of course, but it was kind of odd advice.
I thought about making a status: “Fashion tips for tweeker girls: sit around and play with your hair all the time!”
But I sensed that this was not a good status. Brandon was telling me this was not a good status. “Rachel.” Brandon spoke to me. “They don't know what tweeker means!”
I laughed. “Okay. How about: Fashion tips for tweeker girls, sit around and play with your hair all the time! But this doesn't mean anything to people living in the Lake Oswego ghetto, because they don't know what tweeker means!” I got on facebook and went to make this my status. But when I started typing it in, my computer froze momentarily.
“Rachel, I stopped it from typing. That was me. What that means is, Rachel that's really funny, but don't write that!”
I understood. Brandon was telling me this status would not be well received. I waited until it unfroze, and deleted what I had already written.
I heard Brandon talking to me. “Rachel, they also think you got plastic surgery. There are people who still stalk you on facebook, to this day, because they thought you were such a loser in high school.”
Of course. I was anorexic. I never talked. I dated the biggest nerd in the school. I wasn't pretty. I dropped out of college and was sent to (what they think was) an insane asylum. I was the biggest loser ever.
You spelled lipstick wrong.
I had a status awhile before this where I said “I hate lipstick.” But that wasn't true. I did not spell lipstick wrong! I went on facebook and clicked on “Activity Log” and started scrolling back through my history. That's when I found something. On one of my friend’s posts, I had commented, “I overwent surgery.” My friend had been talking about words that have prefixes where the opposite prefix wouldn't make any sense, and he was giving examples, so I gave an example.
I imagined that people from high school had somehow hacked my facebook to the point where they could look at my activity log. They just saw what I said, not what it was in response to. And they made assumptions. They had already thought I had gotten plastic surgery. There, confirmation.
That was the nature of these Lake Oswegan weirdos. They made assumptions about my posts, and then laughed at me because they thought my posts were stupid.
“The thing about Rachel's facebook statuses, they are smart, but they only make sense to smart people. Like her book. Stupid people think her statuses are stupid, smart people think they are funny.”
Several examples of this came to me. A while ago, I had a status about a dream I had, where I was on a scavenger hunt, looking for Eminem. I went to his house, but it was full of Eminem look alikes, and the real Slim Shady was nowhere to be found.
I imagined that to stupid people they might think, “oh, the real Slim Shady thing isn't funny anymore! That's really old!” And then they would have laughed at me for being outdated and out of style. But slightly smarter people would realize that it's still funny if you had a dream about it. You don't control what you dream! I really had a dream like that.
I had a hard time imagining people would really be that stupid, but hey, I hadn't really talked to all that many people in my lifetime. Maybe some people were a whole new breed of stupid.
Another status I had was about how I was going to have a treatment program that prescribed patients reefer. It was going to be called Ican!nabis.
Stupid people might think, hey, no one calls marijuana reefer anymore. She has obviously never smoked weed. That's probably what her parents call it.
But I just call it reefer because I think it's funny to call it reefer.
Another status was, “I need to grow a beard to keep my face warm.”
I imagined that people didn't know that was a joke and thought I was serious. Like, people were that stupid. “She doesn't know that women don't grow beards!” Heaven forbid Rachel might have a sense of humor.
But my response to that was, “Who says women can't grow beards? Elaine had a beard!” Elaine had had a problem with facial hair.
The last one that came to me that people didn't understand was the one I thought was the funniest. Erik had said something back in January that had prompted a memory of myself in the first grade. Some older kids were telling us that Barney was actually a teenager show but some really cool younger kids watched it. All my classmates were telling them that they watched it. I told the older kids they were full of it. We were first graders, not kindergarteners.
The thing that made this status interesting was not that I was the only kid that understood they were messing with us. It was what I said to them. “We're first graders, not kindergarteners!” We're smart like first graders, not stupid like kindergarteners. That memory suddenly came back to me one night when I was texting Erik, and I had dragged myself downstairs to make that a facebook status. It was funny because that was actually a really cute thing for me to say.
I imagined that that was lost on the losers from my high school who stalked me on facebook, and they thought I was just bragging about being the only kid to understand that. First grade was kind of old to be watching Barney anyway.
Many of these Lake Oswegans (it wasn't clear who exactly they were, I was never given any names) who made fun of me were unemployed now, because the economy was so bad. They noticed that I liked on facebook a local gym called the Trainer's Club, which many of them may have worked out at. “She goes to the gym, but she doesn't really work out. She just does tai chi.”
I had also liked tai chi on facebook. I imagined that people from my high school didn't understand it and always made fun of the people who did tai chi. I mean, it doesn't really look like good exercise: everyone stands there, and moves around really slowly. The classes were mostly made up of slightly older people. But I didn't do it because it was really good exercise. I did it because of the spiritual component. It made me feel overflowing with confidence, and it made me psychic. How cool!
But I took other classes, I did weights and I worked out on the cardio machines. This was the meaning of the phrase, “I'm sweaty.” I just worked out, for real. I'm sweaty. Because these people were so stuck up they didn't think that people like me were tough enough to work out like they did.
I had a really hard time believing all this, that people really would stalk me. But I figured that in this day in age, this is how the second coming of Christ would be presented. “Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.” Imagine being treated for schizophrenia/paranoia and finding that everything you were paranoid about was actually true.
They were disgusted that I would think I was Jesus, when I wasn't perfect. So this is what they were doing. They were stalking me. Not very Jesus-like of them. This is what I meant by “they were just in awe of how great he was!” They don't think they have to be good themselves. But they got on anyone's case who dared compared themselves to our lord, our lord being perfect and all. No one was that great. They didn't learn from Jesus, and think that maybe they should look at themselves before picking on the mote in their neighbor's eye.
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