The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Cold

Spring thunder ripped through my morning.

It is weepy and wet out there, with fat, dewy raindrops bleeding into the dirt. The birds are a little quieter today, though. None of that nervous squirrel chirping either. It is quiet in a sleepy, pajama Sunday kind of way, the kind of day which is only saved by the smell of brownies baking or meat roasting. I decided not to let the day go by without me, though. I got up, washed the floors, sorted through the laundry, have now completed two loads of laundry, stripped the bed to ensure the smells of dreamy sweat will be banished, took two looks in the hallway mirror hoping to see some kind of miracle (no miracles this Sunday, sadly), ate a bowl of cereal and am now consuming my second cup of tea. The stomach is still twisting with vinegar, but so far I'm walking upright and there has been nothing else to report. I am tired of sleeping and dreaming of twisted intestines, though. I should see a doctor, but my entire life I've carried my stress in my belly. I'm that category-twisted sister with the storm in her stomach. At least I don't get migraines. I see this as a positive.

I also spoke with my sister K. this morning. She is now comfortably wisdom toothless, and has decided she understands how people get hooked on drugs. She made me laugh with how she has sailed through the last two days without remembering much of what has been going on, somehow making dinner last night though her head was in a fog. Apparently, my mother went to take care of her, which K. appreciated greatly, and because she was drugged, they got on quite well. I haven't spoken with my mother in nearly two months, and I can't say I'm missing her. That she knows I am angry with her and continues to tell anyone who will listen that she doesn't know why irritates the bejesus out of me. When M. asked me today if I'd ironed things with her out yet I said a flat 'no'. I then told him that it isn't her style to ask me what's wrong, nor is it her way to assume responsibility for her behaviour. Any rift in the past was patched up because I made the effort and because I lived in close proximity to her which made it impossible to avoid her. Now that there is a physical distance, the emotional one thrives better. She won't call, I told him. She won't try to mend fences. She'll go to her death without talking to me unless I initiate the conversation. My mother cares about herself, how she looks and how much she is loved. It wouldn't occur to her to take the first step in fixing anything she has broken.

My sister K. also mentioned that she had spoken with R. recently. Oh joy, I thought, another anecdote from his life which I don't need to know. Apparently, he fell through the ice while fishing with friends on a lake near his house. He was slightly drunk, she said, which came as no surprise, and the ice cracked beneath him and he went down in a flash. He told her he was in the water for about twenty to thirty seconds, but that the intensity of the cold made it seem like hours. All I could think was about how many arguments he and I had about going on the ice, whether snowmobiling or fishing, and how I used to 'forbid it!', knowing that nature is fickle and indifferent to humans. I joked that I bet one of the first things he thought might have been along the lines of ' that bitch Tara was right after all!', and how he would hate for me to able to say I told him so. But I did. I told him so. The result of this incident is that he has sworn off any activity involving venturing out on top of a frozen lake top. This is typical of him though, learning through consequences. He has never been given to listening to the wisdom of others. He's very much a 'I think I'll just put my finger in that fire to see what happens, Holy Hell!, that friggin' hurt!, no more touching fire for me' kind of person. Though initially devastated by our split, I find myself more and more eased through the tales of stupidity people insist on telling me. The drinking, the jibberish, the cold and the obstinance are all things I would not be able to tolerate, and I'm sure he knows it. One kind of amusing thing, though, is that he is going to be in the wedding party of my sister's ex who is newly engaged. I could tell by the way she spit out the information that she's still ticked off at S. her former partner, even though it's been eleven years since they split (eleven years? really? time has flown at warp speed).

S. was beautiful in a purely physical way, a Kurt Cobain worshipping Adonis who was quiet and withdrawn, but there was a haunting kind of sadness about him, a feeling of total detachment. Whenever he was around, I would see all of our female friends stealing long, lurid looks in his direction, and if he knew it, he didn't let on. He was smart, but his shyness limited him from achieving whatever goals he might have had, and he drank. A lot. Though he refused to eat any kind of junk food, always waving away dessert and only consuming grilled white meats and vegetables, he drank bottle after bottle of beer. He became a fitness instructor, sculpted his body into one fatless muscle, to the point that we all worried about him thinking he might have been manorexic, and then his personality became even more difficult to understand. He distanced himself from my sister, begged off social engagements they'd made forcing her to go alone, and no matter how many tears she cried or words she screamed, he was impervious to her wants and needs. When they split, the only tears he shed were for the cat which she took with her. I own that cat now. Meika, the oddly detached, weird little Siamese darling. They got on well, understood one another. Sometimes I feel guilty that she's mine, knowing that she was the only thing for a time he could claim to love.

And now, he's getting married. As my sister K. put it 'the girl is twenty-five and is as dumb as a bag of hammers.' It actually makes me feel better to hear her make those kinds of comments because she has had an extra five years to get over that split and she's still bitter. It makes all the evil thoughts in my head seem normal.

Like last night, I sat down and watched the 'Sex and the City' movie. I am someone who appreciated that show, frankly. I didn't take it seriously, found most of the fashion to be ridiculous, but it made me laugh more than most television programming does, so I sat down with a pudding cup and snuggled into a blanket to watch the film. There's a scene in the film where the main character, Carrie, gets stood up on her wedding day, and while I knew it was coming all along, I still found myself wiping away tears as they streamed down my face. Though this has not happened to me, I do know how it feels to be rejected and I immediately identified with those emotions. I hated R. right then, for all the years I gave him that lead me nowhere. Yes, I am aware that I am better off, and I have no desire to be back with him, but maybe this is the result of thirteen years of complacency on his part. He made me feel, for most of those years, like I was expected to be there and that I wasn't supposed to want for more. I think I grew into the resentment and the lowgrade hatred. I think it became a part of me with each passing, eventless, unappreciative minute. Then, there's M., but at least he knows where I stand and I know that he eventually intends to make the final commitment. His reasons are more acceptable to me than R.'s ever were.

What kills me, though, is that I don't really need a wedding. I believe that a commitment isn't just about a ring or a piece of paper and I'd almost be content to carry on the way we do forever. It's just that I wonder why the men in my life haven't bothered to ask me, and this makes me feel undesirable. There's that, and then there's the issue of not knowing what to call one another, and also, when you have a child it just makes sense to make things legal, for their sake. All the red tape that ensues when someone dies or is hospitalized, legal rights, etc. tend to be more black and white when the contract is legal. To me, it is about practicality as well as emotion, but as I am a self-professed romantic, obviously I want the poetry of it. While I don't want a big, flouncy dress and receiving line, I do want the tender words and the earnest proposal. I want to know that he wants me and that his greatest wish is that we spend the rest of our lives together. Until you get that, there's a part of you that always wonders if he's going to leave, if he's looking for something better. While I hate what I did to R. by dragging his heart around for a year, I secretly harbour a small bit of satisfaction in feeling like I exacted my revenge for the many years before that in which mine was kicked and repeatedly battered by omission and presumption. Maybe I'll get to a point where none of it will matter anymore. Maybe that's what maturity is about.

I'm glad someone pulled R. from the ice, but I'm also a little bit delighted that he fell in. Maybe that's a cold thing to admit, but at least it's honest.