A loaded term
17 May 2011 10:31 AM Categories: Writing prompts | Childhood hangover
I had a dream about them last night, about visiting New Jersey. We arrived in the early morning and my stepmother offered us wine from the half-empty bottle we had brought with us. I accepted and then felt embarrassed to be drinking before the sun came up and made excuses, asked for coffee. Their house was huge, more huge than in real life, with a mezzanine balcony that hung over the kitchen. It had a public bathroom and a group of school kids was visiting (dreams and their strange shifts of time, place, perspective) and I watched the kids swing from one part of a low-hanging chandelier to another as I yelled for them to stop.
Before that, I cried in the kitchen, apologizing for my sadness while hoping my stepmother, who was prepping food, would notice and ask me more. She had cut and colored her hair, was honey-blonde now with eyes to match. They were cold, nothing reflected back. What had happened over the last year to change her very being?
But back to the children who didn’t listen to me, who dangled and laughed and moved with supple limbs. I wanted to protect them. I want to protect my son. I want to go back and retroactively protect myself, an impossible task.
I have a family of my own now, a triad, a threatening triad, with the man present for the child and me off in the corner, remembering, remembering. Kindness leaves and men do too, even the women walk off eventually. The child grows up, the cats die, no one lives forever, and the memories become sweeter and more aching than the reality. I don’t fight it anymore, I am one with it, noticing the feelings, giving them their due, knowing that I survived by a certain sort of soul detachment, connected at the head, connected by jokes and fights, by tossed wine glasses and shouts. Love was worry, worry that the object would go up in a poof of smoke, would leave for a pack of cigarettes and never return.
And yet I cling to the idea of magic, to the man returning from the long journey, returning for me. There is no room for anybody else. I am a valuable object. It works for a while, his love holds me together. Time, proximity, life: they weaken the bond. Eventually I look for another to play the chase and catch game.
From the prompt "Family," a word laden with meaning for most of us. Edited for clarity and grammatical correctness and then edited again. Too loaded of a topic.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.I spent some extra time on this one. It's still raw and unstudied and I don't know how I feel about it.
Image: Me and my mother at my grandparent's house, sometime in the late 70s
blog comments powered by Disqus