12-21-06

My mom and I decorated the house today to welcome back Cindy. She’s been gone from my life for about two years now, and because my mom never measures anything in absolute terms, she’s been gone from my mom’s life for about ten years. (That’s my mom’s estimate, not mine.) We decorated the house with things that we thought Cindy would like. We popped popcorn and strung some along the tree. Dennis ate half the popcorn we popped so we were only able to drape the kernels over the bottom of the tree, which is anyway, the part that counts and looks the best.
Dennis is getting an older kid’s head, but he still laughs like a baby, and when I touch his hair, it’s soft like a baby’s hair, so I can’t bring myself to treat him like an older kid. He still wants to sleep in my room, so we sleep on the floor and pick lint out of my carpet before bed. We’re getting attached in a way that seems familiar. He wants me to take him everywhere and he gets angry when I laugh.
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing at you. It’s a compliment. I think you’re funny.”
“I’m telling.”
“You can’t tell on me for paying you a favor. This is a good thing. I think you’re funny.”
But everything hurts him, even the good stuff, and I know why. Next year, I will be leaving too, and Ms. F, who comes out in the morning with her snake wrapped around her neck, said to me, “Your family is dissolving, don’t you see? One by one you’re all leaving, and when children leave they never come back.” But Ms. F only says that because her own children died in the jungle and no one knows how it happened, but I’m not going to dissolve the family just by leaving, and no one knows that I’m always thinking about death and dying, not that I’m suicidal, just that I can’t stop thinking about it, and up until Ms. F came up to me, I had only thought about it for myself, how horrible it would be the day I lost all consciousness, feeling, and anything at all, but now I’m also thinking about my mom and dad, Dennis and Cindy, and all of a sudden I also think maybe one day they will die in an accident on the freeway while driving up to see me in my college, wherever it might be, only Cindy, I guess, would probably not be in the car, because Cindy is always trying to be someplace that they are not.

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I showed mom and dad how to make cookies today with a recipe I learned from my friend Oscar and it made our house smell like a family staying in for the holidays.

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I have brief fantasies, while waiting for mom and dad to come back with Cindy, of stealing Ms. F’s snake and showing it to the video store clerk who doesn’t work at the video store, who maybe has read my letters and is trying to steer clear of me, if he even knows who I am, and impress him with my snake. Or, I would time warp and shrink myself into a little cane that fits in my mom’s ear and watch the boys come up to her and rack their brains for a reason to touch her. I think the less clever ones would hit her and say, “Ugly. Giant. Twiddly legs.” And the really suave ones would just say, “Excuse me,” and brush past her. Or, we live in our old house, and Cindy is putting my hair in braids, and Dennis is a little tiny baby who wears a blue knit cap and has fingers so small that I spend an entire afternoon trying to wrap a piece of ribbon around his thumb and pinky so I can say, “Look mom, look dad, this is your gift to me, so can you return that bike? I don’t need it anymore.”