Shitty Love

A panic sets in as he sits down to write. Try to write something authentic. Avoid the trappings of a metanarrative and the postmodern. His fingers hover over the keyboard. I have an old mechanical keyboard. This is more authentic. He bought it at a flea market. He never fixed it. He fidgets, gets up, is distracted by and responds to a text message. The condensation on his water bottle creates a small pool near some notes he’s scrawled onto the crinkled yellow legal pad. He sits down. He notices the moisture soaking into the paper.

Thinking back to the other week, he recalls unpacking his canvas bag – filled with unorganized student papers, notebooks, handouts. It absorbed the rain that he was caught in. To him, it seems the profundity of rain is like an aporia. Is the moment profound because of the rain or does the rain pour down upon me to cement a profound moment?

            “I remember being an undergrad and having this thought. It’s funny. What was my professor’s life like? Especially the younger ones,” his girlfriend recently said to him with a hint of dark humor as he walked around his basement apartment with his shorts hiked up around his belly button and making childish noises. “So, this is what they were all up to?” Yep.

Many years ago, if rain fell on him, it usually fell on him as he walked home. He’d be carrying a pizza box filled with the free, cold, unsold slices of cheese pizza that he would plop onto the table so that his mother and father; perhaps too lazy or perhaps without enough money that week, could have something for dinner. He remembers, in his haste, walking all the way home with the sauce-stained apron tied around his waist only to be met by his mother.

“What the hell are you wearing?” she said. She always had a tendency to ask questions that had obvious answers.

Another example of this is whenever she’d call him on the phone. She never stated it outright, yet, she never wanted a cell phone. In her later years it made sense. Connected to an oxygen tube that ran its way through the house, she couldn’t really ever leave. She’d call from the landline that her and her husband had. She’d call her son on the phone. Depending on which son it was, he’d either pick up the phone or he may not pick up the phone. When the son on the other end answered, she’d yell into the receiver, “Who’s this?”

It became a game for her. He’d respond: “You called me! Who do you think it is?”

She’d cackle into the phone. You could hear her laughter interlaced with the wheeze of overtaxed lungs. Sometimes she’d just repeat the question. “Who’s this!?” Other times, she’d move onto a new line of questioning, disregarding her previous inquiry.

“What ah ya doin’?”

If he were to answer her at this very moment, what he is doing is writing. An indulgent act. A tension sets in. What is he writing for? A class. He can hear her voice.

“What do you mean, a class?”

He volunteered for the class. He hears her again.

“Ahn’t you already done with school?”

He recalls the times he tried to correct her colloquialisms. Words like “irregardless.” Ma, it’s redundant. You could say “regardless” and it would mean the exact same thing.

In her own way, she’d encroach upon his vanity, humble him, scoff, and call him a “brainiac.” It was endearing, yet a frustrating reminder that there were walls built around her that weren’t meant to be scaled.

So, this is what they were all up to?

He stalls on the page. As he reminisces, he begins to think about how difficult it would be to explain the labor of writing to his mother. During his formative years, she’d suggest to him to do a number of things that would provoke some sort of windfall for the family: a lawyer, a doctor, a professional golfer. “Why don’t you write a book?” Yes, of course. I could just write a book. It would be so easy. His mother, who, for all he can remember, never went on a vacation for herself since he had been born. His mother, in her coldness, would approach the weekend with the mentality of work. Her young children dreading waking up knowing that she was busy scribbling a list of chores for each of them to do. Does this look like work to you, Mom?

Over the past few weeks, he has had the chance to dust off old pictures of their family; a family hidden in plain sight. A family that has left her to make her phone calls from the couch that has sunken with the permanence of her seat.

He has to pause during all of this. The writing isn’t coming as easily as it once was. Should he write of the family he had never known? In a sense, there are two families he has never known. There was the family that lived before he was born. The opulent and carefree family that had a two story home and would have house parties for all of their friends. There was also the family that she kept from them as she grew older and more detached. Her brothers and cousins which led, through lineage, to his cousins, nephews, and nieces. The families that he was reintroduced to only a few short weeks ago. His long-lost family.

The traits of our parents often leave an indelible mark upon us. His mother lost her ability to speak to Butch and Johnnie; her brothers. Whether is was fear, shame, or just the extinguishing of a flame in a dark room – the absence made the darkness seem just that much darker. He recalls a fight that he had with his mother several months ago. His mother, crying, coughing, supine upon the couch; her body unable to convey the energy raging in her mind:

“Why?! I don’t want to see you children end up like my brothuhs and me! Call yuh sistuh! Jesus Christ almighty! What is going to bring you all togethuh?!”

He stood over her, enraged by her decline, pitying himself for what he was about to say, flatly: “I don’t know, ma. Maybe a funeral.”

Did something awaken within her after that outburst? After that conversation, she called him more often. Yet, she spoke to him sweetly and with caution. Her recalcitrance all through life became his and she could see. The grudges she held for so many of her years were adopted by him. He used them and weaponized them in any relationship he had that was too difficult to bare. Losing a love so strong is harder than the premature disconnect. He never called his sister after that conversation and his mother knew. She never brought it up again.

What else is there to write? He needs to take a break. He walks around his apartment searching for something. Five minutes pass and he has long forgotten what he was searching for. If I don’t write this down, it may be lost, he thinks to himself. He wonders through each passing day about losing those clear images; thinking about how they distort as the memory becomes more strange and foreign to him. He still cannot bring himself to write.

Aside from his one year on the other side of the world, he has always lived close to his mother and father. Whether this closeness meant that he lived down the street or that he was within shouting distance on the second floor means very little. His older brother and sister got away from those responsibilities. He doesn’t blame them. He sought every avenue for independence but was always brought back by a sense of duty or guilt or both.

Fulbright came to her lips at every opportunity. She loved to brag about her son while he was away even if she never really knew what a Fulbright was. She didn’t know about the internal struggle he had when deciding to leave them for that year. It took mentors and friends to convince him that his trip to the other side of the world was more meaningful to his mother than his presence at home would ever be. His father would go to dialysis three times a week during that time. She would struggle to pay her bills. Their fixed income not even enough to keep them afloat, they hemorrhaged money every month.

He was back in a year; full of himself, worldly. After his flight landed, he drove with his older brother and his father to the small house in Dorchester; the one they had lived in for over ten years now. In three weeks’ time, his brother would move back down to the U.S. Virgin Islands. His duty was over.

Tears were shed by the mother and the son. She was exactly as he had left her; on the couch, oxygen tubes in her nose. He proceeded to drag the queen mattress up to the second floor, lay it on the ground next to his brother’s bed, and share this room until his brother’s departure date.

A few weeks after his brother had left, he was in the car with his father. It was the first time I was unemployed since I was fourteen, he recalls with a point of pride.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do. Your mother isn’t doing well.”

He remembers pieces of this conversation with his father.

“She’s driving me crazy,” his father would say.

Perhaps it is because he’s had so many similar talks with him over the past two years.

“I can’t stand her. She just yells at me.”

He remembers telling his father, “If we don’t figure something out, I don’t think she’s going to last another six months.”

He remembers asking her: “Ma, how many times have you cried in the past week?” With this question came the tears.

These bits of dialogue he remembers mostly for how unsentimental they came across. Over the next few months, he maxed out credit cards to get his mother’s and father’s finances in order. He got a job teaching at his alma mater, which meant that he could also start thinking about moving out in the next few months. He found the basement studio apartment; the one where he tries to write from now, and moved in toward the end of the academic year.

For all his successes, he still views himself as some sort of failure or, at least, a Sisyphusian figure; ambling up the cragged rock or sifting his way through the mire. Perhaps it is the sense that his efforts are for nothing and that his failures are inevitable. The works put forth are for an empty vessel or, yet, a titanic tanker already sinking.

Several weeks ago, he received a phone call from his father. His father was at dialysis. He was working in the office on campus at the time and let it go to voicemail. He listened to the voicemail and found his father to be distressed and unable to get in touch with his wife.

“Can you call your mother? She’s not picking up the phone and I’m worried,” the voicemail said. He packed up his belongings and headed to his car as quickly as he could. He called the mother’s landline. No answer. He called his father back as he walked.

“Hi, dad.”

“Hi. Where are you?”

I was on my way over. “I’m at work.”

“Can you go check on your mother? She hasn’t answered my calls. I just got off the phone with 911. They’re going to stop by the house.”

Of course its going to me to be the one to find my mother dead. “Ok.”

He remembers mouthing “Oh my god, this is it” as he walked to his car. He kept visualizing her body on the ground, cold and lifeless. As his car came into view, his father called again.

“Don’t bother,” he said, “She was sleeping. The police just woke her up.”

Having weak lungs means that every exertion brings fatigue. Oxygen is in such short supply that the person suffering finds themselves sleeping more often than they are awake. Throughout the summer, after he moved out, he visited his mother often and, more often, would drop in on her unannounced. He kept a key to that house. When he unlatched the door and came in, his mother would be on her couch, sitting up, but asleep. Her chest rising and falling. Rising and falling. Rising and falling.

The work day was not over for him, officially. Coming this close to death, even if it is just premonitions of death, eschews the menial tasks one had planned. He entered his car and called his mother once more.

“Hello.” She said.

“Well, well. You’ve had yourself quite the eventful morning, huh?”

She laughed. “The police just woke me up. Your father. He called the police. What an asshole.”

“Is everything alright?”

“I was sleeping!” she said. “But listen, I gotta go.”

He tries to remember every last piece of this conversation. Was it really this short? Did he say anything else? Where was she in such a rush to get to?

This was on a Monday. On Wednesday, he would receive another phone call from his father while at work. He would, again, let it go to voicemail. This was followed by another phone call which he picked up. His father tried to say a few things to him but the words wouldn’t come. There was some rustling on the other end of the line. His mother’s and father’s neighbor of many years; of whom, they hadn’t spoken to in over six years, was on the other line.

“Get down here, ok?”

By 11:45pm on the following Sunday, he and his father would be exiting the Carney Hospital together. They walked slowly down the steps, recognizing small details. He remembers what the rain felt like. He laughed, softly, incredulously. His timbre was flat and slow as he finally spoke to his father.

“I’ve never seen rain like this, have you?”

I remember the rain wasn’t really falling so much as it was surrounding us. It was a soft mist that never really seemed to fall to the ground. It only lasted the few minutes my father and I were outside and then it stopped

He searched for some meaning.

“You know, dad. There’s been some stuff happening. It makes you think.” He paused. “Did you hear the bagpipes earlier? Down the road, there?” He pointed across the road.

His father stared at him in the soft mist. It surrounded them. They opened the car doors and sat down. He continued.

“It meant something. You could only hear it if you were quiet enough to listen. All I’m saying is that this rain and those bagpipes? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s random. We get caught thinking we have answers.”

I don’t remember entirely what this conversation was between myself and my father. This is one of those conversations that can’t ever be transcribed verbatim. And rightfully so. These moments are destined to live with my father and myself. I know what it meant to him and what it meant to me. As the moonlight shifted and shucked around us through the hanging mist, perhaps there are some moments that just can’t be written. Perhaps there are situations too infused with meaning; perhaps too authentic.

The writer pauses at his desk again. He remembers one of his favorite authors. This author was a writer at the time where Darwinism was catching on. A lot of his work was aimed at disproving rigid allegiances to notions of Darwinism. He believed that theorists and scientists were looking at evidence through a Darwinist lens and, therefore, skewing the evidence from being seen impartially.

His favorite author set about studying mimicry in insects and claimed: the sophistication of a butterfly’s wings is far beyond the visual acuity of its predators, rendering the butterfly’s wings a naturally occurring aesthetic beauty and not due to some Darwinian necessity.

I guess, what I’m getting at here, narrator, is that, perhaps there are narratives that occur outside the self that we can still write. These moments are outside comprehension, and yet, we should not fault ourselves in trying to write them. I like to think of the rain that floated around my father and I as the ethereal presence of my mother; wrapping us in the soft sorrow of our remembrances. Irregardless of your need for proof, I have mine.