You Belong to Me

The weather here is magic and it gets on my nerves. But when I get back to New York, I won’t be able to sleep and I will be sad for a few weeks missing my brothers and my mother and my two cousins.  Family is strange and maddening and lovely.  

Being with my folks makes me think of A, who has no folks except for his sad mother. 

Is that the biggest difference between us? That I have this strange bunch of people waiting for me to return from wherever in the world I happen to end up and all A has is his unhappy mother who is just waiting to die?  That can’t be true.  My family isn’t that great, not even functional really. But there is a home for me to come back to and none for him. That must do something to a person’s head. And no matter what I said or did, I couldn’t change the facts of his life and the person its made him into. He will not see that belonging to something as crazy as a big family has any benefits.  Well, at least not a real family.  

Now he is part of something --  a group of friends he acquired through the new girlfriend.  It was something he wanted from me – he wanted my friends too.  But I am not the group type.  My friends are not my family.

Four days in L.A., I’ve left my mother’s house once to shop for upholstery fabric for my mom’s occasional and dining chairs and to see my friend June who lives in a little apartment in Koreatown.

June and I drove a bit around Hancock Park where the houses are old and big and set back from the street. It reminded me of drives taken long ago when my old love B and I would roam the streets of Los Angeles because we had nowhere to be alone.

It made me like this city a little more to remember that.  And to remember how I used to hate it here.  It’s not so bad.  It’s not so hateable. Someday I will live here again. 

I’m starting to think I will be living here again sooner than I think. 

My mother is aging fast.  She is starting to show signs of panicking on the freeway.  I love my family but I don’t know what will happen to me if I were geographically closer to them. One thing that hasn’t changed is that I still want my own life and that seems impossible with family close by.

M and I are going to see Aida next Monday.  It will be the first time we’ve seen each other since that weird conversation that went nowhere. If we have enough of these conversations, will that push us toward each other or will the talks eventually peter out? It's gonna be weird.