Bitter In Love With Everyone Else

When somebody gets sick I think a lot of us think we should have looked after them better. 

I had a friend come home from studying in a different city and we had grown apart since finishing school, because growing up means lengthening the divide from a lot of the things we know for certain, and we knew other’s humour and each other’s pain too well to continue with it. She came home and even in the half-dark I could see her bones and the stress of a different situation, like her insides were impaling the air as a sort of white-flag. Then the pair of taxi-headlights broke through the gap between her legs and I threw myself at her like nothing was wrong. If anything, I thought I could be the one not to bring it up, to notice it, like everybody else must have. 

Lying on my side in his bed and he said he might be depressed. It’s not that I blamed myself but all I could do then was make pikelets and make plans, plans that I might have followed myself if somebody had been around all the time to initiate them. And I picked at my nails in the silence that followed.

And my Father was always complaining about stomach pains while I told him vegans hardly ever get bowel cancer.

And I get the urge to wrap these people up, to grab whatever it is they need from inside myself, because I don’t need it. It comes down to what everybody else deserves, and everybody else deserves a lot more than I do.