Morgenmuffel
Mother, I moved in with him!
Sorry you had to find out through email, our schedules just don’t line up for a good phone call right now. Also sorry to directly go against your advice. I see your “he’s doing too much” and raise you a “look at Dad and Chris.”
I know it sucked even though it was 7 years ago, but Dad basically lived in the bathroom or on his phone. I want to be better than sitting until my legs go numb. And Chris was unaccountable, but he was really just hanging out at his friend’s house, drinking. I want to do more than just change whose couch I’m sitting on and whose Cheetos I’m eating. My brother and Dad set a sterling example of the kind of guy I do not want to be with.
Seth is immaculate, considerate, strong, emotional, empathetic, smart as anyone I’ve known, and super hardworking. He keeps asking if we can meet you. He’s a lot like you. If I’m being honest, I’m scared of showing him off to you because I know you’ll see through anything in him that is superficial. All these pretty traits I like in him might be like stained glass to you. I know it was that way for his parents when I met them, with them scrutinizing me. But I mostly felt a strange sympathy coming off of them, since they were both exceptionally hard workers like their son.
But I’m hoping for the best. I’m hoping that some of his work ethic and go-getterness will rub off on me as I try to finish this degree and all the little creative things I want to dabble and eventually get serious with. I promise that, if I’m not able to call you, I’ll send you updates that are not all about Seth. So we’ve moved my cat in, as well, and I’ll be updating you about how Bill is doing.
Bill is doing excellent. She took a nap on Seth’s desk where the skylight throws a ray at about 11 AM. Even though we had to get rid of redundant furniture, anything I cared about I kept and that includes Bill’s cat towers.
Mom, I feel very at ease with this current situation even though it’s only my third move since I left home and only my second time moving in with someone. But as always, if you’ve got any keen, pithy insights I should have about being in a new living situation with somebody, lemme know.
Love you very much!
-Laney
*****
Mom,
Sorry for the slow reply. I’m already finding it a little hard to keep the pace! Seth never stops going! He wakes up at 5 AM, spends a little time in the bathroom, and then finishes exercise and breakfast by 9 AM. I’ve tried to join in on his routine or sneakily be the one to feed him, but he always seems to be out on a run or have food prepared before I’m ready to help. When he gets started working, he’s at his desk making phone calls and multitasking.
Do you know that feeling that you get when you’re taking a test and someone is furiously scribbling down answers, making margin notes, writing on the test booklet until the page is full, and you try to write but the sound of them hustling and taking it seriously makes the task somehow more overwhelming? I bet you were that kind of person in school too, but for me, it’s really hard to focus when I’m next to him. He never lectures me about me listening to music on headphones while I’m working even though I know it’s not ideal for my own concentration; dude has the vibe of a university library a week before finals when he’s not on a call - furious typing.
Thanks for your concern, but I’ve thoroughly checked over the house and his parents’ house while I was moving in and I’m definitely not walking into a Bluebeard situation here. Seth imposes no restrictions or weird rules on our relationship beyond obvious stuff like “no cheating.” Even the lingering scent of cat pee after Bill uses the litter and fails to cover it like a noble lady gains no critique about how better things were before a cat arrived. He just takes care of it.
I’ve taken care of cooking dinners since I’m still a student and don’t pay as much rent as he does, and Seth seems OK with that; although, I perceive it would almost be easier for him if he took care of it since he always remembers what groceries to order.
I don’t mean to make it seem like he’s too good, but he’s so on top of shit that it seems like he’s possessed. He moves faster through chores and mundane tasks than I can even focus for, it’s uncanny.
Besides that and what I told you about my upcoming capstone, and how much I’m actually wishing I could hang out on campus to just type it all out and research it, I feel pretty good! I’m getting a lot done! I have a great cat! I have a big bathtub and take bubble baths like an adult child! I love you! How about you? Are you enjoying a bath too? Mom, how are you?
-Laney
*****
Hey Mom,
I’m not sure it’s possible to ever have an argument with Seth-he’s such an insanely dedicated people pleaser that anything you could possibly make an issue of, he’s eager to meet the demand. But I did feel like, after I forgot to put in the grocery order for some kind of protein, any kind of protein, to have with dinner for the last three nights, I could have expected some kind of “be better” signaling. He just calmly asks if he wants me to help put in the order, and when I say no and invariably get caught up on writing the fourth paragraph for the second section of my capstone and forget. And when I do that, he talks me through what we can make besides what I was thinking of.
Like he’s not more than a couple years older than me! I barked at him! I said “how do you do all these things and not ever forget anything and not ever take anything I do hard, even when it messes with your concentration?”
“Nothing messes with my concentration,” he replied, “I just choose to concentrate on what you’re saying or doing.” And he’s not wrong, I’ve never caught him paying half attention to me, Seth’s just very clear about when he can be talked to and when he is working with a client or otherwise occupied.
“But how?” I asked. “How is it that you just go and go and go. You start early in the morning and you don’t stop!”
“Well, to be honest,” he replied, “I set aside a good chunk of time every morning just to meditate, face my fears, and confront my inner demons.”
And it occurred to me then that I had seen him at 5:00 AM one morning, before he had managed to make it into the bathroom for his morning thirty minute wake-up routine. I rolled over to look him in the eyes, and I saw someone bewildered and lost behind his sleepy face. He looked slack jawed and distant, staring off into the distance, but also nervous, like his foot kept twitching!
What is he doing in there that makes him so awake?
-Laney
*****
Hello Mom,
Yeah thanks for the creepy insinuations you gave in response to my last message. Please don’t overthink my guy spending 30 minutes in the bathroom to get energized. But also.
I regret to inform you that the truth is a lot more fucked up. I pried a little bit harder into his routine, knocking on the door and asking if I could use it this morning. No response, even though the shower wasn’t running, and he wasn’t running the sink to brush his teeth or shave. SO! I cracked open the door and looked inside.
He was standing in his sleepwear facing the large bathroom mirror. His eyes were completely locked with his own, and his breath was a bit rough and sharp, growing quicker by the second. He hadn’t taken a shower yet, and there was sweat soaking into his white shirt.
In his hand, he held a knife. A dagger? Was he threatening to stab his own reflection? It was a short knife with a green tinge to the blade and a little hilt that on both sides curled upward.
Looking him over, it didn’t look like he’d cut himself, so I didn’t register any immediate danger to myself when I tried to take it from him. “Put that down, Seth, you silly ass” is probably what I said, but I don’t remember exactly, because as soon as I locked fingers around his to pry the knife away, the mirror darkened, showing something other than a reflection.
Do you know how, when you stand in a room with two mirrors directly facing each other, especially two big mirrors, you can see yourself repeating over and over again, but in the middle of the frame there’s a dark space that goes on forever? Like if you could somehow step out of the repeating image, you would be seeing infinity, the direct view of two mirrors bouncing off of each other into an infinite dark hole.
That’s what it was like to look for myself in the mirror. I also noticed that I was no longer touching Seth, and I recoiled.
With a blink, the room was back to normal, and Seth was facing me with this knife in his hand. He tried to put it on the counter quickly and slide it under a tissue box, but I was like, “What the fuck was that, Seth?”
And he explained.
Mom. Is there a convergence point between when someone is too good to be true and also when something is too weird to be true? Somewhere where it’s a little of both?
This guy stabs his inner demon every morning with this knife to gain his superhuman levels of getting shit done. Mom, Seth is an inner-demon-slayer.
I sure wish I was joking, Mom. Call me if you get a chance.
-Laney
*****
Mom,
Sorry I missed your call. We’ve kinda been talking about this thing all day. I read your email-he suggested the same thing! Gaining godlike levels of focus and drive and energy is apparently something he can share with me! He said his mom and dad also fight off their demons in the morning! It’s something they’ve passed down, and it’s kinda their family secret to success.
I did think it was kinda weird that I wrote you an email talking about some magic shit I saw for the first time and you were like “oh man sounds great.” You really are scary, Mom.
The name of the knife is Misery Chord or something like that. Kinda an ominous sounding name, but Seth said that it wouldn’t be hard for me to defeat my inner demon even if I’ve never done it before. He just recommended I rush in and stab it without thinking about it too much.
To be honest, I’m hesitant because this is a lot, but I also can’t stop thinking about it. What if the only thing stopping me from becoming a famous artist or a famous writer or a grad student (hah, no) was something I could just kill every day? Could all my insecurities rushing up to tell me that I can’t do something, that I’ll never amount to anything, really be something I can just stab and do away with?
I’ll report back if I try it, and it works. He did assure me that, even as scary as everything looks when you hold the knife, 100% no harm can come to me from doing this. He promised he could come with me the first time, as well, just so I could feel safer. I promise I’ll make the safest choice.
Bill doesn’t know what to think and I’m debating having Bill try to defeat her inner cat demon first. Or bring Bill with me and just chuck Bill at my inner demon to see how that goes.
We’ll see. Love you, Mom.
-Laney
*****
Hi Mom,
Sorry for the slow response. I did use the knife. It was wild.
Seth stood behind me and wrapped his arms around me as I picked up the knife. Immediately, I saw the mirror duplicate my and Seth’s image and then duplicate as if another mirror was behind us, and then the reflections went on forever until, in spite of the lighting, the room felt very dark with a black void stretching out in the distance. And then, with a blink, our reflections were gone, leaving only the void.
“Go ahead and climb on the counter to get closer to this. It’s a tunnel now, and your inner demon is that way,” Seth said, trying to sound encouraging.
I was so scared, especially since he made it clear he wasn’t going to follow me. But I mustered myself and climbed onto the counter and started walking. I had to cross over the counter and then some counter on the reflected image before having to cross a low wall to… you know what, think of the letter “u.” If you were stuck in a “u” shaped pit, you’d have to climb a wall on each side to get out. If you had to do this a lot, it would look like “uuuuuuuuuuuuu.” Except, each time, because the reflection starts to shrink in the stretched-out distance, the depth of the “u” became a bit shallower and the textures of the bathroom blurrier even up close.
This trek carried on for a while. It was exhausting and it definitely felt like more than a 30 minute walk to get to where the space where the room started to brighten again.
And all of a sudden, I could see her, my inner demon, sitting in a little chair and staring at me.
She was me as a little kid. God, I was a cute little kid. No way, I thought. And I hesitated.
“Mommy?” she asked. I shook my head.
“Oh, you’re me, but bigger,” she said. “Why are you so mean to me?”
“What?”
“You’re terrible,” she said. And then she lit into me, telling me about all the times I don’t take care of myself, how real life can make doing things impossible but I blame myself for failing anyway, how wouldn’t a nap every now and then be nice, how I keep constantly striving to be the best at something on my first try and that makes waking up every day impossible because how can anyone get out of bed with just such a ridiculous set of standards, and so on and so on.
Honestly, this clone little girl demon inside of me made me feel like shit, but I know everything she said was basically true. If I killed the part of myself that made my wellbeing the priority of my own choices, I might be able to get more work done, but at what cost?
I dropped the knife at some point just out of sheer wobbliness from the vicious (yet totally deserved) reaming that little girl gave me and snapped out of it, returning to the bathroom.
Seth wasn’t quite happy to hear what had happened, but I’m not quite happy to hear he kills a child version of himself every day either. I mean what the fuck, that’s horrible. Seth basically confirmed to me that that’s the inner demon he has too: a scared boy who is overwhelmed by how much work Seth does everyday and how many times Seth sticks his neck out to take care of other people.
So, sorry Mom, I know that’s kind of a let down. I had hoped that this might be the key to unlocking my motivation or something. I’m sure some people can choose to obliterate their sense of self like that, or whatever you want to call it, but it’s not me.
Not sure what things will be like now that I chickened out of this but I’m still living with Seth. I’ll keep you posted.
-Laney
*****
Mom,
I’m pretty sure it’s not going to work with Seth. I brought home a cold from the grocery store and he literally will not take a break from work to eat chicken noodle soup without me getting aggressive about it.
In other words, I literally have to make his discomfort and his sickness about ME in order to get HIM to do anything about it because he kills off the part of him that lets him conduct his own wellness checks everyday.
What is he going to do if he gets cancer some day? Would he let me know? If he got in a traffic accident and perceived that not informing me caused the least damage to me, would he loop me in?
I vocalized this to him, and he just stared. Maybe I would also feel the need to be a bit more dead inside if I had to be on phone calls for Sales or somesuch everyday, but I can’t abide by this as it is, so I’m packing up to leave.
I love you, Mom. Sorry for the wild ride and thank you for being there in spite of weird magic shit. I’ll be seeing you this evening or tomorrow, whenever I can get out there with my stuff. It would mean a lot if we could just hang out and watch scary movies or something.
-Your Laney