There are certain moments I remember, seemingly for no reason but probably prompted by a trigger.
One memory of late is the way my mother and I sometimes interacted on the phone. I would call with what was expected to be good news — that I got a job, or found a girlfriend.
Except the expected good news was more often not deliverable. The news was bad. I did not get the job. I did not get much traffic to my websites. I did not have a good time with the woman I’d been seeing.
The expectations of good news in these realms always turned sour. We were on the phone but I could see the smiles turn, the eyebrows raised, the instinct to just hang up the phone not far from the surface of her mind.
It worked both ways. I’d call her expecting upbeat, lively chatter, only to find her complaining that the spaghetti she just ate felt like a rock in her stomach. I could not think of spaghetti as anything but a happy, joyful, child-like food. You’d slurp up the noodles with vigor, no mind to how they slap spaghetti sauce on your face or shirt.
But when mother talked spaghetti it was no fun. It was as dismal as everything else about her became in her seemingly endless later years.
I had an elaborate and sophisticated dream last night about a house where an ex-gf lived. Her cat was insane, rushing around tops of furniture and under desks and chairs like the house was a Habitrail cage.
This cat was no stranger to me in reals. My mother’s cat was insane. That cat climbed up the curtains, tearing them into spindles of fabric. When I got up to pee in the middle of the night the cat would bolt upstairs and try to attack me. I had to run to the bathroom.
But that cat is not what I sat to chat at. Qat.
Tiny unhappinesses. Tiny failures. Uncelebrated triumphs.
