Life updates and fiction

My boss left and I got a promotion at work and a senior title. It was welcomed but not too surprising. I had been angling for one since I started and, after nearly a decade of doing this type of work, have gotten a bit bored with the day-to-day of crafting something. I prefer strategy instead or the type of meaningless work senior workers ascribe to themselves to never have to do menial work again.

I don’t mind my job. I find it fairly easy and low stakes. Working from home often leaves me feeling like an introverted alien, but the flexibility is nice and nobody’s micromanaging me.

A year ago I was surprised to pass a salary threshold for myself, assuming I’d be stuck there a while. Now, almost overnight, I’m making 92k and managing a person. IDK how I feel about that.

Pink, magenta blooming in the early spring; your mother asks me how I’ve been and I tell her about my new promotion as we wait for your arrival. You are always late; though you are well aware of the time. It’s an act of defiance, I tell her, some way he can still maintain control over situations.

She laughs and tells me a story of you as a child. Precocious. Always battling something. Crying, nearly in tears, wanting a turtle of your own after a lesson in school. Your mother has brilliant blue eyes and laugh lines grooved deep into her face. Your mother folds her hands over each other so softly. She sips her drink and never spills a single drop. She wipes up each crumb that falls from her pastry, extending her napkin and folding it between her first finger and thumb; using it as a scoop to glide across the table and off into the plate waiting in her other hand. She doesn’t like to leave a mess.

From her you’ve learned to do the opposite.

My brother’s getting married and I knew this was coming soon. They’ve been together for a while now: a decade or more as he tells it. In the excitement of it all he tells me my future role: best man, forced to give some sort of speech. And because of that, and the slew of weddings I’ve been to lately, I have been thinking a lot about it.

In my search for the perfect framework I’m tossing my mind back, trying to remember when I first met his partner. To me, she has always been there. A decade of my life spent with both of them as a pair. Who can remember the initial meeting of such a person anyway?

I think they “met” at a friend’s wedding and I do remember that. I was young and too-skinny, nervous about my place in the world and my connection to those around me. I didn’t have that many friends and these were, decidedly, my brother’s friends, not mine. I was with a man at the time, newly I believe. And there’s a photo of them all on a couch: my brother in the middle, the man off to the side, hanging on the arm, Modelo in his hand; slight half-smile juxtaposed against my brother’s too-serious face. Where am I? In the frame, taking a photo, my body reflected in the vanity’s mirror.

We do not talk anymore.

Yet my first photo of her doesn’t arrive until two years later, a consequence of a bad break-up, a causality of hiding any photos of the man. 2018 on the sands of Port Aransas, her legs folded over each other, reading some book, her hair flowing in the wind, wet from sea-water, smile bright and beaming. What happened between those periods? What love was woven in those years?

A green and drooping sort of thing: wet from rain, speckled brown vines and pink cone flowers draped across a wooden handrail. Can I tell you what I have been thinking, you say without a hint of irony or reference. Frances Quinlan. Light gray skies spread thick with the threat of rain. When my father was younger, you continue, he traveled across the country, driving from state to state in a beat-up pickup truck doing plumbing jobs for big apartment buildings or newly crafted office buildings.

And you thought of that now?
Well, you take a long sip of your cold brew before continuing. He would spend weeks at a time in each new place. Usually a company housing or some sort of run-down hotel.
That appeals to you I’m assuming?
The travel part, yeah. Getting paid to try out new places, even if it sucks.
You work remotely though, I’m sure you could pick up and just do that.
Sure, but you couldn’t.
We’re not together anymore, I remind you. The entire point of that was so you could do exactly this.

Clinging vines and crawling things. Lush green in spring coiled tight against the metal grate. Blooming baby blue bushes and garden rocks pressed neat in a line.

Sure, you continue. But, so. The story my father tells is that he hated it. Like truly hated it. He was with my mother at the time and the thing he loved the most was coming back home. A home cooked meal. Familiarity. You know?

We’ve talked about this to death.
Sure, but I’m just saying.
I won’t make the decision for you. I can’t decide if you love me or not, you have to figure that one out for yourself.

Texas sage. The purple pops of mountain laurels in new bloom. Bright green baby cacti, propagating from the shell of their flat green-blue former selves. It will take some time, but soon their spikes will harden.