090718 morning sesh just seems so cruel. i don’t know if i can do it. if i had gotten up the first time the alarm went off, it would be dark in here and millie would not be clumping around in the kitchen like a bear in search of honey. then again, last night: if megan hadn’t needed me, it would have been quiet and alone then too, but she did and so she came down when i still had six minutes to go and interrupted me, and you know what? that’s OK. It’s OK that my kids still need me. It’s OK that millie has the wherewithal to get herself up at 5:30 without any intervention from me and come down here and MAKE A BUNCH OF NOISE IN THE KITCHEN EVERY SINGLE MORNING. I’m quite impressed, actually. I definitely would not have been doing that at her age. She’s going to be 15 in what, like october november december january march like just under six months. so she’s you could basically say fourteen and a half. why spell all that out but not spell out the glittering castles that toppled as soon as i hit snooze? i don’t know but i don’t really want to be um what um what do you call it um introspective? no i don;t mind being that. i was going to say “intellectual” but then A VOICE FROM THE BARE LIGHT BULB IN THE CLOSET said “pseudo-intellectual” because you never want to admit that you think or imply that you think you’re intellectual because then that opens you up to all kinds of judgment and being proven wrong. Remember, you’re just a kid. You’re just a fraud. You don’t know how to do research. You can’t have opinions about anything historical. You can only have pretend opinions about things that were made up by you, that way no one say you’re wrong. That’s why you think you are so in love with “FICKTION”—because you can’t get it wrong. You are not strong enough to engage in any game that has right and wrong answers. Remember that, and be content. with your comet that’s racing towards your bunk bed almost as fast as Alexa just raced through here, hissing, on her way to the back door, then back over to the piano, then into the entry way between the kitchen and the front hall, where she stopped. stared with those big mystified eyes she’s always carrying around in her little cat skull, her delicate little cup of feather light bones that holds her astonishing little cat brain, that drives the battleship of her fluffy humongous body, her tail acting as rudder, her extra folds of belly skin hanging off like so many unused sheets off the rigging of a ghost ship. cats are bitchin. I so not know why she’s twitchin all over the house though. Haha I say “house” and things like “front hall” so casually that the unenlightened reader might assume i was one of those comfortable people of Muskego, the suburbanites who look around with eyes stiff as treated lumber, assuming that “the world” is streetlit and freshly paved, assuming that “house” means a big beige affair with tall glass windows astride the door, with six different angled roof sections, with oh youy iknow what I mean. Now I see what she was going on about. Terabithia just stalked in here and picked a fight with her. They faced off like a couple of frozen MMA rookies too afraid to do the dance. Then they closed the gap, and the paws came up, swatting at each other like stiff-armed children. The hissing was emitted like steam from a leaky boiler. They rotated a half circle and disengaged. No one won. Alexa retreated to under the piano, and Tera played it off by scratching at the scratching pad, which she almost never does. It must have felt a little foolish, acting like a cat like that, acting like she really wanted to have a good scratch just then. “I feel like a goddamned idiot” she must have been thinking to herself, “but it’s better than admitting that I didn’t win that fight.” And dreams she of another midnight robin chase, a hunting she will go—tonight, tonight, when the wildness wakes and the screen door is open to the startling stars; la nuit, tous les chats sont gris. She goes upstairs to be dignified and wait, and curl up next to one the sleepyheaded mammals that breathes and moves in their sleep up there in the just becoming morning. Well shit. Maybe I can do morning sessions. Maybe I would miss them if I rationalized some way to get a half hour more of half sleep every school day. I just remembered: I was going to tell you from last night. I was going to---he scratches his memory with a rough fingernail. The memory goes, ooooh, that’s good, just a little to the left, and he obliges. The memory sighs, gratitude fills the memory. There need be no telling in this space, this quiet moss-lined hollow in the woods of forgetting. He and the memory sit there, and it’s warm and golden like tea, they steep in each other’s company like beautiful golden tea leaves. But I forgot what I was going to tell you.