Rough Night

Another Monday. Well, it's Sunday, technically. For another seventeen minutes, anyway. I just got back in the box (the truck). I'm delivering in Charlotte at 12:30. Another gift from my dispatcher (he and the load planner seem to have made it their personal mission to make me pick up as late as possible on Friday and deliver as early as possible on Monday (meaning I tend to get home on Saturday morning and leave on Sunday night). So much for my company's much talked about “home weekends” policy.

It was an unexpectedly rough night. I was sitting on the couch at my mother's apartment. She was sifting through a box of mementos, looking for some document she needs to take to the Social Security office tomorrow. The occasion meant that she had to examine each memento as she removed it. Naturally, I was expected to share in her trip down memory lane. I looked at them all. Birth certificates. Adoption papers. Marriage licenses. Divorce decrees. Name changes. Drivers licenses from the departed. Old school test papers. Old pieces of artwork I'd left behind. Poems I'd written as a kid. Birthday cards I'd made by hand. On and on and on.

I didn't want to look at any of this stuff. I couldn't tell you why, really. It all seemed tainted somehow. All I know is that Mama eventually picked up on my weariness. She decided to go next door and visit a while with her sister so that I could take a nap.

When she left, as soon as the door shut behind her, I found myself sobbing. Mama's pleasant walk down memory lane had torn open old wounds. Her past carries into her present. Wheres mine ended at the precipice, where I fell into this never- ending limbo, where weeks slip by like days and weekends are a long lunch break.

After I had collected myself, I tried to nap. The few times I did not off I was awakened by the phone ringing. The rest of the time I lay there staring at the ceiling, or out the windows. My mind was roiling.