That Indelible Feeling

I felt depressed last night. My mind kept replaying a past I wanted to forget. I couldn't get to sleep. Then I finally got to sleep, and I couldn't get up. Then I could get up, but stayed in bed anyway. I just didn't want to face the world. I'm lonely, my novel is still dragging on, and I'm damn tired of winter.

But my mind kept replaying a past I wanted to forget. That got me out of bed. It was 10:30, that's late for me these days. My plans dashed, I decided to do nothing else but write today. Fiction, mostly. Turns out to be a good day to cancel everything. It snowed. Looks to be a good three inches out there.

I guess the death in the family was part of it. Tomorrow's also my late mother's birthday. It brings up regrets: her mental illness, and the impossible reconciliation. The main bad memory last night was of my mother giving me a surprise gift, a Red Skelton Show collection because when I was eight, I liked the Red Skelton. However, my attitude had changed. Unprepared, I physically cringed at it. And I mean, it was a surprise, and my response was so overt, immediate and surprising to me that I couldn't hide it. It was like I became a Seinfeld character. And there was no way to recover from it.

I wanted to tell her I'm not that eight-year old anymore and can never be him again, even long enough to get through a single Red Skelton monologue. But I didn't say that. I just let my rudeness stand. I feel like such a louse. 

But how could I have explained it to her? The problem was, the eight-year old she thought she had then wasn't that child either. She saw me sitting enthralled in TV shows like Red Skelton. And I would talk about them because I had nothing else to talk about. I would pretend they were funny, I would try to enjoy them, yet I couldn't understand a lot of the humor. When I did, it wasn't funny.

I wasn't watching it because I thought it funny. What was going on around the TV with Red Skelton playing was actual so awful that the only thing I could do  was stare at something superficial and detach my mind. So, it wasn't Red Skelton exactly, it was environment around it I'm reminded of with the show. However, it does make his outdated comedy, never first-rate at the time, just twice as bad.  

She was a large part of that environment, being mentally ill and abusive. I live in fear of her. I'm certain she didn't want to go there; she never did, and I didn't either. So, rather than going near a topic both of us would find land-mined, I let my severe insult stand.  

And the moment feels indelible.