Bathroom Monologue: Regret the Right Thing

“I love you, Mom!”

Why did he have to say that? Of everything Kyle could have said on his way out the door, or every nothing, of all the times he muttered in his life. Why did he have to be audible that afternoon? And why did he have to yell that he loved her right then? Why not any other time, she couldn’t remember any other time in at least two years, so why not pick any moment in those two years other than the last?

Kyle was above embarrassing emotions. He was too old, too young, too manly, too preoccupied, too thoughtless, too next-generation. She played out the reasons as she wandered his room, and her room, and the garden he’d planted for her birthday, around the tree fort she’d broken her hand building for him. It was reducible, she thought one midnight: he was what she’d been at that age. She would have made fun of such clichés when she was his age, but now he’d never be her age.

Now it was all she heard. Now when the pressure cooker hissed, she heard, “I love you, Mom!” Now when the alarm clock beeped, waking her or confirming she’d laid awake all night, she heard him yelling between the chirps, “I love you, Mom!” When tires screeched on the pavement outside their house, she imagined her boy skidding off the highway and yelling, “I love you, Mom!” Twice now when Freddie opened the front door, she’d honestly heard him yelling it.

Some nights she felt like a living ghost, her son’s ghost, inspired by him, tethered by him, tortured by his absence, tortured by his refusal to come back through any doorway she checked. The neighbors said she wandered, as though walking around your own property was uncouth just because of the hour. She’d paid her mortgage, she’d earned this place without her runaway husband, and raised two good boys at the same time. So didn’t she have the right? Who had the gall to revoke that, to call the cops, to call Freddie to intervene in her rights?

Freddie wanted to help her. She saw it in his face, mixed in with the hurt of being the other son, the other man, the person she couldn’t help but find less interest in, all because he was simply there. He slept on the sofa, which wasn’t even a fold out, to make sure she wasn’t alone. Sometimes when she turned into a ghost, he followed her around the house, taking sharp things out of her hands. She forgot she picked those up. Sometimes he put stress balls into her palm, a sort of jestful, sort of earnest compromise.

She sat on the coffee table Freddie had bought her, squeezing a stress ball until she felt the sand inside grate against her fingertips, and watching her surviving boy sleep. Her eyes lit on his chest, constantly assuring herself that he was breathing, that he was okay, as though if she was certain enough one was alive, then the other would come home, come through the front door and yell, “I love you, Mom!”

Freddie murmured something in his sleep, something idle, something anodyne, something intelligible. Something that wouldn’t haunt anyone. She wished she could fixate on that, and knew she couldn’t. So she reached out and stroked his mangy beard, and whispered, “I love you, too.”

Bathroom Monologue: Unbelievable Girl

God sent her to harass me. Girls that pretty don’t laugh at my jokes. I mean, yes, I could have met a girl who looked like her at the AIDS Quilt. People of every shape, even mine, do that. But girls that pretty do not compliment my eyes. They don’t look at them; even I’d never noticed my freaking eyes before. And without the deliberate and cruel intervention of a divine entity, I couldn’t possibly have run into her later that night at the second-run theater for Cabin in the Woods, or that weekend at Tom Waits. Those things do not triangulate on their own.

The long, stringy hair that keeps getting stuck between my teeth. Jesus, everything about her was designed to mess with me. Every morning I have to come up with some dumb explanation for how that happened, even though I was asleep, and she knows it. Every morning she looks at me, preemptively bemused with the apology to come. Nobody would do that unless God made them to mess with my head.

She never has emergencies; she never needs to go to the hospital in the middle of the night. She never even needs help reaching anything; she reaches things for me. She never misses work, and finds all the good music long before I do. I’ve never introduced her to one band she didn’t nod along to and say, “Oh yeah, them!”

When she needs me, it’s extracurricular. Like she couldn’t balance an account if she wanted. Half the time I think she makes up her fear of driving in the rain so I’ll feel important. I keep glancing at the passenger seat, hoping to catch her with her guard down and not cringing at thunder, and at the same time, I hope I never catch her doing that. Maybe she’s not a trick? It’s a nice thing to believe.

I want to believe in her. That’s the worst part. That someone who’s taller, and smarter, and healthier, and just better than me would actually want me. But I don’t have the faith. God, am I going to kill this relationship by waiting for it to disappear?