Working

Friendships

c-friend.com

I texted a friend: “I'm toying with the idea of writing something about ‘My Inner Monster in Everyday Life.’ Any insights I can steal from you?”

Next day she texted back: “Hiii”

Since it was my morning off, I replied, “That's so funny. I'm going to sleep another hour.”

She's in high school. She texted, “I wish I could sleep another hour, but I'm here stuck in class for another hour.”

I wrote, “I'm about to write the best web page ever. It's titled, ‘Working Friendships’ and I've already captured the webpage URL.”

“I believe you don't work on friendships, they just happen,” she wrote.

To which I replied, “I believe you have to identify and totally subtract out the non-friends and essentially nip things in the bud with them. Then you're left with the buds which can flower.”

“The buds then grow,” she wrote.

“La, la, a light touch.”

Meanwhile, to the same question, my sister wrote, “Absolutely! I will start paying attention to my monster and send along. Great idea.”

Next day my sister emailed, “Oh I've been thinking of my inner monster and I'm not ready to share her with the world at large. She is kind of private!!! She is a doozy too!!”

“Why do people say that smart people are hard to love?” my friend texted me next day, late at night.

For some reason I hadn't gone to sleep. I replied, “People think, ‘smart’ is synonymous with ‘critical’ or ‘big.’ The way out is to go bit by bit, one little thing at a time. Love is something small.”

She replied, “It really is !!”

An hour later she texted, “How's life been these days?”

I let it sink in and wrote, “Well, thank you! I'm following a new path, determined to see what will happen if I say away from cliques. Then I'll put it on the page I told you about. Not often a person can follow a new path consciously.”

She wrote, “I started following a path a couple months ago where I just don't stress about anything, homework, school or anything and it's been helping me a lot.”

Then she added, “I tell myself if I pass, I pass. If I fail I still passed!”

“Hella, yes! This just keeps getting better, doesn't it? Have to sleep now. And ....”

(Dream) I open the box; it's a perfect cube; inside is a glowing, electric globe of some kind, roughly the size of a basketball. There are veins of amber, silver and blue tucking into the ball and surfacing elsewhere. I get the idea it has an electrically charged low-level magnetism about it. (Fin)

The dream continues in a way to affect my writing here; I've been having trouble with the second piece of this puzzle: First it's cliques; second, and in the dream it's a ten-something; ah, it's a proctor! third, it's anyone who disturbs my nest. Well, I can't name it yet, so I'll go back to cliques; they draw you in, then they exclude you. Then to proctors; they constrain you with critical eyes and relentless questions. The third, which I can't yet name, always betters you. It's so disturbing, like a dream. I could always hate myself! How could anyone better that?

It's midafternoon. “How is the passage of time represented?” my high-school friend texts me.

I have no inkling. So I text her, “Its a measure of whatever isn't yet, coming backward out of memories.”

She doesn't answer. So I send her a text, “What is the name of something that always one-ups you, that is so disturbing in its relentless imprisonments?”

She's still not prompt, so I text, “I think it's called, ‘rejection.’”

“I think it's life,” she texts.

“They would have you believe!” I text.

I add, “They've developed a lot of normalities that aren't normal.”

“Sometimes I think this is life then I realize it's not.”

“We have yet to name it, the cage, the not-ness of life.”

“I feel like I'm stuck in the cage.”

“I feel I can be stuck by attraction to members of a clique, by rejection from a critical school proctor, and I still can't name the third thing that's bothering me.”

“Me either.”

I walked outside to smoke a cigararette and saw her standing on the doorstep with her mother, both dealing with some neighbor. Then I came back inside to watch the Evening News. At the end of the news it hit me.

“A parasite! That's what's bothering me. A bully is a parasite!” I texted her.

“I'm so overwhelmed,” she responded.

Moments later she added, “I feel like I'm going to get anywhere in life.”

And now to uplink it! A marginalized international success, into the Golden Valley.

A butterfly.

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