***
Mismo used to sit with her and braid her hair under the large oak tree behind their parents’ house. That was when they were young. She would wait all school year to come to home to her parents and Mismo, to sit with him beneath that Oak tree and have him twiddle his fingers in her loose curls while they read to each other. His favourites were Sartre and Spiderman comics, though very little in between.
Now she lay in bed, her hair still tightly pulled back from work, with her fitted blazer, and green slacks, seeing her life as nothing. She had built a respectable life, studying psychology and working as a professor, yet no occasion stood out so much to her as that oak tree, Mismo, and how things used to be.
He was a modern day Ophelia. His world was one of reason without reason. Their love was a constant battle, one against the other, yet it reeked of dependency. She perceived him as melodramatic. He told her she was “calm, collected and unsatisfied” and he was right; she was unsatisfied though she would never admit it to herself.
His dilemmas were an evident waste of time, but she would always come to visit again. She felt a gain of knowledge through watching him. He was what she thought as the very product of human weakness. She would sit, and observe as he flailed around his room, drink in hand splashing the liquid around the kitchen table in some drunken fury. Sometimes his words would become so abstracted from his intent, that all she could make sense of was his glass.
Liquid, free of form yet still confined to the laws of physics, sliding up the inner side of the long cylindrical glass. Then falling, coating the glass with thick syrupy alcohol. His fist would pound the table, and the impact would travel up through his arm, muscles ricocheting off of muscles, and muscle to the liquid, which would then smack itself against the glass, again. He would rant, rave, whine, cry, always sick with desperation. All I could see were the faces he would make, thick lines curving up and down across his face. His faces, and his drink, that was all I could see him for.
When Mismo was drunk enough he would slam his drink down one more time, grab her eyes in his and ask her to tell him about their childhood. But she would never speak. All she would say was Mom and Dad had you, then they had me. They grew up and we grew up, and now we are wherever it is that we are.
That was all she would offer him, that which she knew for certain. She saw herself as the voice of reason in their duo, and him the hopeless romantic. She was always the watcher, she watched him cry, she watched him react and overreact countless times over. She watched in hopes that it might eventually make sense. She noted: “My irrational brother was merely reacting. It was like everything he did was a fixed reaction to a chemical or situational cause. I watched him hoping to find the right solution, the formula to his behaviours”.
5 parts alcohol
1 part romantic comedy
=Mismo will laugh at my lifeless response
Add Monday
=Mismo will cry
Add 2 parts vodka
And another missed dinner
=Mismo will yell
Statements like these were his strong point. She told him he was far too irrational to have a decent conversation with. He responded by saying: “I am only irrational if that is what you perceive me to be.” Apparently he didn’t see himself that way. “You find logic only in what you have already proven. But your evidence is only a product of the past, the past is gone, the new time is here, with new experience we evolve to experience in new ways. You say I should see a doctor, someone who sees me only for what they have studied?” his questions become more and more threatening with each tailing end. “Someone who will never really know what I have experienced? I know you, and you know my experiences better than anyone else does! Why don’t you talk to me anymore? Am I not the ‘type’ you study?”
She didn’t know why. She used to tell herself that she was just listening to him, when she could no longer believe that lie, she told herself it was because she had other work to do, which was for the most part true. But this time she had no excuse because this time, for the first time in a long time she was being honest with herself.
***
Nowhere she thought.
Just before she lay down her mind was racing, regretting, justifying, and simply reflecting her loss.
“I could have been a part of his experience, attempted to empathize with him, or I could remove myself and observed. Which is what I did, what I had to do otherwise he would have just wound me into another one of his emotionally arousing, yet unproductive rants.”
After his funeral she came home, passed the empty liquor bottles scattered in her kitchen. No one touched them; they had been there for weeks. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head as she lay down. Her thoughts slowly wound down to a nerving silence.
Nowhere she thought.
“It must be an illusion; we are instinctively frightened by the concept of nothing so our ears play tricks on us. Give us a ringing to listen to, a humming. A tone that could only be described as being like an old mans fingernail, and a child’s laugh that collided together in the vast realm of nothingness. This is where I am. This is where I must be, otherwise how could you explain the ringing in my ears. I am nowhere.”
Lost in her losses she wanted to believe. Surrendering to herself, to Mismo. With nothing around, but the comforting ring of her own imagination, one would assume she could conjure up more encouraging thoughts. She tried to think of Mismo, who he was, why he was the only constant in her life. But all she gets is:
5 parts alcohol
1 part romantic comedy
=Mismo will laugh at my lifeless response
“My internal utopia, my world that cannot exist therefore does not exist. My emptiness. My rationality. I see myself for the symptoms I experience. I am experiencing loss, due to my traumas. My world without Mismo, my world without irrationality.”
“The atmosphere here is static. Nothing is here to move, energy just itches in itself. Of all the things I thought I was, I became only what he feared them to be. Life devouring mandates.”
« return.