"Day" Six

Alternatively titled, “Fighting Fire with Firewood.”

My mother right this second is in surgery, again, overachieving at being unwell I suppose. And the way I feel about all this from so far away reminds me of a conversation we had a couple years ago, if by “conversation” you mean... well I don’t know what you mean. The details now are unimportant but at the time I dismissed the details, as if the details were the important part. As if dismissing the details was tantamount to denial. Ha.

I’ve always joked that she’s my Miss Havisham, my mother, though I suppose it’s not a very funny joke when you think about it. And I suppose it would be true save for one thing, that I do an awfully good job of pretending otherwise. Why do I do it? I couldn’t say, really. I guess it makes it easier to fit in. It certainly gives me something to write about. For example. I once wrote a bald-faced lie, and poorly too, that prompted an email from someone who had never once emailed me before. (Hi, you!) I’m a little embarrassed to think about it now, to be honest, but can anyone regret the lie that brings the best people ever round? And then there was the time I called myself frigid and suddenly the truth was dismissed as a lie, so really, there are no winners here.

And there are no losers either, excepting maybe myself, and in the purely pejorative sense only. Because I don’t feel I’ve really lost anything. I just don’t. So I hope there never comes a day when I have to say “I never loved you, either,” even though I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t believe me anyway.

My mother would, though.