This story isn't accompanied by any DBPB post, it was just something that popped into my head as I was trying to sleep, and demanded to be written. I felt it was too good to pass up, even though it might not make much sense to other people.
"And he's going to H-E-double-hockey-sticks!" the ten year old boy finished his story eagerly with.
"Just say hell. You're allowed to say hell," his mother said with a half-tired, half-amused smile where she was standing by the stove, smoking a cigarette. "Actually, don't say hell, they'll think I'm a bad influence on you. Say go where the pepper grows or where no man wants to set foot."
"A room full of prementstrual women," his father answered as he came into the kitchen, straightening his tie. "That's where no man wants to set foot." He smiled at his wife and gave her a quick kiss.
"I think that's the general defenition of hell anyway," she said and rolled off some ash on the glow of her cigarette in the ashtray.
"Might be. We better get going," he said and put a hand on the boy's back and led him out in the hall to get dressed.
She knew she looked tired. She felt tired. Dead tired. The ash-blonde hair hung lifeless around a long, worn and tired face and she felt more like she had lived thirty-six lifetimes than thirty-six years. It had been that way for most of her life and although no one else blamed her for not working she blamed herself. She had brains and she had knowledge, just no diploma to show she had either. And she didn't have energy. At least not enough to get a diploma or a full-time job. A part-time job was out out of the question anyway, she thought way too much to work as a cashier at the grocery store or something equally meaningless.
She heard her son and husband joke around as they got their coats and shoes and left, and realised it was exactly because she thought so much she couldn't have a steady job. She had tried several times, but her head could never rest, her subconsion was always working away at something, consuming her energy. It was hardly a new discovery, she just saw it in a bit different light now and then even if she was painfully aware of it all the time.
You got a lot of time to think when all you did was do some laudry and plan the dinner in the course of the day. The house wasn't big and she didn't have a small child to look after any more. In many aspects she was glad for that, it gave her more time to discover her own little world, even if it cut her off from the rest of the world in many aspects. She had no problem listening or discussing stories her husband and son brought back from their day out in the world, meeting people and learning new things, but it was still as if it was a wall between them. She felt it especially between her and her husband. Sometimes she said silly things in the greatest solemnty and he just laughed at it and made a joke himself. She didn't blame him, because he didn't see where that thought had come from. He couldn't see it. Just as her energy was consumed by all the little things going on in her head, his energy was consumed by solving the problem right in front of his eyes.
It might soon cost them their marriage. Not because she had any intention of leaving him or stop loving him, but because she saw he had noticed she lived in a world of her own and he wanted her by his side in his world. But his world was cold and hard and run by facts, something she wasn't made for. She was meant to be in a flowing world of half-finished thoughts and hidden ideas. Sometimes these ideas briefly showed themselves for her like the spark from a match, but they soon left only the smell of burnt wood. Not that the smell was a bad thing, it might mean an old memory would pop up and soon enough light another match, but it was never good to tell when it would happen. It could be the smell of newly-washed jeans, in which case the memory came before the idea, or it could be that her son decided to get rid of an old toy and thereby showing he was growing up. It felt like both an eternity and just a second since she was nursing him by her breast, and both were just as right. Nothing was linear or straight when it came to her world.
She put out the cigarette, sat down by the table and cradled the cup of cold coffee in her hands. Sometimes she thought it sounded wonderful to live in a world where things simply was the way it was. Two times three was six, the drycleaning had to be picked up on Thursday and her son was exactly ten years and three months today. Of course that was also true in her world, but her son's ten years and three months was composed of endlessly many moments, each one might affect the next one, but even ten years and three months wasn't even worth noticing in the long run of the history of the universe. The universe couldn't care less that he scraped his knee playing soccer last week, but at that moment and for her son and her, that was all that mattered.
The world where ten years and three months simply was ten years and three months sounded wonderful and uncomplicated -- but also extremely dull. She liked to think of it as the mathematical world, because two times three was six and no one could change that. No one could change that the drycleaning had to be picked up on Thursday, but they hardly thought about what could happen on the way to the drycleaner's. Or on the way to Thursday. Or why it happened to be Thursday in the end. It might as well have been called Gorsday, but it wasn't, it was called Thursday.
She smiled faintly. That was exactly the thing she could rant to her husband about: why was Thurday called Thursday. He would in the end put his arms around her and either say it just was or simply kiss her. Because what else could he do? He didn't care why Thursday was called Thursday as long as the drycleaning was picked up on that day. And to be fair, that was the least she could do for him: make sure the household ran more or less smoothly. Because he was out there in the dull, mathematical and logical world punching numbers and making money, while she was sitting at home wondering why she was the only one who saw that ten years and three months was a rather pitiful representation of her son's life on earth.
She got up again and poured the coffee down the drain before making a cup of tea. The closest her husband had ever come to seeing her world was to compare her with tea and him with coffee: while she could see the bottom of the cup through the murky liquid, maybe the answers to the mysteries in the world, or at least what the mysteries were, he couldn't see other than the brim. That was years ago and although it wasn't a half-bad comparison, she knew he had stopped even trying to see the bottom of the cup, he was happy staring at the brim in his mathematical and logical world.
She took the tea into the living room and sunk down in her chair in front of the TV, but didn't turn it on. People thought she was bitter. Maybe she was. People thought she was deranged, and maybe she was that, too. Mostly, people thought she was too happy doing nothing to contribute to society and being a modern woman. She was too cozy with having everything provided for her by her husband she refused to take those opportunities women had been fighting for for centuries. They couldn't be more wrong, because she wasn't a woman, she was a human, a thinking being, and if men had prevented women from doing what they wanted for hundred of years, she wasn't about to let women preventing her from discovering all of her own little world. It wasn't just what she wanted to do, it was what she was good at and what she was born to do.
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