03/15/2005
I don’t care if the whole world catches on fire anymore… I’m in love. When you have love, you don’t need the world. You don’t even need it to stand on anymore. I’m floating half the time anyway. What would I need with that patch of dirt? That patch of dirt where my mom and dad can’t even be in love anymore.
Screw it all, I say. Let it all fall apart. I can’t care about it when the love of my life, a girl online who calls herself Gray Wolf, who lives thousands of miles away in some frozen place that feels otherworldly compared to Texas, tells me she loves me the same night my mom confesses she doesn’t love my dad anymore.
My heart fluttered when those words came across the screen: I love you. It was like a porn ad had just popped up. My natural reaction was to cover the screen and check behind me. I was so embarrassed. Someone loving me? Was it a typo? I needed to hide it away before any of my brothers could come in and start questioning it. Why is someone telling you they love you? they would ask. What happened?
I wouldn’t want to get into it. The intimate details. That’s just for these blog posts no one reads anyway. The last posts I’ll be making since Gray Wolf will take me away from this place and this computer and show me the world soon. She wants to start in Nevada. She loves the idea of the desert and the spectacle of it all. I get it. She’s been in the dark lately… and covered in snow.
3/27/2005
Dad lost his tire shop and stays in the dark by choice. Some nights I’ll catch him wandering the hall outside our bedrooms just itching to talk to one of us. I’ll wake up trying to go to the bathroom and he’ll be wanting to strike up a conversation about what he did to deserve all this. Why Mom left him? What did he do that was so bad? I couldn’t tell him. I was too busy picturing Gray Wolf creeping through the snow, coming to save me.
4/12/2005
Mom moved into her own little quaint apartment by the city. My brothers and I had to help her move in. There’s someone else in the picture but he moves in the background of her life right now. A peripheral idea she isn’t comfortable sharing with us just yet. I smelt a weird cologne while inside her place, stacking boxes in her bedroom. Did anyone else notice?
4/18/2005
Mom called one night and asked me what places I like to eat. I was the last boy on the list. She had already taken my brothers out to eat wherever they wanted because they were quick with their decisions; they were good at telling people what they wanted. I, on the other hand, am a riddle… within a puzzle… wrapped in a question. I’m like one of those little nesting dolls that keeps becoming a smaller version of itself, until eventually, it gets so small, it’s not even worth looking at anymore.
At first, I said Wendy’s off impulse, then said McDonald’s, then asked what my brothers decided, then switched back to Wendy’s and was laughing at the end, realizing how frantic I must have sounded over the phone. I was feeling winded by the end of it. I was nervous around my own mother! It was brand new territory for me. Why was I so nervous?
Maybe I wanted to tell her I was in love now. And that I understood her better than she thought.
Instead, we sat in silence as I wolfed down four junior bacon cheeseburgers, all plain-and-dry with cheese only, and a large French fry. She was only nursing a medium chocolate frosty. I must have looked like a fiend, just gorging myself like that. Her idiot son.
I’m getting off track, though. I didn’t know what to say at Wendy’s. Not really. I was like, wow, I don’t know how to talk to my own mom. I was swallowing too big. My throat hurt. I wondered how much she talked with my brothers; how their lunches went. I remember thinking that much. I pictured them all laughing it up, really connecting for the first time, being treated like adults; her finally showing herself a little more now that things were different, now that we weren’t lying about being a family anymore — lying that the world wasn’t barren and dead and full of drought. The jig was up now. We could finally get down to who we really were inside.
But I ate too fast and got sick and ended up throwing up in the Wendy’s bathroom. I stood in front of the toilet, in the filth of it all, in the stench of all that fearful eating that my body rejected, thinking to myself, wondering why couldn’t I have just let it out and asked what I was really wanting to know, what I was really desperately wanting to ask her, the question that was really racking my brain: “HOW COULD YOU LEAVE US?”
5/01/2005
Tonight’s probably one of my last night’s home, before Gray Wolf starts her long trek south. Dad just made sure to let me and my brothers know that the divorce was partly our fault. I guess he wants to make sure we don’t think we’re just innocent bystanders in all of this. He’s just hurt… he can’t mean that. He’s just… really hurting right now.
5/04/2005
I haven’t heard from Gray Wolf in three days.
5/11/2005
One week. Nothing…
5/14/2005
I got a random instant message from someone claiming to be a friend of Gray Wolf saying that she had passed away. She was hit by a semi. I pictured a magnificent wolf sprinting across the interstate and being stopped in her tracks. Her body tumbling over itself. Her last whimper, thinking of me.
She died for me… I’m realizing.
I think I’m gonna walk down to the creek by my house. I think this is something I need to cry over. Something I need to lose myself over. I need to get away and get some space, in case my cry isn’t soft and stoic like how men in movies cry.
I just got back. I could barely cry at all. Lord knows I tried. I wanted to blubber like a moron. I wanted it running down my cheeks and my nose flooding with snot. I wanted to punch things in anger. I wanted to be lost in my own love story. I wanted to be so overcome with emotions I couldn’t even remember my mom left or that my dad was falling apart in the dark.
I wanted it so damn bad I bit myself and drew blood.
Still… nothing.
5/18/2005
Mom wants us to meet her new boyfriend. Says he wants to take us out bowling. I don’t think we have much of a choice in the matter. She asks me on the phone while Dad watches from somewhere inside his bedroom. I don’t see him. But I can feel him watching me behind all that darkness. I agree to bowling but feel like a fraud. I just keep looking down at the ring of teeth on my arm.
I think I betrayed my dad. Though, I’m not sure how any of this works.
Plus… I’ve always hated bowling.
5/19/2005
So, bowling happened. It was awkward. I tried for a handshake and got a hug instead. Dad didn’t ask how the night went. I’m glad he didn’t.
But now I’m home and I see Gray Wolf’s back online? I’m trying to message her. I see she’s reading them… but I’m getting nothing back.
Then I get another instant message from her stupid friend. It says: “JK about the semi. She doesn’t want to talk to you anymore.”
6/09/2005
It’s been three weeks since I got that message. I stopped getting online after that; stopped pretending those were real relationships I was having with those strings of words across the screen. I actually dug in a little deeper into Gray Wolf before I vanished for good. Found out she was a 53-year-old woman from Michigan with a teenage daughter who’s pictures she used when I asked for proof of her beauty — the beauty she claimed over the chatrooms. Her account had an old Myspace link buried in her bio I guess she had forgotten to hide. I had to stare at her aging eyes for a while, and the tattoo of a wolf on her arm.
Something about seeing that made me want to cry. I’m not really sure why. I couldn’t cry at her fake death, but something about seeing her in the flesh, real and filled with blood, made me realize the lengths she went through to talk to me… and then the lengths she went through not to talk to me. There was something about the humanity in all that lying and faking that made me feel seen. She stole from her daughter to continue our relationship… It was inspiring. It really was.
Now I just wish I could talk to my mom about the craziness of love and relationships and how we’re all just trying our best to get through life, just bumping shoulders on our way to death — trying to find happiness and doing our best to not hurt others on our way there. How I just wish her the best in her next love story and how I would mend Dad back to health… since I knew she still cared about him, of course. I wanted to tell her everything was okay on our end; that the whole world might be catching on fire and full of drought and utterly barren, but everything was going to be alright, and that now, just maybe, maybe… we could finally get down to who we really were inside.
