Today's writing

I picture my mother and Friskie growing up together just outside Jeff City, which to them was the big metropolis, and I wonder what that must have been like. I didn’t know my grandparents on my mom’s side at all. They’re dead now. “You don’t want to have known them,” Friskie likes to say. “They’re roasting on the right spit, all I gotta say about the matter.”

 

But there’s this moment – this yawning deep vertical cavern of an emotion that spikes far inside me and rousts out everything I don’t want to feel – where I wish, just that heartbeat of desire, the longing for her to be some sort of mother to me. Just in that moment, though if I’m honest about it, it of course isn’t just this moment. Friskie’s the closest thing I have to a mother. Times I’ve wanted to rely on her, to soak her Guns ‘n’ Roses t-shirt with tears. But of course you get close enough to do that and you realize what’s floating in the waters of her, the toxic gunk, the regrets.