An observation on healthy eating

I was reminded this weekend that my stepfather, in order to facilitate the orderly functioning of his digestive system, regularly consumes a cereal product called Fiber One, which appears to have already passed through the digestive tract of some small animal. Speaking only for myself, I would rather just shove a handful of this abomination up my ass and crap it out… the results would be the same, and I wouldn’t have to taste it.

Even the pseudo-candy version looks like a poo. Ick.

What I said today

We don’t really know each other as adults. We never had the chance. But this is something I believe: love which imposes obligations is not love. If I love you, it’s because I choose to. You don’t have to succeed, to get well, even to go on living in order for me to love you. It’s not up to you.

I am proud of you for simply having survived this long.

What I did yesterday was what I wanted, not what you wanted me to do. I had to. It’s who I am. Later on, I was thinking,”What if it were some other disease? What if you spent every day of your life in excruciating pain because of something like cancer? What if the prognosis were incredibly grim and you just got too tired to struggle any longer?” I would have been helping you, not stopping you. I don’t know what that means.

If you decide you want to fight, I’ll be there. I hope you do. If some time in the future you decide to stop fighting, I’ll be sad, but I’ll understand. Better than you think.

You said to me yesterday, “I’ve failed at this, too.” You were wrong, in fact. That’s why they brought you to this place – it has the trauma center. Your execution was perfectly lethal, except for a lack of sufficient time. Blame me for that.

And he thumped me on the knee, and almost smiled.

Red

It sounds portentous and worse, overly dramatic, which is why no one has ever heard me say it. Tonight I told my husband.

“I knew it would be me.”

“What?”

“Opening the door on him.”

Pause. “How long have you been thinking that?”

“Since I was about twenty.”

In my everyday, rational mind, I was afraid it was a gun. I checked the street name and house number as I drove up, in case the police had to come again. When he answered me from inside the bathroom, I thought, “Pills – he’s overdosed. But he’s conscious.” He claimed he couldn’t get up; his mother-in-law, who lives with them and had been in her bedroom two closed doors away, found me a skeleton key.

I learned today that a well-rehearsed nightmare may form an arc of hypnotic deja vú over a completely unique experience; that portents are not always wrong; that the picture in your subconscious, rational or not, may be the one that comes true. And when the paramedics and police had gone, I realized that the devil of memory is truly in the details your dreams can never supply.

Your brother can take the methadone overdose with a drink from Whataburger. The orange and white striped cup will lie innocuously on its side on the toilet cover, next to the bottle and the blade and a blue box of Cottonelle wipes.

Like any other large pool of liquid, blood dries from the outside in. Though you may have imagined it as sticky, it is much, much more slippery than water, and finding a dry place to brace your feet is a matter of necessity, not distaste.

You may know a great deal about many things, but recognizing the physical signs of fatal blood loss and estimating the amount already gone is the province of experts. This ignorance is suddenly appalling.

When you pick up the towels he was sitting on and feel their weight, mentally adding that heaviness to the largely-untouched lake on the floor, you remember that the cuts, in the seconds before you got them wrapped up and started pressing, were deep and pink and no longer bleeding.

For some reason, the clotted edges make you slightly nauseated, though the dried spatters and liquid do not.

The grout is stained much brighter than you might have expected.