“I’m soooo sorry, I just forgot”
So sayeth borgette.
I like to think of myself as a pretty tolerant soul. Ya know, let bygones be bygones and not try and dwell on past indiscretions and all the heartache that’s associated with them. For me, it just doesn’t put me in a healthy frame of mind….
But then again, there are moments in life that are hard to forget…
Last Friday, I had to have yet another stent plopped into yet another artery to keep the blood flowing through my veins and into that thing we call a heart. I was also told that three of the four veins from my quad a few years ago are 100% “occluded” but not to worry because I was growing new veins or some shit like that and they didn’t pose any immediate danger. After hearing that I’m laying there thinking to myself “What the fuck? If they were clogged a few years ago and I had to be sliced and diced to keep them open why don’t they pose a danger now?” The good doctors explained it to me and I promptly forgot what they told me. By now, I’m so familiar with the procedure that I think I could do it in my sleep if I had to.
My kid and my ex-both knew I was in the hospital. They both knew the circumstances that brought me there and they were both aware of the potential consequences that might occur should something go wrong.
So I laid there for almost two days in a haze of OxyContin and Ambien staring at a phone that never rang and wondering when I could get back home. When you’re laid up like that there’s not enough ESPN in the world to take things off your mind.
And it begins to wander to some dangerous, dark places.
Maybe I’ve put them through so much shit in the past that they take these kinds things for granted and that’s ok when it comes to my ex. Shit, by now I’d be more worried if she was holding a bedside vigil on behalf of my sorry ass than attending to her own life. It’s my kid that I just don’t get…
Maybe it’s because she’s thirteen now and views herself as the center of her own little universe. Maybe because as she gets older I’m becoming less and less of a factor in her daily life and I only need to be around when some major things are going on. Maybe it’s because I didn’t do as good a job as I should have over the past few years and I’ve let some selfishness on both of our parts creep between us.
We talked a few days later but there was an iciness to our conversation that wasn’t there before. It almost seemed formal, like two business people meeting each other for the first time. I’m thinking she felt a bit guilty about not calling and I felt a bit hurt by the silence.
In instances like this, I’ve come to realize that I hate doubt almost as much as I hate certainty….