chapter seven.

i don’t read instructions. never have. and yet i’ve assembled more furniture that you’d believe. i’m just good at it i guess. but i’ve never read the instructions, they only slow me down. how very masculine of me. except that men tend to get pissed rather quickly, and they get so upset when they think they’re done and they still have two or three parts in hand, and they have no clue where this or that fits in or on or what these things are supposed to be and do. they curse a lot too. not me. i’m patient with inanimate objects. and i come in and i take the extra parts and i re-assemble and the men just stand there with their jaws dropped, or they just walk away frustrated, thinking i’ll never get it done if they weren’t able to. well i have a special smile for those times. and they tend not to like it, either.

the boyfriend was out of town this weekend. gone to see his insane family. i’m lucky – i don’t have to go. and i haven’t had to go in a long while. it’s just easier: they say i’m insane, and i say they’re insane. i don’t live in the same era, universe or dimension as his family. and who needs in-laws anyway? it’s the same as your own family, the aura of guilt, the sense of unsaid expectations, the lies, the hypocrisy, the silences, the fakeness of it all. just like your own family, except that the decades of history are beyond your grasp. you’ll never know all there is to know, the why and the because, and they don’t want you to know, but they’ll take you as a silent witness, they’ll ask and expect you to take their side, even when they don’t tell you what it’s all about. they want you there, smiling and bowing and polite, and that’s it. who you are, what makes you tick, they don’t want to know – in fact, you shouldn’t tell them, as they’ll only use it against you. if you can, send a cardboard cutout of yourself to any in-laws gathering: the cutout can’t do worse that you would.

you can go there for years, be told you’re a member of the family (don’t believe it for a second – if the boyfriend bolts, they’ll change their phone numbers if they have to, just so they can cut you off as quickly and painlessly for them as possible), and you’ll never really know what’s going on, the hatred, the sarcasm, the superiority complex, the infidelities, the lies, the family secrets, the history. they want to be perfect and they want you to think they are and they want you to be perfect and they expect their son is perfect. well good for them.

you can sit there for hours and hours and what do you know, every few minutes they’ll mention his ex-girlfriend, the one who was so pretty, so nice, so sweet, the one that everybody thought was the one, and i wonder why it didn’t work out, perhaps they didn’t give it all they had, perhaps they should have worked at it some more. and what do you know, the ex in question called last week, and what a chat we had, what a fun person she is, respectful and yet full of energy, and what do you know, she’s single again. and she’s done so much for herself. and she trains four times a week now, did you know? and she gave me her famous triple chocolate cake recipe and i made it and that’s what we’re having for dessert.

and you excuse yourself to go to the washroom while they keep going on and on about her, and walking by, you see her picture, right there on the mantel piece. it’s been two years and they never took it down. and there’s a picture of the boyfriend in the bath when he was a baby and here he is graduating and here he is with his new car and oh, if you more the picture with the car a little to the side, from behind the bath picture, well there you are.

nothing ever really happened. i just feel claustrophobic there. judged. well, that’s not even a feeling, it’s a fact. they judge. they judge him too, but he’s one of theirs, so they expect him to come around eventually. the mother told me, as if in confidence, in a whisper, i think he still has feelings for the ex. right. what he was expressing wasn’t desperation or shame that his family would treat me like shit, it was “feelings”. right.

strangely enough, i was raised to be treated like a piece of shit, so i should like this. but i don’t. they remind me so much of all that has gone wrong in my little life that i want them all to face the music and pay for what others have done. no, that’s not even true. if they just paid for what they have done and do, i’d be satisfied. really. i’m not good at pretending. i have no respect for hypocrites, and i refuse to play their game. well that doesn’t make it easy to have happy friendly relations with in-laws. i called them on their bullshit. the mother would try to guilt-trip us for having gone shopping instead of being at home with her chopping peppers and shredding cheese for the dinner she decided to have, and she invited seventeen people to. but when we left, did she mention she needed help? no. everything was well, and we could do what we wanted. yet we come back, and who knows who pissed on her parade, but now she’s a martyr, doing everything by herself while we selfishly went away for a couple of hours. at first i only smiled and chopped her fucking vegetables, all the while being told my pieces were too thin or too coarse or not triangular enough. and then i stopped caring. that was a good period. because soon thereafter, sensing that she was losing her grip, she came back with a lot heavier guilt-tripping, and i have my limits, even when i promise the boyfriend i’ll behave, and on at least two occasions i ended up storming out of there, and i spent the evening in random bars and the night in sleazy motels. i’d come back the next day to pick up the boyfriend, and they were all going on and on about how we should stay for brunch, come one, we’ve barely seen you, why don’t you leave just a little bit later. nothing about me storming out. and certainly nothing about the fact that we have hours of travel to get back to our town. they don’t care about that. they just want to stretch their time with their son. enough to lie to get him to go, to stay, or not to go home just yet. that we have shit to do at home is not their problem, and even if i’m having gastric problems and need my own doctor right fucking now and hours of road lie between me and him (yeah okay i have a specialist i don’t want to kill – well i had to, until he, well, died).

now that i’m talking about his family, the words escape me. it’s like if i don’t say anything about the worse shit, it never happened, and i don’t have to reopen wounds to pick at them and discuss them endlessly. but really it makes them sound just normal and me crazy. great. well you’ll have to trust me, they’re untrustworthy, and they’ll backstab anybody if they find an advantage to it. even their son and brother. me… i’m nothing to them. a problem their son has encountered on the road. kind of like he stepped on a big wad of gum on a sunny sidewalk, and now he’s stuck with it for a while, but eventually it’ll just go away and everybody will just forget the episode and go on with their lives. they are energy suckers and love bandits. they manipulate until you give up. except that i’m one tough cookie when it comes to manipulation. i’ve been trained by the best, and now i can smell emotional blackmail a mile off.

so the boyfriend was gone all weekend, dealing with them as he can. he avoids seeing them now too. says i revealed them for what they are. impressive how blind human beings can be sometimes. but i didn’t say anything bad about them, i just exposed them by letting them talk and go behind my back and attempt to manipulate him and i. anyway, he still goes a couple of times a year, and this weekend was one like that.

and now, you ask, why was i talking about not reading instructions? well, my dear, because i also do not care much for the directions on a medication label either. and i spent the entire weekend in bed, buzzed out of my skull. i wanted to get rid of my stupid cold so i can stop talking and thinking about it, and what do you know, they make those snazzy cough syrup potions for night-time, and they’re supposed to be strong enough to knock down a thai elephant if you take a big enough quantity (and really it’s a skill test because those liquids are putrid). so i thought i’d give that a try. i poured myself a glass. i assume that’s more than recommended (the little plastic medicine cup that came on the bottle was a hint), but drinking cola has gotten me used to the idea that one bottle is one portion (it’s true – when they changed the format of cola cans nobody started keeping the extra third in the fridge for later, we just decided that as of that moment, one serving was that newly blown up size!), and i drank it all. quickly, because it tastes horrible. and i’ve spent forty hours sleeping in the last forty-eight. well, if you call that sleeping. i laid in bed sweating like crazy, having weird dreams i couldn’t get out of – felt like i was really a wad of chewing gum, because i seemed to stick to everything and reality was distorted. again, dreams of people chasing me. a long saga about running away, but the man right there is looking for me, so perhaps if i look away and hide my face with my hood he won’t see me, and oh, there he is boarding the train and perhaps i’ve lost him, but he looks back, and in any case he’s going in the same direction i need to go, so perhaps i’m thinking i can stop in that ghost town that was shut down in the middle of the eighties, except really it was a real town and it’s been burned to the ground and where would i hide there and what would i eat and winter is coming and i’m already so cold and there is no hope for me in these woods but civilization will be the end of me, and they’ll find me and i’m doomed.

once in a while i’d wake up. my mouth felt as if an army of rubber spiders had been covering every surface with a thick web, preventing my tongue from ever touching my palate, teeth or cheeks ever again. instead of flesh, i could feel this cottony layer of goo, viscous and thick. my eyes couldn’t focus – at one point i picked up a magazine and tried to read, but i was seeing green spots at random intervals. television was straining my brain power. so i’d go back to bed for a few more hours.

and that takes me to tonight. i’m slowly coming out of the haze. i’ve had food again. man, i was so hungry when i was first able to wonder whether i was or no. but i had a bagel with some fake meat thing the boyfriend left me, and that was more than enough and i reached nausea quickly. the boyfriend called on his way home. wanted to come over. i said no. he’d freak if he saw the apartment now. there’s kleenex everywhere, and trash on the floor, and blankets all over, because i’d just carry some around with me so i could lie down and sleep whenever the need became more than i could tame. and i don’t have what it takes to clean it all up for now. i think i’ll go sleep a little bit more. but you know, i haven’t coughed or sneezed in six hours. well, that i know of (i haven’t yet set up a camera above my bed to see if i’m sick during my sleep…). so i think i beat this thing. radioactive cough syrup beats echinacea’s ass any day.