Tumbleweed. Smiling Secretively. Much-Needed Addendum.

Hahaha. Almost made it a month without a post on here. Will be amazed if anyone still visits. *tumbleweed*

It's about 5AM right now, which means I've got some two and a half hours left on my first overnight shift in Powell Main Lab. Soul for sale, $9.77/hour.

I suppose that reads rather ungratefully; I'm fully aware of how sweet of an hourly wage that is for a job that is, essentially, sitting on one's ass overnight. But jesusgod, I had almost forgotten how barren and sterile this library is in the wee hours of the morning.

When I walked through the hall to go to the bathroom, my right shoe made squeaking noises. The only people in the library were either engrossed in their textbooks or the backs of their eyelids, so they didn't see me smiling secretively at the noises coming from my right heel.

Working sucks. Unless I actively try to stop it, all my brain does is multiply and divide until I have a minute-by-minute breakdown of how much I am being paid. It is sickening. So this is what adulthood feels like.

I'm turning into my father. I can feel it.

Much-needed addendum: I'm going to get this out. I'm going to talk (write) this through. No more talking (thinking) around it. Do it.

Eric, your parents are selling the house.

Eric, your parents are selling their house.

Eric, your parents are selling your house.

Eric, your parents are selling your house.

What the fuck am I supposed to say to my mother when she tries to talk to me about it? I don't care what 1 Corinthians made you realize about the whole fucking mess. I already lied to you and said I don't care, that whatever you both decide is great. And I can't exactly go back on it and tell you that I'm just as confused and hurt about how quickly he committed to selling our home. That goddamn signpost has already been driven into the front lawn, and I am not about to try and stand in the way of my father's Great Plan. Tianamen Square? Tianamen Square.

I already dumped two of her calls to voicemail, my brain unable to gather itself enough to keep up the charade.

I mean, how do I tell my mother about the ghosts? No, not the fake ones that swirled in that empty space in the hallway where my six-year-old eyes swore that they saw a shimmering face (and still sometimes thinks it does), and I ran ran ran-- terrified in that special, six-years-old sort of way-- into mama's bemused arms.

What do I tell her about the real ghosts?

The flecks in the kitchen tiles where those beautiful porcelain platters took jagged bites out of the floor after mom sent them crashing to the ground because of what he said, how he said it, and just how much he meant it. The patch of the carpet which she then ran to, laid down, and cried no matter what I said to her, my own boyish words missing the cruel resonance of his.

Silent ghosts, born in the minutes after all the guests finally divvied up the leftovers and walked out the door, and the warm silence as their decades' old friendship would hang in the empty air.

The thousands (thousands!) of ghosts in the walls, of all the shouting matches, of all the ridiculous karaoke songs that I only half understood, of all the half-sincere threats that left fully-sincere scars. Humming, rumbling, vibrating, surviving all these years. How can we you sell this to someone?

How am I supposed to ask my dad why he's auctioning off his garden. You think those strangers-- those fucking interlopers-- will understand the pear tree? The barren tree whose branches stayed empty for every year that the space between you and mom was a painful, gaping void (and the heartbreaking sweetness of the pears that finally arrived)?

The square of dirt where you planted sunflowers for mom that year? She demanded-- bursting with girlish glee-- that you take a photos for her mother of the unearthly tall blossoms and the grinning woman dwarfed beneath their stalks. The patch of green scallions that somehow got us all at one table to wrap dumplings.

The ring of perpetually dying grass that reminds me every summer of that other summer: the one golden with distant childhood where you hoisted me and Josh-- giggling, miniature versions (long-since lost) of us-- into the tree that used to stand there. Then the noisy week when you hired workers to cut it down, drag out the stump, and inform us that the grass would probably never grow as thickly there as the rest of the yard.

All of this-- all of it is ours. Made by us. Remembered by us. There is nothing in it that they can ever even begin to grasp. Much less to own. What an awful fucking joke.

I don't want to have to drive down this street every time I come home, staring at another remembered tree stump. But since when have I gotten what I want? Stiff upper lip, kiddo. It's time to get back to work.