Drips

Hey babe, I like playing armchair shrink, but these new revelations are killing me, coming a little too late for my comfort. You stagger the truth in small, unpredictable increments, like the haunting sound of slow, erratic drips from our leaky faucet. A kind of water torture for me, but with drips of truth, not water; each drip reverberating more ominously, more painfully than the last; always catching me off guard despite the anticipation, and piling up, one on top of the other – an acid wash of drips corroding away your sweet sugarcoating.

Drip Drip Drip Drip Drip Drip

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Daydreamer

The teachers were concerned, leaving notes for Mom and Dad regarding my “staring out the window” during class. Daydreaming they called it, the politically correct term for something more sinister, such as bad parenting or inferior character, their “go-to” conclusions in those days. Social anxiety, depression, the autism spectrum, and other so called mental health conditions were not yet common terminology. This was the seventies.

“He should visit with the school shrink,” they suggested.

“Let’s find out what he daydreams about while staring out the window, so we can address the situation.”

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Imaginary reader

The writer imagines a reader, the one who desires to know the story, and the story behind the story, which is the writer’s own story. This imaginary reader, the one to whom the writer writes, is the writer reversed and inside out, reaching into the world, searching for one real reader, a living and breathing human being who wants to know the story, and the story behind the story – the writer’s story. Human connection!

Please don’t shoot me dad!

Dad, please don’t shoot me in the back, I thought to myself. I’d been retrieving pellets from the wooden board used for our target practice, when the vision of him shooting me from behind appeared. Several times, I turned my head for a sideways glance, making sure the gun was not pointed at me. Dad just looked at me and said nothing, but the Larkin boys laughed heartily at my paranoia. I thought of my ancestors lined up at the edge of mass graves, waiting to be shot in the back, one by one, like a factory line of executions; the soon to be executioners finding humor and a perverse justice in their victims’ predicament.

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Recycled memories

Did I remember to take my medication last night? I remembered, I think, but is this a memory of having remembered other times – a composite image of taking my pills twice a day, 365 days a year? Or do I remember the actual event of consuming my medication last night?

I search my mind, vividly imagining the two white pills, one being small and round, the other shaped like a caplet of Tylenol. I visualize my hands removing the bottle caps, taking out each pill and laying them on the couch beside my left thigh – a repetitive ritual initiated by me twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, rarely with any variation. I pick up and place the round tablet on the back of my tongue, and then the caplet, washing them back with some cold water, to descend my throat and do their thing, which is to lower blood pressure, slow heart rate, and eliminate palpitations.

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