Always Amy's Fault

It's not that I'm unaware. I may be mentally ill, but I'm not stupid. This morning I noticed everything — really noticed it, the way you're supposed to. The sky over the marsh had that scrubbed, just-rained watercolor blue. The lagoon reflected the same color as a heron went about its business with no particular hurry, as though not to disturb the reflection.

I watched the scene evolve as I drove out of Chatsford, and thought, well, there it is; a beautiful morning, delivered with perfect timing. And here I am, for once, paying full attention.

But here's the part nobody warns you about: knowing everything is fine does not translate to feeling fine. Events, it turns out, have almost nothing to do with it. Hand a neurodivergent brain a perfect morning, gift-wrapped, bow on top, and it will still go looking for the fire exits.

This one's on Amy. It's all her fault.

I should clarify. When I say Amy, I don't mean the tiara-wearing critic who runs the bridge of my other stories. This Amy is smaller, older, and considerably less housebroken. Dr. Coast calls her my amygdala. I call her the intern nobody hired who somehow got the corner office anyway.

Since last Thursday, or possibly since the Cretaceous, (Amy keeps her own calendar) she's taken up a new hobby: police body-cam footage. YouTube, apparently. I don't watch the stuff myself; I haven't got the stomach for it, and Spectrum only carries me so far into the modern age. But Amy has her own streaming service. She's always known what I'm watching, where I'm going, and what I'm thinking, so I assume she's found some private feed running straight off the electromagnetic field between my ears.

This morning she gave me the look. The one that means she's about to speak, whether I invited her or not.

"What are you complaining about?" she demanded. "I do everything for you. I've saved your goose countless times, and all you do is complain about my methods and compare me to the Red Queen of Wonderland. Can you name one thing you've ever done just for me?"

I opened my mouth.

"Yeah. That's what I thought."

"I don't get it wrong all the time," she added, before I could recover. "Just sometimes. Like yesterday, at the reception."

Ah, yes. The reception. A perfectly civilized, seated affair with place cards, salad forks, and a string quartet working through Pachelbel like it owed them money. Somewhere between the toast and the entrée, Amy decided the appropriate response was full evacuation. "Run for your life!" she cried. I very nearly took the tablecloth with me.

"How was I supposed to know it was a sit-down reception?" she said, entirely unrepentant.

"It said so on the invitation, Amy. In fancy script, with a calligraphy border."

"I don't read invitations. I read rooms. And that room had exits I didn't like."

Here's what I've come to understand, however grudgingly: Amy isn't wrong about danger, she's just wrong about scale. Somewhere back along my family tree, being the nervous one kept an ancestor alive long enough to have a descendant like me who could still take a Sunday morning drive, noticing herons wading the lagoons. 

I don't approve of Amy's methods. But I do answer her calls, most of them, because the alternative is not taking them at all, and I've seen where that road leads.

So this morning I let the sky be blue, and the coffee be good, and I let Amy grumble along in the background, running body-cam footage without consulting or warning me. It wasn't a quiet morning, exactly. But it was mine, static and all, and I noticed every bit of it.

And that, Dr. Coast, is what I'm calling progress.