There’s a memory, deep under heavy blankets of shame and shudder. I am sixish. My family has just returned home from a vacation at the beach, and my dad is screaming at the top of his lungs at my brother. Apparently, he did not unlock the 4WD hubs on the Jeep before the drive home.
In the room are my mom, my dad (the one screaming and freaking us all out), my oldest sister, and me. I think my other sister went over to a neighbor’s house. My mom is fluttering between her husband and teenage son like a moth about to explode into flames. The rest is less clear.
I wanted a rescue. My sister, so close, unable to protect herself from the onslaught of my father’s rage. I don’t remember if they drank on the road trip home. My dad was one massive YELL.
I dissociated. I learned to turn myself inside out, to feel nothing, to pop out of existence. If no one is going to help I’m going to die, leave, vamoos.
In adults this tendency is part of my mental cluster. I get anxious and my executive functioning shuts down. I get quiet. I can’t say what I’m thinking, I’d wind up in the mental hospital again. I shut the fk up. The radical thoughts aren’t quieted, I’m just unable to share any of my inner world. The ideas are acid, fire, death by suicide, and self-immolation.
I lose a month to the darkness. A day of sadness. A month of Sundays. The fall arrives with a humid rain that provides no relief from the heat. I am not sad or quiet now. I’m lit and raging. I’m not unlike my father at that horrible moment. Growing impatient and entitled. I want my NEXT JOB now. I want things to change. I’m tired of being caught in between these moments.
Something’s gotta give, yeah, but not if it’s me. The rattle in my chest is getting better. My one-day weekend providing naps and nourishment. My return to the store tomorrow is foretold and painful. I understand “tired all the time” vibes I see in the young staff, trying to balance partying in their first apartment and still having to show up for work. I feel the tiredness in my soul. I have been working hard over the last ten years to get sleep, exercise, good food, and nurture a healthier mind.
I’m in the middle of a gap. The time before awash with potential that never arrives. The time ahead indicates change and shifts in time and schedules. My day tomorrow a necessary evil to arrive at another day off, a single day weekend, the curse of the retail lifestyle.
Eleven to seven thirty tomorrow. And smack in the middle of my next “weekend” a massive dental appointment, pain, money, and drugs. This time I’m taking the sleepy way out. Halcion. I think it was my dad’s sleep med of choice. My eighty-year-old adopted father figure is going to take me the morning before his last radiation treatment.
“A rolling three-year timeline,” he says.
He is not concerned. His love and support for me has spanned two marriages, the birth of both kids, and lots of ups and downs in both our lives. Tennis holds us together, as a ritual, but we both know we’d find ways to spend time together even if it rained for a month.
He’s showing me how to age gracefully. How to adapt to his changing body, his marriage, and his outlook on the future. He’s studying the Stoics and interjecting good soundbites of wisdom into our relationship.
I asked him to step it up last summer after my other best friend died unexpectedly. He was more like an older brother. A hippie. An enthusiast. 12 years further down the road of life and leisure. He was just settling into retirement when his heart gave out. Done. End of story. His beloved Standard Poodle Argent went with his platonic girlfriend and the reason he moved to New Mexico. She deserved the dog.
So strange to know you’ll never see or hear someone again. Never step foot in their amazing home, drank their coffee, shared some time and nice meals. George sent me a link to my schedule the last time I visited him in Albuquerque. I still see the notice on my phone. We enjoyed reading, intellectually stimulating banter, and art. I may have lost my sister in my twenties, but I got George in my fifties. And now John in my sixties. But John has been with me for over thirty years.
And as he expresses his own resolve and courage at his pronosis, I am keenly aware of each blessed event or evening we can share. We touch base on the phone most days of the week. On the weekends we’re usually playing tennis at least once.
Not every sentence needs a comma. Not every comma is good. AI wants to add a lot of commas to my modern prose. I fight with AI. AI had no imagination, no creativity, no flex.
