Achiever

Kellyn Baker

She’s walking, alone, across campus. You consider joining her, but don’t. She’s not enjoyable to be around. Not in an overt-bitch way. More of a covert-narcissist way. Four years ago, she was confident she was better than you. And everyone else, of course. While you were taking handfuls of multi-colored pills from a party bowl and washing them down with your father’s Wild Turkey, she was choreographing dance routines while listening to The Mel Robbins Podcast. Her need for self-improvement, productivity, efficiency, performance, and any other words describing her exactly how she wanted to be described would eventually create a chasm. She’d fill it with personal growth books and self-proclaimed self-awareness.

Two years ago, she seemed to grow out of it, at least a little bit. Time around her sped up, just like it did for you. Your friends got engaged, your siblings graduated college, your parents’ hair turned gray. You started to realize how much time you’d wasted looking for the next best thing, something—anything—to keep your racing thoughts flowing from one thing to the next. As for her, she started to feel like the race she had been winning all this time was suddenly rigged with trust-fund rockets. Maybe it was never a race to begin with. She’d let the thought linger in the repressed section of her prefrontal cortex. Maybe it was time to slow down. There were plenty of people content being spectators. You being one of them, of course. This isn’t about you, though. This is about her. 

This isn’t about you, though. This is about her.

*

She didn’t grow out of it. She made herself return to being as falsely self-assured as ever. Today, she tries not to think too hard about the implications of slowing down, or that she’d ever considered it to begin with. Imagine what might happen if she let her own life outrun her. When she thinks about it, she thinks about spiraling. Thinks she is spiraling. She never really is, though. At least, not like you. You sit alone and let your sloth consume you. The only pills you acquired a long-term love for were the Oxycontin 10s, and you still wash them down with Wild Turkey. Of course, there was that one time she got so high she forgot her own name and her identity began to separate from her consciousness. I am what I produce, she’d say. But everything I produce is only a temporary manifestation of my priorities. What makes me me? What the fuck does that even mean? Her heart was beating so fast she thought she was actually going to die. She called you. You told her to breathe and go to sleep. You had to work early the next morning. You didn’t have time for this shit. You blocked her two days later. 

A year after that you got back together. A few weeks later, you took enough shrooms to send you to Mars. You called her. She came over. She rubbed your shoulders and helped you fall asleep. The next morning, she went home with a false sense of bitterness and a real sense of superiority. It’s important to keep a record of the things that she does that make her better than other people, especially you. And she will always be better than you. 

Do you want to get married, she asks now. Of course, she doesn’t want to get married, but it’s important to her that you want to marry her. She adds, Not now, just… someday? You say no. Well, you say more than that. You try to plant flowers around the rocky words, but what matters to her is that you say no. Me neither, she says. Then she convinces herself that it’s true.

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