Meeting The Parent

“All that creamy white looked wrong, perverse, floating placidly in the cup on the table before me. That glass looked like the sort of thing you drank hard liquor out of, not something as embarrassingly good for your health as whole milk.”

“It comes twenty-six minutes after midnight, when you look to your right and there is your mother on the couch. But she is not your mother - She is a lumpy mass of skin and bone and muscle and fat, crying over the news of her brother’s death, and she will one day be dead, too.”

“Once upon a time there was a little girl named Allison. Allison was murdered in her bedroom. If you do not pass this horribly vague story on to twenty people in the next five minutes, you will never find true love.

Worse things have happened.”

I pretended to be obsessed with The Smiths my freshman year, just because I did not want to disappoint a teacher of mine who somehow got the impression that I was a diehard fan when I said, “Yeah, that one song is amazing.” I could tell she thought we were kindred spirits, that we had a connection. I didn’t want to burst her bubble. And I figured that I should like The Smiths, anyway, right? I’m always doing ridiculous shit like this. What kind of person does ridiculous shit like this? And I do not like The Smiths. Not even a little bit. Not even at all.

My best friend died last year. Her mum sent along some of her old things. A shoebox filled with odds and ends, photos, little trinkets; her life. I found an essay she wrote that summer, the one she was going to send to Harvard. I copied it word for word. She was always such a good writer. Maybe this is why I didn’t get into the schools I wanted. Maybe this is why I’m going to a shit college. Maybe this is all her fault.

Forcing yourself to write something amazing is not a good thing. And, might I add, it is not possible.

“I love you.”

“Why do you love me? Saying it is not enough.”

“It’s the difference between you’re and your.”

“What?”

“Chew on that for a while.”