mom & me on the phone

 

It seems like the universe is in the physical state of devouring. Poking at first, and then devouring. The sky is the kind of grey-blue that makes you feel nice. It’s like the color of the first good sky of spring. Come out. Come out.

Fuck I feel good. I'm on the phone right now. Writing this. Real-time, yeh.

My mother has called me because she read my credit card bill. My mother reads my credit card bills because they arrive in her mailbox. Her mailbox is subscribed to my marketplace antics. She opens my mail. I am too lazy to call the bank to change my address. I'm too lazy to go online and figure out how to change the statement delivery options. My mother and I love/hate this fact.

I am a part of a great wheel. I spin it for my mother and my mother spins it for me. It feels like just labor. She calls me for nothing. She calls me only for confrontation. She calls me on bill day. Today is bill day. Landlord.  The hub of the wheel is unmoving.


I have no fixed plans. I try to take human interactions as they come;  as if they are an object, passed gently or tossed aggressively. I try to catch each one while bracing myself.

Fffuck you, I stutter in my imagination.

'Stop ordering from amazon.ca. Why are you ordering so many books?' my mother says. "I told you to stop and you need to stop.'

'It's my credit card,' I tell my mother. 'I pay the bill, what do you care?'

She tells me I'm flitting my life away. I write down the word 'flit' on a piece of paper with the intention of googling the definition later. I will probably never google the word “flit”- ever.

Fuck flit.

Flitterature. I've seen the future and the future is flitterature. Flitterature is new-wave. Flitterature is avant-garde. Flitterature is for people with gigantic flits. Flitterature. flittitty-flottitty-flew. Flittoral stimulation. Stab my flit with your tongue.

My mother is still on the phone. I feel moderately creative live-writing while pretending to talk to my mother. Just me breathing into the phone, that is good enough for her. Beat down to a creature that only breathes to her. When she contacts me, though I'm just a breath, she still beats. She is talking about my future. She is talking about danger. I’m trying to take her insults in a kind of 'stride'.

Here comes an insult. Apparently she thinks that I'm in with a 'bad crowd'. She has just said the word 'that' before saying my friend's name. That_________.

I am trying to reflect meaningfully on this. I am telling my mother that I will work on finding new sets of friends. I mention returning to a group of old friends that she admires. I can almost hear her smiling.

Is she smiling because she is happy about my decision or is she smiling because she thinks she is twisting me in loops, controlling my shape? She’s smiling because she thinks she still controls my existence.

Is she even smiling?

We’re tossing a poorly constructed paper plane between us. We’re dancing like zombies. We’re something like something. I don’t know. It feels like the most rational course of action would be to hang up. My mother is telling me that I need to become something substantial. She hasn’t asked me anything about myself in five years. She has no clue who I am. I am staring at the button on the phone that cuts the calls. I want to press it. I’ll stop writing when she goes away.