Queen Juicy J

I’ve known for a while that this was coming. Could feel the very first tendrils of the affection creeping up into dusty, dark and closed places of my heart. Places I never believed would find love, would be open. Places relegated to cold, to empty, to the dark realities of broken dreams. But I have been caught up in my own perspective, so wound around what I could lose to realize that I’m not the only one putting it all on the line. That’s the problem with living in one’s own head. You tend to become the only one you think about in the long term and it can take a surprising amount of force to change that. I was thinking of all I could lose when he struck me with his own question. Oh. Oh I see. How funny that we two fear the same thing but from opposite ends. He asks me to swear I won’t hurt these children. That I won’t leave them and I’m caught off guard for the moment. When he asks, all I can hear is my own defensiveness in my ears, screaming all the things I stand to lose. But ...

I remember the first time I saw their little heads. I had met T for dinner and followed him home at his invitation. The house was dark and they were curled up on the couch, watching the laptop. Two small bobbles bathed in the blue screen light, huddled together. Their voices were soft, small. Deferential to the man who had just walked in. When I turned my gaze up to the painting on the mantle, they jumped up to comically praise it, and I saw immediately that they were an amusing blend of him and her. If I had known how things would grow, I would have locked in more detail. I would have savored this first meeting. But we never know what moments will be important later. The following day they introduced me to Minecraft, offered me food, and they were kind to me. Z set the example and R followed. I can still recall Z saying “I don’t mean to upset you but this level is based on hell.” Already so polite and thoughtful in his way. R kept distance but would animatedly parrot whatever Z...

I don’t remember when I had the thought first, exactly, but it was the night Z got really sick. “The mother of my children”. I was thinking of T and how he must differentiate us, his wife and I. How we have different roles. How he must perchance describe us individually. And when I had thought that, I had turned it over in my mind a few times as I often do with common phrases. Looking for a new perspective on them.  Later that night we had to go to the hospital. Z’s face was flushed and his eyes fever bright. He looked so small and lost, and I suddenly felt years of pent up emotion trying to burst free. Trying to pour out on him. He looked so tiny and in such need. On the big hospital bed he looked even more dwarfed and a little scared. How many of my siblings and nieces or nephews did I sit with in hospital rooms like this one over the years? How many little hands did I hold through bed bumpers and tried to be soothing? And yet none of them had pulled like this one. No...

I can hear it in the night. In the dark. It starts as a whisper, almost completely inaudible. Most people don’t hear it, most people live blissfully unaware of the sound, unencumbered by the knowledge that life is not static. It’s ever changing, ever evolving until it’s a banshee wail in their ears, forcing them to face it.  But not me. Not others like me. We can hear her in the night, in the dark. The first time she cracks her dry, scaly lips outside the window and inhales. Long before it’s ever a bridge I’m standing on, I hear her. I feel her. I dread her. Change is her name, but she wears a lot of disguises. A lot of masks. Evolution, transition, graduation. All pretty, colorful words that all mean the same thing. Change. And for people like me, change often heralds terror.  Change came to my grandmother and stole her mind out of her still living body while I watching in slow horror, her eyes more vacant daily until one day she forgot how to breathe... Change...