My best worst self

“Sometimes your worst self is your best self,” to steal a quote from a popular television show, True Detective.

I heard that and rolled my eyes. What a fucking pseudo intellectual masking as profound thing to say. And then I remembered my current angst and thought, well, maybe that’s true.

People always seem to like me better when I’m being a piece of shit. In fairness to me, that angry girl once popular was dealing with the death of her father. God, I was such a fucking mean girl, I don’t even know where to start. If Twitter were around, there would’ve been so many subtweets, man. Subtweets.

The best and worst part of it was that I didn’t give two shits. I feel bad now, in retrospect, but at the time? Eh. Youth? Nah, I wasn’t that young. It’s just that dealing with grief and loss of my best friend and my dad, everything else had the volume turned way the fuck down. I look back on chats and things going on and I just shake my head now. People wanted to be my friend. The fuck was wrong with them?

My mom called yesterday. She had a health scare, which those who may or may not be following, was connected to chemo she’s receiving for her stage 4 cancer. So, you know, she’s dying. I mean, specifically dying. We’re all dying. Even if we’re not dying we may just flop down and die for reasons we can’t even fathom or could never predict. Like my migraines. No one knows why they came. It would be comforting to know why, but life isn’t really about that. It’s just that shit with this shit and a little more shit that may be the good shit this time, but you don’t know. That just is what it is and being white and American, I can’t help but be surprised when something bad happens.

Anyway, mom’s fine, for a value of that word, but her cat was missing. Midge. She’d been sick that morning and then vanished. Then the rains. All the rain on Houston. Midge was from a pair of kittens I’d given my parents, both alive and as far as anyone knew, in no threat of dying in the number of years I could count on one hand. A friend had found them scampering the yard of a house she was living in, I was in the midst of doing cat rescue. My parents came up for an art show I was doing, my dad fell in love with the kittens and took them home.

Dad died a few years later. One of the kittens, now a cat, ran away. That left Midge, mom’s cat. Now, she was a 14 year old cat. I say was because mom called to let me know that they found Midge’s body. My mom, fucking dying of cancer, calls in neighbors to help bury her fucking cat. Ain’t that just the shit?

She’s an old lady and things break down. That was an old cat and shit breaks down, but damn. Can’t we just put off dead cat until mom passed? She’s in stage 4. It’s not like she was going to be around forever and ever.

I feel bad because I wasn’t there. I’m angry with myself. Angry that I had migraines almost all week because they like to come the week before shark week. That in the midst of all of this, my body had the fucking audacity to tweak perfectly mundane hormonal shit when an old lady with cancer was missing her kitty. And how stupid is that?

The volume knob on things is being turned way down. I feel that familiar impatience rising. Oh well. Maybe people will like me better.