Grumble

I've been meandering through my life somewhat aimlessly, I've met a lot of people... both online and in real life. A few have made such strong impressions that their mark may be on me forever. Others I cannot remember at all.

I went to an antique store with my parents the other day and ran into a fellow who I vaguely remembered from a place I worked over 10 years ago. He remembered me by name, but I couldn't remember his. Is that the normal way? Do people generally remember each other like that?

After he left, I ran across something bizarre and stupid - a curio, I suppose, a brass leaf with a star engraved into it. As I looked on, the radio began to play the song my ex and I would call "our song". I felt vulnerable and alone, trying not to fall apart in a public place.

I went outside to pull myself together, and the man, whose name I still cannot recall, came up to me again.

"So, when'd you get those boobs?" he asked me.

"They grew." I told him.

"Why?"

"I'm transsexual, I'm on estrogen."

"Oh." He looked positively nonplussed.

An awkward silence, as he stared at me.

"I should be going," he tells me.

"It was nice seeing you again," I say, somewhat dishonestly.

"Yeah," he says.

He walked to his truck, an old yellow beat up thing of a make and model I was uncertain of, and promptly drove away.

I sighed heavily. <i>"My life."</i>

I begrudgingly dragged myself back into the antique store and tracked down my mother.

"Where'd you run off to?" she queried absently while browsing through some old clothes.

"I just needed some air," I said, sighing further, trying to keep the insanity of the past few months out of my head. Separation, death, bankruptcy. Life shouldn't be this way.

She stopped and hugged me. "I miss her too," she told me. "Probably more," I said somewhat flatly. "I've had 5 years to process her not being in my life, you've had one month."

It was true. She'd thrown me out of her life five years prior, angry at my pathetic parenting skills. But I was in my daughter's life, she was not in her daughter's life... and that was nobody's fault but her own.

"It's going to be okay," I lied. It's never okay again. Not after something like this. I knew that. My mother looked at me, tears welling up in her eyes.

"Let's go home," she said.