Single moments, split decisions, random lucky breaks, it's dizzying to contemplate. My oldest friend said offhandedly yesterday that her whole life could have been awful when her mom married someone just 4 years older than we are, but he was a really good guy, loving step-dad. Random lucky break.
In all the years I've known her, since 6th grade, I never once thought of her stepdad (Mike) as any younger than her mom, I didn't know that fact until now - grown ups were grown ups, either good or bad, and I still see that way instictively, knee-jerk. Maybe Mike wiped out any inclination I had to sort adults by age instead, with huge consequences in my own life. I spent as much time as I could at their house growing up, mine being so relentlessly unhappy and chaotic, and every memory I have of Mike is as a source of kindness. My friend's mom died young, like Mark, life cut off halfway lived. From all that, eventually came the son my friend is now raising, her younger sister's baby that she adopted the same year that I miscarried mine, a loss of my life as I knew and loved it, layers of me scorched off that knitted themselves back together in a full-body scar-casement. Always stiff.
It's funny, odd funny, how much LOSS is LIFE defining. Here this kid is, sitting next to me in the backseat, loudly quiet - I know that sound, the inner choppy water of feeling loved and lost at the same time. I hold memory of just about everyone who went into the making of this kid - his birthmother (in the wind) obsessively loved professional wrestling as a teenager; his grandmother (gone) cut her own hair at the kitchen table, laughing easily; and now, the serious look on his father's familar face beams determined care-love at him in the rear view mirror, and I remember that face in his wedding photo 35 years ago to the day, a kid himself with eyes WIDE ("wtf just happened").
Already this child is in motion toward decisions with lifelong consequences, which he might well start making in that very same high school hallway.
back in the blue - lucette ft mariel buckley I'm fucked up but so what lalalaaa
