Tough Week

There's a reason there's a literary genre of Southern Gothic, ya know...

I'm sorry I haven't been around much, visiting you guys. I'm also missing out on a good reading I need to be doing, that I can't do, and that's because from the time I arrive home, and I do mean, pull up in my driveway, I have a visitor waiting for me, looking out the window to see when I arrive, talking incessantly, humming to herself, incessantly, when she's not talking, showing me clothes, taking pictures off my shelves if she decides she wants them and putting them in her suitcase and, when I call her on it because I see it's missing, she gets mad; hoarding food in the back of the refrigerator if she found something I bought for her, that she doesn't want to share, showing me more clothes, telling me how she cleaned my microwave out for me (because I am not ever clean enough, apparently - she says this as well, by saving the paper towels she used to clean and saying things like just look at this, Robin) telling me she wants me to make copies of pictures of me that she found when she went through drawers without permission, because she wants to show people back where she lives, when she goes home, that I was pretty when I was young, that I looked like her when I was young...and then she says...I wish you were still pretty, Robin, like you used to be, back when you look liked me. Well, fuck me.

I'm living in a fast-forward version of the way I grew up, guys, and it's pretty hard. This isn't what it sounds like, not exactly. This isn't a relative faultering with age - well, it is, but it isn't. Because what she is, is exactly what she was like when she was younger, but I have to grit my teeth and be kind, because we all get old, and how could I live with myself if I wasn't charitable enough to put up with crap from an old lady every once in a while. Any old lady, but especially this old lady.

I'm tempted to say something dramatic like...if you don't hear from me, you'll know it's because I blew my brains out, but it won't happen.

Oh, good Christ, there she goes again...hmmmmmmm hmmmmmmm hmmmmmmm...fast, staccato-like, in the same way she used to mumble to herself out in the kitchen when I was a kid, carrying on a running conversation with her favorite person...

The real me will be back sometime Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile, I've checked the fuck OUT.

Hope your week is better than this.