So Come On/Come On/It’s All We’ve Got/ Our Hands Are Full/Our Lives Are Not

First: Light <I do no other sort> housekeeping.

Picking up my own narrative language again is daunting, it turns out. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what <how> to say. Were brackets still sub/supertext? Had I moved on from that? I think formatting was lost in the restore, but nothing can induce me to dig around for my old save file and check. I am hesitant and tender with sliding back into my own expository strictures. This place is baked into who I am, but it is overwhelming to <honestly> look myself in the face again.

It’s likely I will ease hesitantly back in to all of my scaffolding and armatures. I am trying to be easy with myself about this.

---

Mister comes in and settles into one of the grandparents’ chairs.
;Hi, Sport. How you doing?;
;Can Sport be your new nickname now?;

Me, staring
;No;
;What about Scooter?;

---

[TW: There’s going to be some talk of longterm abuse, at the very least]

‘So come on
come on we can be saved
The lives we live, the wars we wage
When everyone just tells us how to feel’

I need to talk about my mom <what keeps me up at night>. I almost exclusively use her name now. But I don’t know what to call her here <like anyone with half a working knowledge wouldn’t recognize me here in seconds> as a substitute. I toyed with Gayle; but that’s reserved for destructive, irritating coworkers, not the woman who slammed me into counters with her hips or threw coffee mugs at me. I thought about just the first letter of her name; but that convention has always felt 19th century and like it breaks up narrative flow, to me. I am legitimately trying to trawl through my options as I type, believe me. It doesn’t even have to be a good stand in; it just has to suffice. But I have not been one to settle for just passing-good here. <This threadbare record is my best>

Now I am procrastinating. In the past four years, these are the kinds of strategic things I have learned to lean on Mister for. These kinds of conventions of thought and speech. <But he is not allowed here, and I want none of him here except what I carry in with my own hands> He is handy with linguistic creativity. Good at tossing thoughts and general themes back and forth and not pushing the answer until it works itself up and out of the firmament under its own merit. I feel like it is taking more work to determine what to term The Fridge than it took to know it was time to cut her loose completely. Which isn’t to imply that it was easy. I am still furious that it was so wrenchingly difficult. Abusive parents poison everything. It’s stunning that they are able to wrap themselves so wart-like around the very roots of our blood and bones.

Procrastinating her epithet buys me space before I open the floodways of addressing her head on <I am not unaware of my own tricks, you know>, I know. But I am also failing to engage with really thinking through what would be a good fit, head on. So.

‘And I
I would give anything
But for the grace of God I’m here and still aware’

Bea. Fine. We’ll call her Bea. That’s fine. It is just tangentially appropriate enough. Now, I suppose, I have to get to work.

Isn’t that why I’ve always been here?

‘We know the end is overrated
We’ve become the walls we raise
We don’t believe enough but we still care
Standing on the edge without a prayer’

So we did, after every possible kind of tempering and smelting, eventually become engaged. That story only intersects with this one in a handful of ways, so perhaps some other time we will talk about why ;you deserve each other; is a curse on Sisterface’s lips. Which –engagement–, when done correctly, leads to a wedding. Which we had. A little more than a year ago.

It was a good wedding. I was proud of it.
Bea elected not to go. The day of. She said nothing; simply didn’t show or answer any calls. We delayed our actual marriage by only 45 minutes. I am not new. It wasn’t out of the blue; her level of rage and petulance and shit-stirring had been steadily rising for five months before.

It was not completely unexpected. But that did not stop me from finally doing something with my anger and drawing the line. I texted her <in part, ;goodbye, Mom;> the next day to sever our mutual obligation. She did not respond in any way. I heard nothing, in fact, from her for nine or ten months. At which time, she texted me to tell me that the last cat I had as a child had died.
;I thought you might want to know;

So. here I am. Now. Motherless.

‘The loose affiliation with the real
We’re sleeping at the wheel’

That was fall of 2016. And it is early spring now. The insomnia for this year began ahead of schedule, and my anxiety is ticking up and up and up and up.

So I find myself lying awake a lot, thinking about how Bea is definitely going to die soon.

The simple physiological facts are that you cannot drink like a sailor, lose your memory <we should talk about my memory sometime, too>, piss yourself regularly and burn every bridge you build, without eventually running out of track. All roads end. Bea’s must be drawing tight up in front of her as she scrabbles on by now. For years, friends lived with her because we’re all millennials, and they could stand her and she didn’t ask much money to stay in the house she owns outright. At one point, I told them if they were still there when she dies <assuming I inherited> that they could stay for as long as they wanted for basic upkeep to prevent the town pressing charges and the pittance of taxes levied against the property.

 

But they’ve moved out. Sometime this fall. No one is taking care of Bea. She is drinking. Alone. In her hoard. With the animals she tortures.
It cannot be long now. I imagine not more than five or seven years, at the outside.

Which brings us back to anxiety and insomnia.

‘All of the time we’ve lost
All of the love we gave
And now these hands are tied
I can’t help thinking’

Around this time every year, usually after the clocks change, I stop sleeping. It’s part of moving into the summer weight of sleep; the sleep of the living, not the nearly dead. It came very early this year. I am suffering greatly with it already. A lot of what I am stymied with, beyond my usual fear of the stove being on and the floors collapsing and some monster/creep sneaking around the house and doors being open that shouldn’t, is knowing Bea will die soon.

How will I find out?
What if she has not written me out of her will?
How will she die?
How long will she have been alone when she dies?
Who will tell me?
Can I refuse to inherit her hoard?
Can I be held financially responsible for her hoard and its toxic clean up?
Who will arrange her funeral, because it won’t be me?
What is she doing?
Rattling around my childhood home until she tips a pile onto herself?
How often is she passing out drunk now?

My parents are close to 70. I have no regrets about going no contact with Bea, but lately, I have been borrowing dread. Trying to pre-shape the next event, despite knowing there is nothing I can do. Nothing to be done. Or it would have been.

She will die a lonely abuser who cannot apologize and it’s not my fault, or anyone’s but her own, but it is a shit story.

‘That I was in a daze, I was losing my place
I was screaming out at everything
Waiting for the walls to come down
Before my moments starts to fade
But everything that’s perfect falls away
…
Just sleeping at the wheel’
-Matchbox20