Crickets...no...a cricket...chirping away from the hedge outside of my house. It reminds me of my childhood home. The noise was deafening back then, especially in the summer, with the windows open and praying for a breeze. I would stay up late and silently beg for it to stop. Now, it's nostalgic. Now, it's all cars that I wish were crickets.
My parents came home late tonight, long after Rosalie had gone to sleep. As they staggered up the sidewalk I feigned worry and said and just where have you two been? They were playing bridge. All day. Dad waxed poetic about Subway's breakfast options. Mom insisted that they haven't been drinking. They live with me, now. A combination of financial and familial needs. It's only been a few weeks, but it was strange to have the house so empty.
My thigh has been bothering me for weeks. One of the many effects of being a relatively old person playing an absolutely young person's game. It's felt like a bruise...so tender that I would wince when sitting down and my car keys would press into it. But it did not look like a bruise. It didn't look like anything. Today, some purple patches have sprouted, and I can finally take my pants off and yell at people. YOU SEE? I WASN'T LYING! I won't point at the bruise, though. I'll let them decide what I wasn't lying about as they stare at my tan-less legs. Drooling, no doubt. My knee, despite only a very small tender spot, looks like I had sawed off my leg at the joint and then glued it back together. If I show my leg to Mom she will probably drug me and then drive me to the hospital. And where's the fun in that?
I am down 72 pounds since Thanksgiving. The jeans I had bought when I hit the 50 pound mark are loose. None of my shirts bulge in the middle when I sit down. I might actually buy clothes from Target this weekend (and if you were never big and/or tall, you may not realize how pleasing that thought may be...unless you hate Target). If I had to give a piece of unsolicited advice, it's this: drink water. Water is your friend. And try not to spend a lot of time indoors, where I tend to turn eating into an activity to pass the time.
I still smoke too much, and it seems like the solution to that is going to be to not have any money to buy cigarettes. I'd like to thank AAA, for leveraging supply-and-demand economic theories to charge nearly double their typical cost to renew a membership if you call them on a phone with a service request. I'd also like to thank my car for draining the battery with various sensors that not only failed, but somehow sapped up all of the electricity while failing, just to twist the knife, I suppose. I'd like to thank the mechanic, who re-charged the battery but failed to test it and discover that some of the cells were ruined. And I'd like to thank Auto Zone, for installing my new battery for free, but gouging me on the price. I'd like to think some other ridiculous series of events wouldn't happen again soon, but ridiculousness follows me around like a shadow.
This summer is going to pass without a single road trip. It's imminent. I want to drink whiskey in a dive bar in the middle of nowhere. I want to go somewhere where my brain would play Three Dog Night constantly. I want my cell phone to be useless. I want to sit on a rock near a river, with a notebook and a banana. I want my shoulders to stop aching. I want to roll down the windows and sing songs to the highway. I want to be alone with someone.
The drunk people that walk up my street always think they're alone. They yell and laugh and act stupid. And they must sense me in the peripheral...that weird notion that somebody's looking right at me. And they fall silent. After that, I don't hear a peep until they're far down the block. A few of them don't care. One out of ten, maybe, will stare straight at me and bellow whatever song they were singing, or cheerfully greet me, or ask me a question that has something to do with the conversation I was never part of. "Why are guys so shallow?" or "This one knows what I'm talking about, don't you?" I do. Sure.
After dinner, Rosalie took off her shoes to play on the sidewalk. She grabbed a water noodle from the pile of beach toys Mom had brought up in anticipation for the beach, and led an imaginary cavalry up and down the street. It was her army against the water from our neighbor's sprinkler. I think it ended in a stalemate.
59 e-mails left in my work inbox. They can all wait, but I don't think I'll let them.
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