That woman is not my mother. I am staring at her and she is talking to me, and I see her lips moving, but I do not hear a word she is saying. Something is off. We are standing in my parents bedroom. I am folding a pile of my father's undershirts. I hear my little sister in the background, but I know she is not my sister. She is repeating something unintelligible over and over again in a very loud dull voice. She is 11 years old and bored out of her mind. The woman who is not my mother is yelling at my sister who is talking very
loudly. She is telling her to please come put her laundry away. My sister, who is not my sister, is ignoring my mother.
right now I am scrutinizing the tag inside of the undershirt I am holding. It looks like my father's except that it is a bit small. Maybe it shrunk in the wash. Maybe it belongs to my brother who is nearly as tall as my father, but much skinnier. The tag has been washed out, and I cannot tell whose it is. I spread it out over the bed so that it is lying flat, but now it looks too wide for both of them. I fold it, and toss it into my father's open underwear drawer.
My sister who is not my sister is now banging something against the wall in her bedroom. It sounds like a hard shiny plastic object, and it sounds like it is chipping paint off the wall with her continued smacking of it against the drywall which has been painted purple, pale purple. That room used to be my room, but now its not. I sleep in a room next door. At night when everyone
is sleeping, I hear my father snoring. I hear my sister's breathing. Once, I woke up thinking my phone was vibrate. It really was everyone sleeping and breathing, sleeping and breathing, and the whole house was vibrating. I am a quiet sleeper.
I walk into the hallway with a pile of towels and sheets. An excuse to leave my parent's bedroom and my mother's increasingly shrill admonition of my little sister. Her voice sounds like she knows the effort is futile, like we all know that it is. I put away the dishes today, I put dirty laundry into the machine, I put clean dishes into the
cabinets, I hung
delicates on the line to dry. I do everything this woman tells me to do. She looks like my mother, but lately I am starting to wonder.
I am starting to wonder about a lot of things. What is reality? And how, under any circumstances, did I really construct this to be mine? How did I reach this
particularly nasty stretch of
dismalness? And did I ever have the control to make my life anything differently? If I worked harder, perhaps I would be elsewhere living a life? but aren't I working just about as hard as I can? and how could I be so mislead as to end up like this?! In my parents house, folding laundry because my mother told me to, doing homework about things that
dint really matter to anyone in the long run, except possibly me.
I can only wonder how I allowed myself to get to such a state. I am truly baffled. I used to play this game a lot. I would imagine myself doing
something amazing, then I would figure out how to do it. I wanted to invest in a mutual fund, I invested. I wanted to travel, I traveled. I wanted to learn how to play an instrument, I took lessons. I wanted an internship, I got it. Now I am working on the long haul plans: finish school, finish school, finish school finish school. I think, somewhere within my own house, I lost myself somewhere along the way.
