Here There be Dragons

It is no secret to anyone that I have a bad temper and a fair amount of free-floating rage. This isn’t something I am particularly proud of, nor is it something that I work on as much as I should.

My menstrual cycle is haywire from all the air travel we have been doing, but I am pretty sure that the dream I had last night, which involved betrayals and punching and screaming and kicking is directly related to my hormonal state. Seething.

My aunt in Montana has terminal cancer of the lungs and kidney, and doesn’t have long to live. She can’t come to my sister’s wedding and is despondent about it. Her younger sister who has serious pill addiction, hepatitis and other issues has moved from her New Orleans nursing home to live with her sister. I am hoping to visit them briefly in the next two weeks.

My aunt’s son (and her only child) is a few years older than me and is, by all accounts, a very kind man. This is devastating for him and we have been talking a fair amount since the diagnosis. Why, then, when he called me just now, did I want to rip him into pieces? “Man, this is so hard, it is so hard, so hard…..” Normally my heart would bloom open like a yolk in oil. Not today. He kept asking me when my sister was coming out there. I told him the tentative dates she had emailed me this morning, dates I need confirmed immediately or airfare will spike and I won’t be able to go, dates that I myself could not confirm. Repeatedly asking me questions that I cannot answer makes me want to crush the questioner’s face with a cinderblock. I got off the phone as politely as I could promising to call tonight.

Maybe it was the big question underneath that enraged me, because I just fucking don’t have the answer to why is this terrible thing happening? Maybe it is the psychological tugging that made me feel obligated? Hot tears punch at my eyes, behind this idiotic desk.