Thursday 24 January 2013

Pathos.

Please teach me to breathe
Remind me how, I can't remember
Please read me the theme
You've lost the plot, the story's dismembered
Lochlan called it a moment of mellow drama and I laughed when I stopped feeling sorry for myself. He's clever with words, teaching me pretty much everything I know as I learned slowly, succinctly to the point of using words for sport now, for entertainment.

Now I get these great litanies from him, spat out hard in his delightful Scottish invisi-brogue, too impatient to work lyrical magic. And I'm not sure anything ever changes. I don't feel like I've achieved much more than an ability to shut down into nothing, duck my head and weather the storms as they hit, one after another.

He came flying out of the house during the shoot-out in overtime, boys glued to games (Canucks won and so did my Leafs, so they say), cursing me straight to hell and back for missing that, and he grabbed a hold of the ribbons on the back of my dress and hung on through the worst of it and I didn't know he was there until I leaned forward but didn't get anywhere. He puts a lot of misdirected faith in the stitching of my clothing. I'm not surprised in the least.

He also called Batman to consult because he didn't like the way things were going and he didn't quite know what to do. They didn't like Caleb's abrupt shift to not wanting to see me when half the time he seems to gain oxygen by my very presence. They didn't like Ben's refusal to talk to me and throw in Duncan, TJ and Andrew being gone and then my heading out to take up sentry position close to one absent ghost (but not the other because he showed up again unannounced this week) and a recipe for disaster is baked and then held in the oven on keep warm.

Does Lochlan ever know what to do? I don't know. He panics inwardly. He shuts down too and he's trying so hard not to do that when I already have. It must be harder than it looks keeping the lot of us contained and alive and together. He's been doing it since before I even met him. I think a lot of the time he is exhausted and under too much pressure and things slip. I just don't know why he holds so much responsibility for everyone.

What if we fended for ourselves?

Oh, right. Things get worse when that happens. See, uh...that eight year period when we all moved to the Prairies and he didn't. Well, he did for a little while toward the end of our time there.

When it began to rain last night he finally started pulling me in by my ribbons, hand over hand until he could grab hold of me. He took the headphones away and pulled me right into his arms.

You ever wonder, Peanut, why I make you listen to silly love songs all the time? You ever put it through your thick fucking head that maybe it's because you absorb all the other stuff like a sponge and then you wind up in a puddle of fucking misery and I have to wring you out and dry you off and you take fucking forever to dry, you do. It's better if you just don't go in but you're like a magnet to that stuff. Before I can turn around you've run off and gotten in right over your head again. You gotta stop doing this, I swear, we're getting too old for this shit and I love you too much to see this happen over and over again.