As I was walking my dogs tonight, the friendly neighborhood drug dealer passed me as he often does. Unlike the normal scenario where my dogs bark and he keeps walking in silence, though, after we'd both continued to walk ten to fifteen feet in our respective directions, he called to me. I turned, and he yelled something I could barely hear, something that after about a minute of repeated yelling back and forth, a lot of questioning on my part, and a bit of pantomime on his, I finally understood. After all this time, he said, we both look exactly the same.
The drug dealer, who I've been passing on the streets of my townhouse complex for probably about ten years (save for an absence of a year or so when he mysteriously disappeared), was right. Save for my ever changing hair colors, neither of us really looks any different from how we looked when we first "met."
When we first walked past each other, the drug dealer and me, I was in my early to mid thirties. At the time, Griffin and I were closer than I knew a mother and son could be. Ever Friday we had an after-school coffee date that neither of us would miss for anything. One Friday, Griffin actually got in a fight (semi-fight?) with the singer of his band because he wouldn't miss coffee to go to practice. Those coffee dates lasted for years, maybe five of them, from middle school to early eleventh grade.
Coffee dates, of course, weren't the extent of our relationship; they just typified it. I used to barely get through teaching a class without a text from Griffin: memes, photos, song lyrics, random facts (are you aware a kangaroo has three vaginas, everyone?), trivial conversation. Griffin used to never leave me alone. We did makeovers and took walks and went out to eat. Once we even drove to Savannah on a whim to see the spot where they filmed one of his favorite movies, Forrest Gump. I protected him from his dad (even when, admittedly, he probably didn't need protecting), and he protected me from his dad, too.
I believe I even have a blog post where I write something akin to, Regarding Griffin, can I just say soulmate? Nothing else to see, move it along.
I'm thinking your inference skills are probably good enough to have realized by now that between me and Griffin, something's gone wrong. Two years ago, things started to change. Saying no to hanging out with Alex wasn't as desirable as saying no to practicing with his band, nor was bringing her along like we did in their beginning, and our coffee Friday dates stopped. That was really the start. In that time, our relationship has deteriorated hopefully not to beyond repair, but in truth I'm not so sure.
I won't go into all the details, not for the sake of privacy or propriety because we all know I care for neither of those things but for the sake of space. There are just so many details, and in the end, do they matter at all? We're both to blame in different ways (in addition to quite a bit of help from some outside forces, and far be it for me to be one to name names, but if yours either starts and ends with an A and has an X in the middle and you used to have pink hair but now maybe sport a faded shade of blue or you're someone who runs a couple thousands miles a year or at least you used to, I happen to be talking about you).
Tonight when I pulled up a few hours and one day after a fight during which, among other things, shampoo was squirted all over the bathroom and the hallway; posters were taken off of communal walls; toiletries were hidden in a car; someone was forcefully chest bumped, grabbed by the wrist, and thrown into the hallway in addition to being called one of two emotionally abusive and horrible parents, a fucking idiot, and insane; and another person was called trash and his ex-girlfriend called a whore, I saw a box peeking over the wall in front of my house. Upon walking up, I saw a crate full of records, a guitar, a record player, and other things that escape me now.
Even though I knew, I had to ask when I opened the door. What's going on?
I'm gonna go stay at my Dad's house.
I was afraid of the answer, so afraid of the answer, I didn't want to ask, didn't want to know:
Forever?
He didn't know.
***
That friendly neighborhood drug dealer thinks I look the same because he can only see me on the outside. If he could see me on the inside, he'd know I don't look the same at all.
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