you're telling me a fairytale
(written yesterday)
Today I went to visit people. My aunty, who is not related to me, she gave me a piano with early inheritance. She gave me a piano, and that piano is at least a third of who I am.
We’re no that close, actually. Last time I saw her was about a year and a half ago. She’s getting really old. She looked after me a lot when I was a toddler and a baby. I used to pick plums from the tree in her garden when we went to visit.
On the way there we stopped at Chris H-‘s house, which was strange and intimidating. She was my mum’s friend. Her son and daughter were our playmates; the kind of playmates you climb trees with, and play doctors and nurses with (indeed).
Paul was there, and he has turned into an interesting and handsome young man who I was quite comfortable with, and found myself wishing to impress. It was weird. I could almost see cupid in my mum’s eyes.
Aunty Barbara never seems to age even though she is 84, which explains why she is so politically incorrect, and thinks that the amount of lorries on the road should be high up on the government’s priorities (she could have talked me into thinking so too, I think, if she’d taken the time). She was more amiable than usual.
I argued with my mum a lot on the way there, so I decided to maintain silence and, having just discovered Barbara's age, I thought about how old she was.
She was in her twenties during the war. She was middle-aged for the sixties. My mum told me about how her husband had died when he was in his forties. He died suddenly, of a brain tumor. A few months earlier Barbara had had a miscarriage. This is grievous enough, but the loss of that baby seems even worse when you consider that she now has very few relatives, and none that live nearby.
The extent of her alone-ness scares me a lot.
At lunch she talked about her next-door neighbour, a teenager, who she has always considered a nuisance. She has become convinced that he has found a computerised way of bugging her house, and can see what is going on. She says he hears him saying stuff when she is in her house. The more I think about this, the more it makes my mind revolt with pity and fear, because she must be so afraid and paranoid most of the time. I think it came from a newspaper article she read about that guy who set up his webcam to go off when someone entered his home, and he caught a burglar this way when he went on holiday. I tried to explain to her that it would be impossible for her to project a webcam picture without having a computer. But I didn’t want to sound like I was saying she was crazy, because she is so sound of mind in every other respect. As far as I know. And which is more frightening, really?
She makes me very afraid of being old, and of being alone.
But I am not going to be like her if I get old. I’m going to be like the other person we visited, Mary, who is the same age. She goes off on coach holidays with women’s groups, and she visits people, and plans trips to Norway for next year. She makes jokes, and tells us she is living life to the full. She could be lying in order to protect us. It’s hard to tell.
All of this made me very appreciative. I felt strangely lifted by the whole day; not because I left feeling like ‘thank god I’m not them’, which I didn’t really- no, it was because I genuinely enjoyed the day and I felt like a could actually look at these women and see something different in them that I ever normally do.
Maybe it was my hormones still pumping from Paul. Maybe it was gratitude. I don’t know.
Does this mean I’m becoming a woman or something?
No, probably not. I just got a message from vikki saying we’ve been friends for ten years. Any excuse to celebrate.
Today I went to visit people. My aunty, who is not related to me, she gave me a piano with early inheritance. She gave me a piano, and that piano is at least a third of who I am.
We’re no that close, actually. Last time I saw her was about a year and a half ago. She’s getting really old. She looked after me a lot when I was a toddler and a baby. I used to pick plums from the tree in her garden when we went to visit.
On the way there we stopped at Chris H-‘s house, which was strange and intimidating. She was my mum’s friend. Her son and daughter were our playmates; the kind of playmates you climb trees with, and play doctors and nurses with (indeed).
Paul was there, and he has turned into an interesting and handsome young man who I was quite comfortable with, and found myself wishing to impress. It was weird. I could almost see cupid in my mum’s eyes.
Aunty Barbara never seems to age even though she is 84, which explains why she is so politically incorrect, and thinks that the amount of lorries on the road should be high up on the government’s priorities (she could have talked me into thinking so too, I think, if she’d taken the time). She was more amiable than usual.
I argued with my mum a lot on the way there, so I decided to maintain silence and, having just discovered Barbara's age, I thought about how old she was.
She was in her twenties during the war. She was middle-aged for the sixties. My mum told me about how her husband had died when he was in his forties. He died suddenly, of a brain tumor. A few months earlier Barbara had had a miscarriage. This is grievous enough, but the loss of that baby seems even worse when you consider that she now has very few relatives, and none that live nearby.
The extent of her alone-ness scares me a lot.
At lunch she talked about her next-door neighbour, a teenager, who she has always considered a nuisance. She has become convinced that he has found a computerised way of bugging her house, and can see what is going on. She says he hears him saying stuff when she is in her house. The more I think about this, the more it makes my mind revolt with pity and fear, because she must be so afraid and paranoid most of the time. I think it came from a newspaper article she read about that guy who set up his webcam to go off when someone entered his home, and he caught a burglar this way when he went on holiday. I tried to explain to her that it would be impossible for her to project a webcam picture without having a computer. But I didn’t want to sound like I was saying she was crazy, because she is so sound of mind in every other respect. As far as I know. And which is more frightening, really?
She makes me very afraid of being old, and of being alone.
But I am not going to be like her if I get old. I’m going to be like the other person we visited, Mary, who is the same age. She goes off on coach holidays with women’s groups, and she visits people, and plans trips to Norway for next year. She makes jokes, and tells us she is living life to the full. She could be lying in order to protect us. It’s hard to tell.
All of this made me very appreciative. I felt strangely lifted by the whole day; not because I left feeling like ‘thank god I’m not them’, which I didn’t really- no, it was because I genuinely enjoyed the day and I felt like a could actually look at these women and see something different in them that I ever normally do.
Maybe it was my hormones still pumping from Paul. Maybe it was gratitude. I don’t know.
Does this mean I’m becoming a woman or something?
No, probably not. I just got a message from vikki saying we’ve been friends for ten years. Any excuse to celebrate.