blueperiod.

things i didn't want to hear today

"Mama, what's for breakfast?"

"My armpits have kind of an odor. I'm starting to smell like Mama."

"Mama, what's for lunch?"

"Actually, Mama, I just remembered I don't like zucchini."

"Mama, why is the tube of toothpaste in the toilet?"

"Mama, what's for dinner?"

the last thing he said to me

When I was seventeen years old I killed my father without a second thought. The little girl I was babysitting asked me where my father was, and rather than go into the whole story about how my parents were separated, and in the past five years I had only seen my father a handful of times, I said, "He's dead."

At the time it was easier to just be done with him; no possibility of complicated intrusions. Now, I'd happily embrace such complexities if it were possible to resuscitate him with an off-hand comment. "Oh, my father? He lives in Florida; fishes all day, dances all night."

The truth was that he lived four hundred miles away and thought of me probably as often as I thought of him. I spent my adolescence learning how to live without him; erasing him from my life. I forgot about the way light danced in his eyes when he smiled. I forgot about how he liked to sing old songs like, “Chances Are,” and “Blue Moon.” I forgot about how when he fried onions and green peppers, the smell reached into every corner of the house and made me feel safe and loved. I forgot all of these things until one day, years later, my mother called to say, “Your father is in the hospital. He has cancer.”

I was twenty then, and in the middle of the worst summer of my life. I was working two jobs and still broke. I was stranded in the middle of nowhere without a car. I was struggling to finish coursework that was months overdue. And to top it all off, I was recovering from a mess I’d made with this guy, who, in hindsight, was so much like my father that it scares me now to think about it.

I felt like I’d already died a little bit that summer, but for some reason I dropped everything—at a time when I was desperately trying to hold on— and flew to the side of a dying man; a man I’d already killed in my memory. After all that time it was the threat of losing him for good that reminded me he was still there. If my mother had said, “Your father is frying onions and peppers. He misses you,” would I have gone?

time

One afternoon Luna tells me, "When I'm a mama, I won't ever make my children wait. I'll come right when they call me. I'll stop using my computer or washing the dishes and play as soon as they ask." She speaks plainly, without a hint of accusation in her voice.

Good luck with that, I think to myself. I say, "Your children will be very lucky," and try not to take her comment personally. It isn't really a comment as much as a statement, anyhow. And five is a little young for the nuances of passive-aggressiveness, no?

I do think about how often I put them off. How frequently the later that I promised never actually comes. Some days are so full of doing for them that there isn't time left for being with them. Time. How can something so irrelevant have such prominence in our lives?

"When will it be soon?" Luna asks me. "Is it later yet?" She counts to ten when I tell her, ten minutes. Time makes little sense to her. Time makes little sense to me and I've spent most of my life hyper-aware of it—so focused on its comings and goings; its absence, its presence. I've had too much and and still not enough of something I can't even explain; something that barely exists.

For a long time I honestly believed that time was speeding up as I grew older. I could not explain how this was possible but I knew it to be true. I thought it must be the same phenomena that made a return trip significantly shorter than the journey out. Once when I was twenty, riding in a car on my way to a babysitting job, I made an off-hand remark to my charge's father about  time accelerating. He was a psychologist for whom English was a second or third language, and I was intimidated by even casual conversation with him.

"Ah," he said, suddenly animated. "But time is not changing; only your perception of it." He then happily went into a lecture that took us all the way home. Unfortunately, I never I got clear instructions on what to do with this information. Just knowing that it's all in my head hasn't helped me much.

What I'd really like to know is how to slip back into that mind that doesn't bother differentiating between seconds and minutes. A mind that has little use for soon or later. Maybe, if I pay attention, Luna can help me remember. Maybe, if she's lucky, she won't forget.