Hey Mom. I'm ready to talk.
Mom you're dead and I am who I am. Unlike my best friend, I commune with nothing in nature. I don't believe in God or ghosts or, really, you. I believe you are gone, Mom. Your final lesson to me. Maybe your worst, maybe your most important. Your body, your corpse, your meat, the thing that used to house you and was now like an impostor, like a doppleganger from an alternate universe containing everything that was you except the most basic unknowable stuff, it taught me that once you died there was no you. No spirit. No ghost. No soul drifting off to reward or punishment.
I am talking to you like a poet. I'm sorry.
No. No, fuck that. You're dead and I am who I am. I'll talk to you, finally, in whichever voice I choose.
My girlfriend is snoring, Mom. She's in a bed in the emergency room of Samaritan Hospital. She needs her appendix removed and I'm here to offer whatever my presence can offer. She loves me, Mom. I love her. I'm going to marry her.
I am split on whether or not you would like her. I'm not sure I care. Maybe I obviously care but I just don't want to. I don't know. You left me a fucking mess, Mom.
Should I call you Grace now instead of Mom? Would that help with something? Would the practice help me to see you eye to eye rather than the looming presence you have always been?
You left me a fucking mess, Mom. Your death changed everything. Your death is a great, invisible spike in a graph measuring the certainty that no matter how much growth or success I achieve, I will always fuck it up. As Trent Reznor sings, no matter how many chances I get, no matter how many blessed rebirths, I will "keep myself. I will find a way."
My art teacher warned me.
I don't remember her name.
Every other writer is better than me. Every other writer remembers intimate, almost sensual details of every person in their dumb life. Or they simply learn the skill of lying about it. I prefer to believe the latter, but that may only be because of my shortcomings.
I had an art teacher in grade school. I pissed her off all the time. I don't remember her name. I recall long, stringy gray hair and glasses. I remember her being tall and thin, but everyone was tall and thin to me when I was in grade school.
I pissed her off because I ended every assignment the same way. No matter what we were supposed to draw or color in, my creations would always end up being visited by a giant, poorly drawn spider that would cover everything in the drawing with what I called "webs." Rather than webs, it was just me scribbling madly over everything I created, regardless of whether or not I'd managed to make houses and dogs and trees better than I ever had before. Everything would end up buried under a massive, chaotic cloud of scribbles without rhyme or reason. And whenever the art teacher asked me what happened, I just told her a giant spider showed up and shot webs over everything. That pissed her off. Or maybe it didn't.
But that was me. That was perhaps the closest I got to being a fortune teller. I could build a kingdom and it will eventually collapse not from invaders, economic calamity, or natural disaster. It will fall by my hand, and for no other conscious reason other than something inside me cannot allow things that should be to exist. Not in my life.
I'm getting ahead of myself maybe. I don't know.
I'm just here to say I'm ready.
Every day is another day closer to financial ruin. Every day is another day closer to physical collapse because of the weight I have regained. Every day is another day closer to the kind of regrettable but otherwise manageable medical emergency my girlfriend is experiencing, that for me will be like a tornado hitting a sitting pond of liquid shit because I don't have insurance.
Every day is another day closer to not sitting on the fence anymore, to the day when I stop living in the mental health purgatory of not being suicidal coupled with the reality of being unable to cope with being alive. Every day is another day closer to finally killing myself.
I don't want any of that, and I'm finally ready to act.
I did not intend to say all of this to you, Mom. I'm not sorry I did, but I didn't intend for it. Not this soon, and not so chaotically. That giant fucking spider is always nearby.
All I meant to say is that we need to talk. And I don't know how to commune. I don't walk between worlds in which I don't believe.
This is the closest I can do, Mom. The thing for which you and Dad have placed no value. My writing. This is the best I can do. And I need to do it because I really need to speak with you, and there's no other way.
I have shit to do. We'll talk later.
