warriormonkey

hathaway: leaving

there is little worse than wondering about a loved one's dreams. what was left behind? and what part did you play in the leaving?
_______________________

hathaway slid the envelope under the edge of emma's pillow. she always stuffed her flannel green jammies with the pink and white polka dots under her pillow before school. a nod to order. after dinner she'd fish them out, perfectly pleased with the wrinkled mound.

she'd find the envelope then. after boiled macaroni and cheese. after single-serve cinnamon applesauce. after six ounces of skim milk. after cleaning her plate. after wiping her chin.

it's a red envelope, the long thin kind that looks like it might carry official business. except red and textured in a way that felt substantial in hathaway's hand.

at a time like this, every detail matters. every detail would be remembered, be dissected for decades to come.

hathaway had taken the little gold foil seal the bleary-eyed sales clerk had pushed across the counter with her envelope and receipt. but when it came time to fold the letter, to lock it away in that paper sleeve, she'd lifted it to her lips, hands nearly shaking it loose, to close the gummy seal.

the letter itself she'd been writing for years, maybe since they'd met. if you could consider that first kick a meeting. since she realized how powerfully inadequate she was for the task.

first in her head - composing explanations, excuses that increasingly felt like a conversation, like an echo left behind. then torn bar napkins. a drink or two and then she would experiment with the look of the words on paper. would writing them make them more real, shake her into something...into someone. someone better.

they just sat there, though. the words. unremarkable. all too easy. another drink. hathaway would carefully shred the napkin. tear it into perfectly sized bits. build a soft round mound of single letters.

then on her computer. phrasing and rephrasing. ten pages of possibilities. fragmented thoughts. excuses. excuses.

and every time, it ended the same way. if there is one thing i would tell you it's this: everyone lies. some of us just do the best we can with what's left. i love you.

mom.

dorthy: waiting

she waited to hear the tires screech as they tore around the corner. the siren had been caterwauling for blocks and they always seemed to stop right here. a complex they called it, but really a place of ultimate simplicity where the very sick and very old eat, defecate, live and die - often in the same stain resistant beige recliner.

still, every time it was a curiosity. dorthy turned her head, ready to look out the window and see the stretcher unfolding onto the sticky asphalt, ready to wonder idly about the young men who rushed off to roughly handle her slumped and moaning friends. except this time she couldn't move and instead of a window, she saw only the wall, its baseboard shimmery and impossible to distinguish from the blur of light.

she dimly remembered pressing the button - the panic button - that hung on a nylon cord around her neck, a constant reminder that even so simple a life-saving measure as getting to the phone was now beyond her reach. it was merely a spit second of regret that made her press the button. regret or fear.

she remembered now. kneeling on her bad knees, in front of the oven, trying to breathe in the gas, but unsure, behind her milky cataracts if she was even able to do this right. eventually, she'd given in to the pressure in her hips and struggled to her feet, carefully closing the oven door, lest she poison the entire building.
then there were the pills. pretty little blue tabs, she remembered, although it had been years since she could see them. now they were faint thumps against her palm when she flipped the M-T-W lids of her pill organizer, really the only thing that seemed to require organizing at all since she'd arrived at the complex.

today is sunday. she had seven days of compartmentalized medication ahead of her and she swallowed them all with a flat diet coke her granddaughter had left warming on the counter. on her way to her stain resistant recliner, she'd tripped a little, felt the scratchy rug under one shaky hand and decided to rest there instead. so long since she'd been stretched out this way...

it was pain management medication for creaking arthritis, a badly healed hip, a myriad of aches and pains doctors and family were able to worry about.

but she knew what no one ever tells you, what everyone hopes is "just them" and not the ugly reality of the entire human condition. pain is the only thing that keeps you aware rotting away in these homes, these guest bedrooms, these empty houses. it grounds you, allows you to have banal conversations about dinner specials and grandchildren who might be strangers save a string of stories and a timeline of school portraits. were it not for the pain, we would simply be numb, floating in memory, aging toward exhaustion with all things real in the world.

she pressed the button, calling the young uniformed men. waited for their rough hands.

did you miss me?

so, four months later, i resurface. life entirely changed. or as much as things change in the middle. i'll save the story of my today for another time, maybe for the new site i'm building, but i still find myself looking to get back to blogging...

certainly this medium would have never flourished without the last election, without passionate people sharing their ideas and then their lives. and, now where from here? well for me, i'm using this space, and my trusty warrior muse, like the tattered notebooks, saved bar napkins and assorted detritus of memory i've collected over the years. i'm done "publishing" and onto thinking out loud.

someone who should know me well recently said he didn't know me at all. it's changing that leads to declarations like that. changing and missing the nuance of change. so, here, once guarded and private girl is just who she is - comfortable, mature woman. read what you interests you, skip the rest. find some intrigue in the fact that i'm not writing for you.

i am entirely myself. no veils. you can choose to know me here and elsewhere.

here, fiction, profiles of people i admire, pseudo philosophical blurs and memories. elsewhere, great conversation over coffee or wine. enjoy.