Hey guys, it's Jen. I'm at work and I needed some air, so I decided to step out onto the boulevard where I could contend with all the background noise in the universe, including: a guy singing along to his own song on the radio, several garbage trucks, a bus… and now the patio music for the restaurant next door has been turned on. So, I'm gonna go this way. I'm annoyed at everyone simply for existing, so I know that I'm the asshole right now.
I figured why not be in an asshole mood and talk about my cousin Susan. Honestly, I'm in such a shitty mood that I decided to pop a muscle relaxer and walk around the block until it kicked in so we'll see how this goes…
Do you ever use labels or categorizations, things like astrological signs, love languages, birth orders, to help you figure out a person and why they react to certain stimuli and certain people? I did a lot of that stuff, a mix-and-match, because I'm always curious about people and the why and the how. Like a lot of the time people think that the reason I have an issue with sharing is because I'm an only child. But the reason I actually have an issue with sharing is because every time I've lent somebody something, they've destroyed it before returning it to me.
When I was in high school, I had, like, two pairs of pants. Not only was I poor, but I wanted to be trendy, so that was all I had: A pair of army cargos. One day, my cousin Susan borrowed them. One night she left my sight, and the next time I saw her with those pants, they were shorts. She had returned with one of my two pairs of pants cut into shorts. My cousin Susan, my best friend at the time. I'm getting ahead of myself.
I am an only child, but I was raised, kind of, in a sisterly environment with my two cousins Susan and Tia Maria. Tia Maria was in the middle if you were to look at us as a triad.
When Tia Maria and I were kids, she had a vibe of competitiveness about who would be the better younger child. I realized later that the part she was playing was one in a dynamic initially created by her mother, to create competition between her and Susan. But she applied it elsewhere, especially when we were little kids. She would exclaim to me I'm doing so much better than you! when helping in MY family flower shop, at a job I'd been doing way longer. But that's just a small digression into my relationship with Tia Maria, although I'm pretty sure she and Susan also don't speak.
The last time I heard from Susan was shortly after her wedding. She sent me an email that said I heard about your diagnosis and I'm here for you. Let me know if there's anything I can do. And I thought, like what? Create the calligraphied invitations to my hysterectomy? What did she think she could do? What did she think was wrong with me? Who told her any of this anyway?
I berated my mother and momentarily cut off my aunt for talking to my other aunt about shit irrelevant to them like the state of my cervix. At the time I hadn't seen Susan since her wedding, even though I tried to coordinate an outing once or twice, before or after the wedding, since somehow we'd ended up living in the same city again. I'd already dealt with the idea of surgery, and here she was, throwing her anxiety at me. Suddenly I was responsible for her emotions at finding out something literally microscopic about me, and making it all of me. I wrote back trying to be polite but official. I appreciate your concern for secondhand news about my health. Please know that if something concerns you, I will contact you directly. Of course I didn't plan to. Why would I call on somebody for support who shirked several years of getting together, even though we only live several miles apart? You can't even meet me for coffee, why would you be capable of taking care of me after a surgery? And honestly, if you aren't offering that, what the fuck are you contacting me for?
The time before this that I'd heard from her was a congratulations on your graduation when I finally finished hair school. I didn't keep the card. I knew she meant well, but I specifically noted that she said something about my raw talent, which was now technically not raw, but, in fact, finely honed and certified by the state. For someone who got a master's in English, it seemed like an odd mistake, so instead I took it at face value. But I don't want to give the impression that we were on bad terms at the time. She sent me hand-drawn holiday cards of her and her husband. She wasn't writing to me angrily the way she had nearly a decade before.
During our email correspondence where we updated each other on our social lives: Oh, by the way, I'm doing meth now! No big deal, once or twice a month. Which, I realize now, sounds preposterous, like, no worries bro.
I can't talk to you anymore. For as long as I was using meth, she couldn't be my friend. Okay, I said, accepting the terms of her ultimatum. It was easy not to talk to her because she lived in San Francisco and I lived in Atlanta. Again, from across the country. Ma'am, very easy to accept.
Like I mentioned a couple episodes ago I've used hard drugs casually, eventually losing interest. The way Susan reacted was as though I told her I was becoming a prostitution whore to support my habit. If she'd issued the same ultimatum under those circumstances, my response would have been exactly the same. You're across the country; my life in no way actively affects you. But clearly, knowing anything about my life makes you so stressed, it's best you not know, I agree. Sometimes I wonder if she translates my life into a series of panics so that she can have some reason to feel martyristic and superior in her catastrophizing. Which is a trait inherited from her mother. I still ponder the effect she thought she would have via email from across the country especially without even offering encouragement, or a way out of whatever detriment she saw me buried under. I want to stop and say now that I have stopped talking to friends whose choices I've found burdensome and ever-unchanging, From abusive relationships to— yes, drug use. But I've done that after months of talking daily about the issue to the point of exhaustion, I haven't called it quits after one brief mention of partying in an email. Again, from across the country. Whatever effect she thought she would have, I resent and rebuke it.
I can't remember how I got back on her Christmas list after that. She must have heard that I was doing better, and getting married to a nice, employed man, and other signifiers of normal, non-hysterical living.
In childhood, Susan and I had a mutual friend. I don't mean that we were friends and cousins, and therefore we knew all the same other children. For as close as we were, we attended different elementary schools, based on… I don't know what! None of us attended in our district, so. I went to a series of faraway specialty programs, and somehow Susan and Tia Maria met Rice, who lived in a flat below my aunt, with whom I would spend my summers. Eventually Rice's parents got divorced, and Rice's mom found a scandalously younger boyfriend in Rob (age 22), who became an excellent stepdude to Rice, and eventually a cool young dad. They moved across the neighborhood to a flat next to one of those cool 90s coffee shops that just don't exist anymore.
In high school, we all drifted apart, especially after I started dropping out in my sophomore year. I began extending my breakfast at the diner into first period, only to rush back for 10AM attendance, and then to the pizza place for an extended lunch, where I became a corner-booth-fixture as the rest of my non-delinquent peers filtered through.
I began dating a well-above-drinking-age man that I met at a show, and occasionally would leave the pizza place before dismissal and head up to the share house he lived in. Sometimes, my friends and I would find ourselves in other areas of town, like back at the cool coffee shop next to Rice's house. Surprise! Avon calling.
Rice's mom answered the door and did not meet my enthusiastic greeting. She wondered what I was doing there, and told me Rice was at work. When I walked away, I wondered why the interaction felt off.
A day-score later, and I learned the reason that Rice's mom had been so sus of my arrival, is because Rice had told her, that Susan had told her, that I had done some sort of version of runaway homelessness with my older boyfriend. With this background in mind, Rice's mom had opened the door to find a Runaway Train Kid.
Why did Susan think that? There was probably a discussion one mother to another between my mother (or aunt) and Susan's mother, in the sense of Jen is out of control, in the way that I was casually independent and just… wouldn't behave: Piercing my own ears, stealing smokes, drinking peppermint schnapps, the aforementioned punk shows and older men.
I don't know how Susan got the idea that I had run away or something? Because I was spending nights out with my boyfriend? As you do when you're in a relationship? But I realized just the other day while listening to a podcast about Ani DeFranco, who Susan loved as a teenage lesbian, as you do as a teenage lesbian. And, maybe she didn't know this at the time, but that's what happened to Ani DeFranco. So, I just kind of wonder if, if stories that she heard about other people's lives [that] she couldn't really, like, understand, so she applied them to mine. Just a thought. I tend to feel like I get frustrations and traumas projected onto me from people who are replaying certain issues. I just find it interesting that it was she as a freshman in high school who bragged about cutting class to fuck girls she met at the bus stop. Unless she was making up her own drama too.
No wonder my perceived rebounding into normalcy after each fictional disaster was so awarded. Even though you'd think at some point they'd recognized my cycle of decline and subsequent rise— the one that they made up— that they don't actually need to be worried or disappointed, as they watch this version of my life. Even in your bizarre universe I still come out on top, no? Save your concern for your own choices and follies, which I respectfully ignore each time one is brought up to me. Rest assured, the gossip goes both ways. I'm just good at ignoring it.
Never mind that none of the stuff that's happening to me is so interesting to talk about ultimately, which is why I assume the bric-a-brac of made-for-TV-movie is stitched onto the edges of my life at the first telling.
[“Send Me On My Way” by Rusted Root]
On My Way