Jorge Luis Borges

“Your mother was unkind to me,” I thought as we boarded the rollercosaster. It was Independence Day after all. I thought about the ways in which she had always cast dispersions on me and my family – a side of the tracks which she peceived in me, and which she did not desire for her daughter, although we lived blocks apart and on the same side of the tracks. There was an imaginary track in your mothers mind in which cotton and coal and automobile parts moved up and down the seaboard, and on the other side of it – the side that knew nothing of these tracks – lived those people.
It was strange that she was my mother’s best friend in high school and that they had not spoken in 30 years. My mother attended your father’s funeral when he was mangled in the mechanical looms at Burlington Industries, and your mother did not acknowledge her. Driving home, mom saw an albino deer cross the road and she was sure that it was the spirit of your father escaping to freedom.
I don’t know what happens in these dreams. My upper teeth, gums and teeth, half rotting, become detachable. Easy answer is that I need a trip to the dentist. Hard answer is that I feel that I am losing a part of me.
I guess I have felt that for awhile. Like a phantom limb thing for the last 10 years or so. Like I need to become whole with the person that I used to be, and that I was comfortable with. I was going to change the world, I remember. I was going to be someone, and mom always thought the same.
I can’t figure out what in the world making these little web sites has changed, or the occasional brochure for real estate, black angus steaks, a week in Las Vegas. I’ve settled, but I know in the back of my mind that more was what I wanted.
This is those most personal type of journals. Not as entertaining as the rest. Not as scary either. No one dies. Nothing is ambivalent. There is a noticeable lack of the Borgesian twist. My moonface wanes as the sunlight approaches. I want sleep as do you now. A week of bad vibes and discussion. We will make it better in the thing to come.
But my teeth seem to be falling out my head as I fall to sleep and this seems to exhibit a certain paranoia akin, but completely different from, the sinking pool of weeks before. If it’s not one thing it’s another, I suppose.
But what you do not realize is that my mother loved your mother when they were kids. She worshipped her to an extent. They were inseparable for a matter of 8 years coming through school. I guess there’s the rub. There’s nothing that she could have done but marry that guy and live in that place and be that person that was something that your mother lost the capability to love so long ago. Hell, she didn’t even love you in the way in which you wanted to be loved.
I wish that I could make sense of all of it and I suppose that is what I am trying to do, but perhaps a few more hours of sleep are needed – a few more years between me and that. Perhaps, you and I can make it all better if we try.