I have a new side hustle editing college admissions essays because I need the money. The way this job works is that a new essay is emailed to all the editors, and you have to be the first to claim it. So I’ve been staring at my inbox for two days. I’m staring at it now as I write this. Like I said, I need the money. Apparently, all the editors do, because the essays go within seconds.
I wonder if the other editors are also soul-sapped by the pain of aging parents. Does everyone dealing with a shrinking father suddenly feel the urgency of a steadier income, or is it just me? When the minds of those who made us start to slip, do we always become so dazed that even brushing our teeth feels like an impossible task we’ve forgotten how to do?
As I sprint to feed the dogs as fast as possible so I don’t miss the chance to edit an essay, I smell gas—I’ve left the stove on from when I cooked an egg this morning. I open all the windows and doors. I look up what to do—do not waste time opening all the windows and doors. Leave immediately. But it’s too late. My apartment smells like sulfur. Time is already wasted.
My own behavior makes me uncomfortable these days. Recognition in misrecognition. Like, who am I? Oh. Yes. I am this.
Last night I had a sad, intimate dream about my ex. He was very sorry for how things went, and I was very sorry back. He held me. He was different. More solid, less ghostly.
Naturally, being the fragile, weird thing that I am, I woke up next to my boyfriend, ashamed about the dream. As if imagined forgiveness is infidelity.
To punish myself, I do not process my grief. I do not say aloud that my dad is dying and that the time for absolution has run out. I don’t imagine how he once was—how bright and sharp, teaching himself ukulele and singing All I Have to Do Is Dream by the Everly Brothers; how he printed out my ten-page published short story and hung it in his office, bragging to his co-workers about his writer daughter; how he hid at work, the church, his garage, instead of saving me from the constant violence of my mentally ill mother, and how I am now the one not saving him. I do not picture him as he is now in the perverted erosion of Parkinson’s and dementia, or the confused and frightened face he wears on top of his real face, his sweet face, his smart face, his smirking, pun-spitting, real face.
I let my grief pool at my ankles, my knees, my neck. I can hardly breathe now, and it serves me right.
My apartment does not burn down. I make $8 for an essay about a student’s passion for plane spotting, for watching and tracking takeoffs and landings at a runway in Jersey, and I remember my poet friend who told me a story about Bruce Springsteen while we downed champagne in the afternoon and unraveled our family trauma.
She said Bruce had this habit, this addiction, of driving past his childhood home. Obsessively. Day after day for years. Finally, he went to a psychiatrist and asked, “Doc, what’s going on in my head?”
The psychiatrist knew Bruce knew, but in the end, he told him outright—“Something went wrong there in your childhood home. And you want to make it right.”
Ah, yes, I imagine Bruce said in his soul.
“And you cannot make it right,” said the psychiatrist, not with his soul but with his mouth, open like a door you don’t want to walk through.
*
To put it plainly, my parents are old and sick and practically gone, and I never got to fix what went wrong.
*
“I’ll never write again,” I utter as I write this. Clearly, I can’t be trusted.
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this one hurts a little extra if Bruce Springsteen is your parents’ favourite musician. Sending you all the love
The gas burner, looking up advice and immediately discarding it, made me laugh, and the rest of it made me think. I really enjoyed this one!