This is probably stupid

Lately I've had issues with my boyfriend's relationship with his parents. And when I say lately I mean our whole relationship.

They don't respect each other - his parents are awful to him and he's awful in response - but that's not even what's been bothering me in the past few months. What bothers me is that even though his parents are awful to him, he relies on them for almost everything. If my parents treated me as poorly as his treat him, I would have gotten a job that pays me really well (which he is capable of getting) and I would save money and move out. He's going to college so he's asking them to pay for it (and for everything) instead of working for a while then sending himself to school and not owing them any money. He acts like he can't stand them but then he puts up with them and lets them pay for everything/ be bitter at him for owing them money.

Another thing that really gets under my skin is that he expects his mom to cook for him and gets bothered when she doesn't. If the four of us are out to dinner, he'll tell her to try a food and say that she should make that for dinner sometime. Now, he knows I'm a great cook and I cook for him all the time (probably more than his mom does), but he still expects her to do it and still wants to eat her food. I would never want to eat the food of someone who shames me all the time and is just completely terrible to me. I would want to eat the food of my awesome girlfriend who I never fight with.

So... I'm really not sure if I'm being petty and unreasonable or if I'm actually thinking logically. Either way, I'm not really wanting to bring it up because I'm terrible with confrontation and that's not a necessary conversation to have right now. It's just increasingly bothering me and I'm afraid it'll come to a head and I'll get unreasonably angry at him over his mother's cooking.

Tangent: they do a rehearsed prayer at family meals that they required me to learn. I hardly go to their family meals anymore because I just don't feel like dealing with their power play.

But yeah. This is probably stupid.

I wrote this about a year ago, Fall 2012

Butterflies, pictures, and pictures of butterflies

“Photographs are funny things. You can capture a memory in a moment then forget it even happened. And when you go back and look through old photos, you find old memories, like how you stumble upon a song from years ago and you instantly recall every bit of your life that revolved around it.” Sarah told me that one night when she was showing me her high school yearbooks and scrapbooks from family vacations, and I’ll never forget a single word of it.

At one point she told me that ever since she was small, Sarah was interested in three things: butterflies, pictures, and pictures of butterflies. Now, the word “small” here means childlike, but she was also just a generally small individual. She had small features, short fingers, she wore a size five shoe and she towered over infants and small children alone at the adorable height of four-feet-eleven-inches. If ever someone dared refer to her as a hobbit, she would quite cleverly point out that the tallest of the hobbits is three-feet-eight-inches.

Bouncy, brown curls licked Sarah’s cheeks, neck, and chest as the wind whipped into her car through her rolled down windows. It was that carefree spirit that I loved so much. She said that what she loved about me was that I gave her butterflies in her stomach.

We met in a doctor’s office, so ever since that day I’ve been unusually cheerful about getting a physical. She sat next to me in the waiting room, despite the roomful of empty chairs, and clicked her heels until I looked at her.

“Hi, I’m Sarah.”

“Hi, Sarah,” I chuckled. “What’re you in for?”

She laughed. “That’s cute! You’re cute. Stomach ache. How about you?”

“I’m here with my mom. She’s got the flu or something but she doesn’t drive.”

“That’s really sweet. Does she live with you?”

“Well, I live with her. I’m only 19.” I was kind of embarrassed, but she smiled.

“Oh, good. I’m 18. Your beard makes you look older, but I figured I would talk to you anyway,” she giggled.

She told me later that she had no idea what she was trying to accomplish with that statement; she wasn’t even sure she was interested until we had our first date.

We left the doctor’s office that day expecting to never see each other again, but thankfully we were mistaken. A few weeks later, she rear-ended my car with hers at a stop sign. I saw her in my rear-view mirror and couldn’t keep myself from smiling. She got out of her car and ran to my window, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so so so sorry,” the whole way.

“Hey! It’s you! Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. I don’t think your bumper is messed up at all. Are you okay?”

I smiled at her, told her to calm down, and asked her to dinner.

“No, I hit your car. I should take you to dinner.” She insisted, so I let her.

After a few dates, I guess it was five, Sarah showed up on my doorstep, her curls were damp on her face. I let her come inside and brought her a blanket. It was red, her favorite color. I put my arm around her and she wiped her cheeks on my shoulder.

She breathed in heavily through her nose.

“I’m sick.”

“No, sweetie,” I said flippantly. “You’re crying.” It hurt to see her upset, and I never was good with comforting. She laughed, though.

“I wish it was just sniffles.”

“So, what is it?”

“A lot of things. I’m diabetic, anemic, and I have a combination of gastritis and stomach ulcers. It’s not usually a problem, but I haven’t done anything for it until recently so I’ve gotten really sick.”

“That isn’t fatal or anything is it? Can’t those things be treated?”

“Yeah, they can be. I’m being dramatic. I’m not dying or anything, I’m just overwhelmed.”

I had gotten Sarah a scarf with butterflies on it because on our third date she made me dinner at her house and showed me her collection of butterfly photos and butterflies on mounts. The scarf was red and the butterflies were white and black. That night, I gave her the scarf early even though I was saving it for our next date. That night she taught me that every memory is a picture in your mind, and if you focus hard enough, your life can turn out to be a private photo album for you and your thoughts. Her auburn eyes being accented by the scarf was the first mental picture in my album.

We fell fast, and I did my best to keep her mind off of being sick because it didn’t just hurt her, it hurt me, too. She was sunshine, and her sadness kept me in the dark.

One day, I brought flowers to her office. When I walked in, she stood from her desk, then fell to the floor. She said her knees were tired and gave way, but she held her stomach the whole time I was there, her short, slender fingers wrapped around her sides.

“Thank you for the flowers, baby. They gave me butterflies.”

Her smile was perfect. Regardless of my circumstances, she could make me ten pounds lighter with one look. Nothing was too great for her smile, no burden too heavy. That smile could cut through steel.

Her office had a party; I was her plus one. She wore a strapless dress of deep purple, and her face was radiant. Her eye makeup was that same color, and I remember it well because she and I took at least a dozen pictures together that night.

It was over five months since we first met in the doctor’s office, but this was the first time I had seen her bare shoulders. She had a flock of black butterflies tattooed on her left shoulder. They danced across the top of her shoulder and down past her collar bone onto her chest. That night, I kissed her for the first time.

I took her home after the party and she invited me in to show me her past. Sarah pulled out a box from a shelf; it was almost too tall for her to reach. Some pictures fell out. “Ah, jeez,” she sighed as she bent down to get them, but her other hand tipped the box in the process and more pictures fell on the floor. I couldn’t help but laugh, and she glared at me sarcastically.

“Well, what are you doing? Come help.” She motioned her head for me to come over. She looked adorable in her little purple dress surrounded by pictures. I sat next to her and picked up a picture of her as a five year old. Her curls were tighter and wild.

She took the picture from my hand; her fingers slid over mine. I grabbed her hand and kissed her, and I saw her other hand hold her stomach out of the corner of my eye.

Most of our nights that weren’t spent going places and taking pictures were spent looking at pictures, either hers or mine. One night she brought her camera to my house. For about an hour, she showed me how to take a “photograph,” which, according to Sarah, was different than “snapping a picture.”

“Anyone can take a picture. A photograph is a well thought out piece of art.”

She showed me how to increase and decrease the shutter and how to open and close the iris of the camera.

“You know how your eye dilates when it’s dark, and your pupils get really small when it’s bright? Well, when you open the iris of the camera, the picture gets lighter, but not as much is in focus. That’s called having a low aperture. When the aperture is low, it’s bright but there’s a small depth of field. Only one small area is in focus. But when you have a really high aperture, you could take a whole landscape picture. Now, I know it’s confusing, but I think you can get it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I think I understand. Tell me about the shutter, again?”

“Good. Okay. The shutter is the speed in which your camera takes the picture. So if you want to take a picture of soccer players in action, your shutter should be super fast so you can get them without the picture being blurry. But sometimes it’s cool to leave your shutter open longer so the picture can be blurred. Have you seen those pictures of the trails of lights on the freeway?”

“Yeah, they’re cool. You can do that just by leaving the shutter open?”

“Yeah! Neat, eh? Never thought you’d learn that at a girl’s house, huh?”

I rolled my eyes and kissed her. She was so smug.

Exactly one month later, I took her to dinner for her 19^th birthday. She wore a black cocktail dress with a pink sash and she made me wear a pink tie to match.

She asked me on our way to dinner if we could roll the windows down. “It’s so nice outside.” She spent an hour curling her hair, we almost missed our reservation, but she fancied whimsy over appearances. I loved that about her, and I was grateful because the ring in my pocket was much more quaint than expensive.

I had the waiter put the ring around the candle on her red velvet cake. She knew we would sing to her, of course, but the proposal was more than her body could handle. I kneeled next to her as our waiter set the cake before her, and she fell heavily onto me. At that moment, everything slowed down. I cradled her softly as someone ran to call an ambulance. I could hardly hear the inquiries as to what happened. All my lips could exude was, “baby’s gonna be fine.”

The wait after that was the longest I’ve ever waited for anything. The hours felt like months. All I could do was sit forward in a chair in the hospital waiting room with my hands across the top of my head, my fingers clutching my hair, my heels clicking.

I felt the doctor walking toward me; his sadness pulsed through the room. I made myself stand, despite immense protest from my knees which had made a snap decision to change their occupation from joints to jellyfish. The doctor forced eye contact and made himself stand still.

“Sarah was very sick. I’m sure you know that. Her various blood deficiencies weren’t a problem as long as she kept them in check, which she did. Are you familiar with the term ‘butterflies in your stomach’?”

“Yes, of course, she got them all the time. Did she say something about them?”

“No, no, she wasn’t conscious when she arrived. She’s had butterflies for a long time, most of the time for no reason. Most people get them when they’re nervous because their bodies pull blood from their stomach to their muscles to ease tension. This causes their stomach to shut down briefly, and that’s usually the reason why people lose their appetite when they’re anxious. Sarah’s stomach would lose blood and gain blood so often due to her gastritis that she constantly had butterflies, but if she were to ever get overly excited or nervous, her stomach would lose blood too rapidly and go into shock. We’re giving her a blood transfusion to make up for her anemia, but if she is going to recover, it’ll take some time.

“So, what does that mean? The butterflies could kill her?”

“The short answer is yes, but luckily she’s not dead. She’s not exactly stable, but she’s alive. Right now she’s in a comatose state.”

A coma’s better than dead.

I don’t remember walking to her room, but somehow I knew how to get there. All I remember after the doctor talked to me was seeing her. She looked smaller than usual, more fragile. Her skin, which had glowed golden a few hours ago, was porcelain. She was almost as white as her hospital gown.

For hours I just sat next to her bed and looked at her. She had an oxygen mask on; it covered her adorable little nose. It reminded me of my dad’s accident, but he didn’t hold on this long. He was gone before I could see him.

Sarah flat-lined while I held her hand. The warmth had already left her fingers, and since that moment my life has been a blur. She taught me once that when you decrease the shutter speed on your camera, your picture will blur. The lower the shutter speed, the longer the exposure and the more action is captured. Since she left, my shutter’s been open. It’s made for an interesting picture, but it’s impossible to sort through. My life is a beautiful piece of art, but it’s become a horrible memory.

I don't know yet.

Wrote this once upon a time when I had friends at which to be mad.

You may be faint hearted, dear,
but your footsteps are heavy,
and I hear every move you make. (and I hear every step you take)

Your subtlety has an edge, and it slices through,
with the blade of your words, I grow more hollow,
trying to regain the consciousness that I bled.

You know nothing of what it's like to be me,
all that you do is based on what you see,
there is no other option but to let me bleed,
from the inside out, pain comes from your mouth.

Fall Like Leaves

So I had this word picture in my mind for days, that of painting the sky, but I haven't been able to write this  until today.

- The stem of my heart whithered

It left me to float to the ground

Now I'm in a heap of broken

Just waiting on needles to be found.

- I am the bristle in the paintbrush

And it's You who's guiding the stick

He is the color that fills up these hills

And our love is what makes it stick

- Take my hand

We'll paint the sky

I'm no fan of clutter

So it's just you and I

Take my hand

And together we'll fall

We'll fall like leaves

More in love with it all

- The waves of this sea hold my waist

They're your arms and your hands and your fingers

And over me floats your apple

In my eye forever it will linger

- Take my hand

We'll paint the sky

I'm no fan of clutter

So it's just you and I

Take my hand

And together we'll fall

We'll fall like leaves

More in love with it all

Burn.

Her naked feet hit the frozen ground; book in one hand, gasoline can in the other (at this point, it was too late to put on shoes). She’d tried several times now to set it alight, but she was sure this plan would work.

The book fell to the earth with a soft thud and the fluid flooded the cover. To make sure it lit, she opened it and spilled among the pages, too. She struck a match and let go.

The heat was shocking, like a sudden chill in the winter, but she composed herself and quickly moved back, taking the gas can with her. The flames waltzed with the wind and the pages began to curl and shrink like melting Plexiglass.

After a few quick moments, the book had the likeness of a large, white rose that had been lit on fire and was blooming in reverse. For fear of her feet freezing in the evening, she splashed more fuel on the flames, her distaste for the cold eventually outweighed her desire for distance from the book.

She got tired of waiting, so she decided to let the fire die; it was good enough. Stubborn as fire is, it persisted, forcing her to employ a metal pipe to stamp it out. Of course, this only encouraged the embers into revolution.

The previously untouched pages were next. As if tending a campfire, she prodded and shifted the ash and ember around until more flame was exposed.

The last small pieces were eaten away and the pages began to squeal softly in pain. A life, if you could call it that, had ended. Now the dilemma was turning the glow into soot without making her frozen feet work too hard. She returned to the ashes with the metal pipe, flicking up dirt to settle the tiny city of lights. It was the pipe’s turn to be headstrong, as it tried to take bits of the flame hostage. Soon all that was left was like the dollar you find in the pocket of your jeans after you do your laundry, and it crumbled in the wind. If ever a word was read again it would be sorely out of context. On her knees, she patted the pile of soot down with her hand, with a slight tremble of fear for being burned.

She was satisfied. She threw the pipe, carried the canister, went inside, and looked at her hand. She questioned the irony of the ash on her hands as she turned on the sink. As she washed the demons away.

The Peace in the Fog

It was hazy. I could barely see my hand in front of me, nor could the merchants and the fishermen. The Viking statue was barely visible in the old Ravnkloa fish market. That Viking, Harald Hardrada was his name, stood with victory in his gaze,taking watch over the clock before him and over us down below. That day, however, Harald was a ghost, a silhouette in the mist. Yet, I could still feel his eyes through the fog, staring mercilessly through me as he cast his disapproval over those who smelled of the sea. I’m sure he thought all the seamen had betrayed him, for no one continued to pillage. They were nothing but kind fish-sellers anymore, or so I thought at that moment.

Norway was a forgotten land, a hollowed-out shell, and even more so was Trondheim. As I walked by the Byhaven shopping mall I had an epiphany: the world was ending. You see, no one cared. Everyone guarded themselves, leaving no room for trust or love. People turned on each other, too, you know, man against man, brother against brother, son against father and so on. I had never had a real friendship, never felt as though someone truly loved me. Apocalypse must be coming.

Then it happened. I tripped over the slab of pavement that stuck out at the corner of Ravnkloa and Jomfrugata. I fell right into him. We tumbled to the pavement. He had a beard. And a gun. The gun went off, so, naturally, I screamed. He mumbled something, “Be quiet wench or I’ll blow right through you.” So of course I was silent. I stood, and helped him up, then brushed myself off and kept walking. Then it struck me; he was English. I paused for a moment, baffled to find a naturally English-speaking man on a street in Trondheim. I then continued forward, only to be stopped again by a husky English voice calling after me.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” called he, and at that I turned around.

“It’s of no consequence. Had it not been me, however, you would have certainly needed to apologize. People around here aren’t too loving.”

“But, are you?”

“Well, I try, a bit,” said I, startled at my own affability.

“I certainly appreciate it, marm.”

“You are quite welcome. Now, watch where you wave that thing and have a safe,gun-fire-free day, sir.”

“Thank you again, and the same to you.”

“You’re welcome again, and thank you, too. Good day.”

I turned briskly and kept walking, strangely hoping to never see this man again, but somehow still wanting to see him once more. I wanted to hear his voice at least one more time before the world was finished. Somehow I knew that wouldn’t happen.

I caught myself smiling on my way home. Strangely enough, I didn’t stop myself from it. I opened my small, cold door and entered my small, cold house. To my surprise, I discovered someone sitting in my living room. He was my uncle, and he was dead. I felt his neck, but immediately pulled my hand back from the shock of his icy skin against mine. I rubbed my hands together then took the whiskey bottle from his hand; I was afraid that this discovery was a sign of the end. It’s an omen I thought, then addressed the body of my uncle. “Look at you, why have you done this? Why have you come here, of all places?” I was so used to his quick, “Ah!” then a long delay. I almost expected his response, despite the shade of gray that was flushing over him.

I made a quick call to the coroner and a sharp, “Komme hit og ta dette døde kroppen bort før jeg nødt til å begråve ham selv og treffer deg med en spåde! (Get over here and take this dead body away before I have to bury him myself and hit you with a shovel!)” As they carried him away I thought to myself, I should have prayed. I guess it doesn’t matter when I do it, he’s dead anyway. Well, God, rest his soul.

The next day, I walked to the fish market with my coffee, as I had done for many days prior, and looked at the Viking sculpture, as I had also done for many days prior. It all seemed the same. It was too hazy to see my hand, Harald gazed at me disapprovingly, and I left, with my back to the sea. Something was different, though, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Things started to change as my head started to swim in a sea of nausea and disaster, and the fog lifted much earlier than usual. As I leaned against the wall of the Byhaven mall and held my head, I saw a man lying next to where I stood. He looked like myuncle Ansfrid, loosely holding a half-empty bottle of whiskey in his hand. He was just as dead as my uncle, too, but the whiskey wasn’t the cause. I lifted the hat from his face to find that he was the man with the husky English voice that had made my heart melt.

All my premonitions were falling together. I stood and tried to compose myself, but this was the last straw. My head pounded with agony, and I shrunk to the ground with my back to the wall. I heard inquiries to my health and well-being – for the first time that I could remember – but the voices were so distant. Maybe it was because my knees were covering my ears, or maybe it was Armageddon. All I know is that the world went black and I felt a glorious peace for a fantastic moment, but it soon left. It left forever.