2011

17:02 - I changed that wet one [it was nearly done, pretty soaked] into a dry megamax that I have yet to wet in. Got my lights out but my leds lights on and I am drinking water and lemonade

Chapter 149: Homesick There wasn’t much talking on the way back to Amy’s house. Not from me, anyway. “Mommy, what’s the difference between a taco and a breakfast taco?” “Is this a riddle, baby?” “No. Just a question.  Like is it the eggs?  Do eggs make things all breakfasty or is it the time when of consumption?”  “I think-” “I gotta think it’s the eggs because sausage isn’t that different from ground beef and steak and eggs is a breakfast thing too but if it’s the egginess that makes it breakfast how come I’m not allowed to have eggnog for breakfast and why is it eggs anyways like there’s not a difference between milk and breakfast milk,” a beat. “Except for that one time when you had too much wine.” “We’re not having breakfast tacos,” her Mommy said patiently. “You already had breakfast and we only have flour tortillas at home. Your gluten allergy, remember?” “Oh.”  Something that may have been sadness danced across Amy’s face. “Deconstructed breakfast tacos?” She said hopefully.  “For lunch?” “Nachos.  You mean ‘nachos’.” “For lunch?” Amy repeated. Helena waited for a red light to respond.  “I never could say ‘no’ to you.” “So saaaaay….?” “Yes.” She leaned as far forward as her car seat would allow. “With eggs?”  “It wouldn’t be a breakfast taco without eggs, would it?” “And chewing gum?” “No, baby.” Amy smirked and leaned back. “Whelp, so much for that theory.” I kept to myself, replaying the failed scouting mission over and over in my head. It had been a long shot anyways, but that didn’t make it any less of a failure.  We didn’t even see a single Little, nevermind Cassie. But I wasn’t trying to concoct where things had gone wrong. Within the parameters set, I’d done everything I could just by suggesting this stunt. Anything more extreme could be used as justification to send me to New Beginnings as a student. It was more that I was rooting around for feelings inside myself.  What might have been my last shot at finding Cassie had just failed epically. I should have been despairing. I should have been crying or bawling.  Or if not bawling, then seething! I should be quietly stewing in anger and fantasizing about doing terrible things to the people nearest to me.  I wasn’t even numb. No hard rationalizing forcefield jumped up to protect my ego from the clash of my feelings and thoughts. No mental fatigue. No lazer intense focus or tunnel vision lest I confront inner demons.   If I felt anything, it was a sort of disconnected relief. Like when a grandparent dies after years of being sick, I wasn’t sad as much as I was glad that it was over. Even if she was Adopted by a softer Amazon like Janet, the odds of finding her were astronomical.  Realistically, the Cassie I had known had died months ago. If by some miracle she made it out, she wouldn’t want to see me anyway. So I felt a guilty kind of satisfaction, instead. I’d tried and lost, but at least I’d tried. I’d done everything I could realistically get away with and then some and I’d still come up short.  It wasn’t fair, but neither was the world.  Sometimes the only way to win the game was to play and lose it. I shifted in my car seat uncomfortably. I was lying to myself, but it was a lie of omission. The car took a slow right turn and a wave of painful nostalgia hit me. Car seats were not designed with their occupants’ view in mind. Everything was always partially obscured or at an uncomfortable angle from where I sat.  But there were two skylines so etched into my memory that I’d recognize them anywhere. “Almost hoooome,” Helena Madra sang.  My eyes started to sting. I felt a slight weight on my chest and my breathing had become shallow.  I’d forgotten just how close Amy lived to my old house. My face melted and froze while I tried my best to swallow my emotions and maintain composure. This is where the relief had been coming from. If I had seen Cassie, I’d have had this same reaction. Loss is easier to bare when you don’t have to confront it directly.  Sometimes it’s easier if Grandpa doesn’t wake up from his coma so that you don’t have to look him in the eye to say goodbye.  You can at least feel good about yourself because you sat by his bedside for a few hours before he passed in the middle of the night. Going back to my old neighborhood freshened up old wounds to say the least.  It still wasn’t half as painful as seeing Cassie again would have been. I arched an eyebrow when the car parked. “Did we go a different route?” Helena unbuckled herself and turned around.  “What do you mean?” I said, “I thought we were neighbors or something,” and instantly regretted it. Helena started to calmly explain what ‘neighbors’ meant as if I’d misused the word but Amy interrupted. “He means the construction site, Mommy. Two blocks over.” “Ooooh! That!” Helena said. “We can drive by it if you want, but it’s not safe to play there.” I hung my head to hide my disappointment. “No. That’s okay.” Amy had filled me in enough. My old home had been burned down, demolished and now it was being built over. Pretty soon there’d be no evidence that Clark Gibson ever existed.  “What’s being built over there?” “A daycare,” Amy chirped. The word ‘WHAT?!’ got caught in my throat.   “Amy,” Helena laughed, “that’s not true and you know it.” “You don’t know what I do and do not know,” Amy snapped back. “It’s not going to be a daycare.” “It coudl be.” “It’s a home.” “Could be a home daycare. We don’t know.” “What an imagination!” Helena laughed.   I fumed. A few minutes later Amy and I were in her house, a one floor three bedroom two bath from an Amazons point of view and a palatial estate by Little standards.  It was enough like my old house that it was likely built around the same time, but it was hardly a cookie cutter copy of my forgotten home. It was also insanely locked down.  Every socket was plugged, every cabinet and drawer was latched, every door knob was sheathed and every opening was gated. The corners had bumpers on them for crying out loud! The floors looked pristine and my brief glance at the kitchen hinted at immaculate.  In lieu of her usual tourguide bit, Amy said, “Welcome to Hard Mode, buddy.”   In contrast to the rest of the house, the living room was a minefield of soft plush toys and hard plastic contraptions that jutted out at odd angles. Armies of fast food prizes mingled with tribes of wooden puzzle pieces. There were so many rattles, teethers, plastic keys, stacking cups, wooden train tracks, and activity cubes lying around that they could be used as currency in the event of an apocalypse.  From above one could see the most trafficked pathways in and out of the living room just by looking for the bare spots on the carpet. The rest of the house might belong to Helena, but the living room was Amy’s domain.  Helena high stepped over to a faded yellow couch and melted down into the cushions with us.  “Home again, home again,” Helena said, sighing and sagging her shoulders.  Perhaps she felt bad for what had happened.  Maybe she was just tired and needed a break. Being Amy’s Mommy was a full time job, however.  “Mommy, can you take Clark’s gloves off?”  Helena looked unsure. Like a pro, she passed the buck to Janet.  “I’d have to ask his Mommy.”   Amy crawled into the Amazons lap. “But Mommy, thumbs are what separate us from the animals! Without thumbs, they’d just make cartoon representations of us to decorate clothing with while we sat naked in zoos and I wouldn’t be able to take me home as a pet! You wouldn’t want that, would you? Would you?!” Helena laughed and gave her Little a kiss on top of the head. “You’re not a pet, sweetie.  Neither is Clark.” “Prove it!” Helena undid my mittens.  “Fine, but only because I trust both of you.”  More like she trusted her own security measures, more, but I wasn’t going to talk myself out of a win this time. “Thank you, Miss Madra,” I smiled, wiggling my freed fingers. She stuffed them down into my diaper bag. “You’re welcome, Clark.” Amy slid down off the couch. Because it was her equilibrium that the Amazons had sabotaged, she was able to safely support her weight by leaning against the couch as soon as her feet hit the floor.  A moment later, she safely lowered herself to all fours and started crawling away.  I followed. “Thanks,” I told her, quietly. “No problem.” “That was still a jerk move with the daycare joke.” “Yeah,” she agreed. “But at least your old house isn’t a daycare.” I allowed myself a grim chuckle.  “I guess.” “What do you want to play?” I was still too in my head to be any kind of clever. “Wanna build something?” “Okie doke.  Mommy! Can we play with the marble run?” Helena was already up from the couch.  “Marbles are a bad choice for you, remember?” “Mommy! That was for Science!” “‘How many marbles can I fit in my mouth without swallowing?’ is not a scientifically worthwhile query.” “Agree to disagree, baby!” “Damn,” Amy whispered. “Yes, Mommy!” We scavenged along the living room for wooden train tracks instead. The way they were positioned made it so that crawling around the floor collecting them was the easiest way. Bending over and standing up again and again would have been more trouble. Something told me that Winters would be doing something similar in physical therapy; possibly with jingly rattles. Helena was something of a domestic goddess in that she was both omnipresent yet invisible.  One minute, Amy and I would be alone gathering materials, and out of nowhere the Amazon would be handing me a few pieces of track that I hadn’t yet gotten to. Just as quickly, she’d remember some household chore she needed to do or a work call she needed to make and she’d disappear.   I started working on my own section of track, mindlessly connecting piece to piece and not caring if the thing turned into an impossible mess of bridges, hills, tunnels, and forks that led to nowhere.  When doubled back to Amy I found her working on a slightly different project. Amy had built a stretch that forked at the very end; one left and one right.  Amy was laying something on each track. They were tiny wooden cutouts, painted to look like people; decorative passengers to wait at the train station. Amy was laying them across the tracks.   “Question,” Amy said. “Left or right?” The left track had four victims. The right track had only one. The five figures were part of the same set.  On the left was a dark haired man with a mustache, a blonde woman with big hips, a blonde boy with a bowl cut and overalls, and a dark haired girl with a ponytail. In other words they were Daddy, Mommy, Brother, and Sister.  A bundled up Baby was all by its lonesome on the right track. “Go right.” “Clark!” Amy gasped dramatically. “You monster!  You’d run over a baby?!” “You gave me a choice between killing four people, and killing one. This does the least amount of harm.”  Besides, if it was a Little I was putting it out of its misery. “But it’s a baby! It never hurt anyone. Never even had the chance!” “Would you rather I make it an orphan?” I said.  “It’s not like I actually want to hit someone with a train.” “But if you did you’d hit the baby?!”   I couldn’t tell if she was fucking with me or if she’d talked herself into believing her own hypothetical.  I picked up the baby cut out and put it at the end of the family line.  “There. I moved it.” “But now the train is gonna go left and hit all of them!” Amy insisted. “No, it can just go right and not hit anybody.” Keeping a straight face Amy looked me dead in the eye and said, “Clark. It’s gonna hit somebody. That’s just what trains do. And by putting all of them all on the same track, the train has no choice but to run over all of them.” “Says who?” “Everybody. That’s just how it works.” My rebuttal was interrupted by Helena swooping in to violate our personal space. “Hm,” she patted my rump and sniffed the air. “Must be my imagination.” The worst part was I hadn’t seen or heard Helena until she was checking me. Why was it that both Madras could so easily get the jump on me? It obviously wasn’t genetic. Wait… “Miss Madra, Amy’s not your biological daughter, is she?” Amy started laughing through her nose, giggling in little squeaks like a mouse. Helena answered rather seriously. “No, but I love her just as much and your Mommy loves you the same.” “Okay. Just checking.”   It must have just been a coincidence, then. Or perhaps it was a skill developed by practice. Amy was so mischievous that Helena adapted to get the drop on her and catch her in the act. Or maybe Helena started as the ambush predator and Amy had learned to compensate for her crinkle as a means to get out from underneath Helena’s ever watchful eye. It suddenly occurred to me just how little I knew about Amy.  For all the good it did me, I scoped out the living room and made sure Helena had popped off to somewhere else.  I whispered, “What’s your um…maiden name?” “Madra,” Amy whispered back. “I’ve never been married.” “Not what I mean and you know it.  What was your name before you got Adopted?” “Blank.”  I gave her such a glare. She started squeak laughing again. “That’s what it was on my Adoption certificate. Legally, I’ve always been Amy Madra. Old me is dead.”   “What was your name before you died?” I pressed.  She shrugged. “What does it matter?” “Where’d you live? Where’d you grow up? Did you at least get to move out of your parents house before you ended up here?” Amy batted and flicked away her train victims one at a time like a cat knocking glasses off a table. “You wanna know how I got like this? Is that what we’re doing?” “If you want.” That’s when she told me… ******************************************************************************************************* She didn’t want to do this. It had been years since she had spoken with Andy in more than just postcards and the briefest of telephone calls. It’s not that there was any animosity towards each other, they’d just slowly drifted apart. Amy was a struggling playwright, still trying to make her dream work in the Big City. Andy had been a theater director, but he gave all that up so that he could go on an extended mid-life crisis.  Granted, it was more of a quarter-life crisis given their age, but when you were a Little waiting till mid-life was basically procrastinating. This was a fancy restaurant. Fancy meant expensive. Good thing Andy was paying.  Andy got out of his ruts by traveling the world, risking his neck, and trying new and unusual experiences. He went on photo safaris on far off continents with silent monks and did bungee jumping out of hot air balloons with circus performers.  He spent a summer learning to rope cattle and smoking peyote with Mayztepic rancheros. He once went to an Amazon majority country where he didn’t speak the language and kept fidgeting like he needed to go to the bathroom. Andy had no idea how privileged he was, though.  While he was seeking thrills and a vague sense of spiritual enlightenment, Littles like Amy were just trying to live their life and finding pleasure in simpler things: Warm socks on a cold day or a good cup of coff- ********************************************** “Amy,” I interrupted her. “I thought you were a zookeeper.”  “This was before that.” I narrowed my eyes. “How long before?” “Long enough…” “What did you say your friend’s name was?” “I had my dinner with Andrew.”  She didn’t hesitate, she paused, as if waiting for a laugh track. “You’re riffing on My Dinner With Andrew? The old movie about the two guys in a restaurant?”  My eyelids went to half mast in disapproval. “Clark,” she (badly) feigned innocence. “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” Helena manifested holding a basket of laundry. “It was on while I was feeding you last night.” “Huh. So that’s where I got the idea.” The phone rang. Helena disappeared.  “What’s the real story? “Okay, you got me,” Amy said. “My husband and I were about to start a family of our very own in an old fixer upper when we died unexpectedly in a car crash. Then this Amazon family moved in and started ruining it, but we were very bad at haunting.” “I’ve seen that movie, too.” “What movie?” “Hello?” Helena answered the phone. “This is she. What? Excuse me?! How did you get this number?  What bathroom?! Above the changing station?” “Uh-oh…” Amy said. “Quick! Go to sleep!”  She ragdolled onto the floor, closed her eyes, and began to snore. Helena re-entered.  “Some people…” she huffed and let the rest of the thought go unfinished. I scooted as far away from Amy as quickly as I could.  She might as well have had leprosy just then.  Helena had plenty of room to high step through the landmines and scoop her ‘sleeping’ Little girl up. “I don’t know how someone managed to get my lipstick and write my phone number on a bathroom wall without me noticing…” Amy’s eyes remained closed. “It wasn’t lipstick…” “...but I do know that if you’re falling asleep that means that you need a nap!” Amy opened her eyes. “WHAT? NO!” Helena grinned devilishly. “YES!” “NOOOOOOOOOO!”   Amy’s cries faded as she was carried away to her crib.   Despite everything I thought I knew, I still tensed up, waiting for something to replace her cries. I imagined the sound of flesh hitting flesh, or perhaps an eerie silence indicating Amy being gagged. KRRRRRSH! Static buzzed from overhead. “Mommy, please!”  Amy’s voice crackled in from her baby monitor. “I was just trying to get you a dah-tay! For Solstice!” “Dah-tay?” “D-A-T-E. Dah-tay.” “That’s ‘date’, sweetie.” “Pretty sure it’s dah-tay.” “Amy. You’re trying to distract me from the point.” “Is it working?” “I think you need to cool your heels and take a nap.” Amy’s “NOOOOOOOOOO!” Was so loud that it almost blew out the speaker. “Fascist! Don’t be a fascist, Mommy! No naps!”  “Night night, honey.” “No naps! No naps! No naps! No naps!” The chant continued even as Helena walked back out into the living room.  She reached up on top of the bookshelf and switched off the speaker.  “Amy’s not in trouble,” she promised me. “She just needs a few minutes to reflect. You two will get plenty of playtime.” I pointed to the baby monitor, likely up so high so that Amy couldn’t tamper with it.  “You know she probably wants you to turn that off so that she can sneak around in a couple of minutes.”   “Maybe,” Helena agreed, “But I know all her hiding places.” “You know she really was trying to help,” I offered. “I know. But that doesn’t mean it was a good choice.”  Ah yes. Helena really was a graduate of the Beouf school of so-called parenting.  “And this is a consequence of that choice.” It felt weird talking about Amy like this. It was like a cross between a parent talking to another parent and snitching on another kid.  Both concepts left a nasty aftertaste. “Nap is a consequence of a bad choice?” “Temporarily depriving her of one of one of her favorite things is.” “Attention?” “Spending time with you.” “What? Spending? Wha…?” I stammered. “What do you…? Huh?” The idea that someone I liked and cared about liked and cared about me right back felt strange and alien to me.   Helena’s laugh sounded remarkably similar to Amy’s, like a giant rodent that had just found a vegetable cache. “Boys…” she said. Then more to herself, “I’m so glad playdates are all I have to worry about right now.” I grimaced at the implication. “Ew. No. Not like that!” “I know, I know!” the giantess teased. “Girls have cooties, right?” There was no point in arguing. Through her filter I was just a booger eating toddler.  “Typical,” I whispered just under my breath.  To her credit, Amy didn’t sneak around. She screamed ‘NO NAPS’ for a solid three minutes. She was loud enough that a baby monitor wasn’t needed to hear her from the playroom. “Missus Amy’s Mommy?”  I tried. “Uh-oh,” she said. Evidently, Janet had warned her about me abusing the m-word. “What is it?” “How did Amy escape?” “You mean when she ran away?” “Yeah.” A shadow came over her. The normally soft expression the giantess wore hardened. “Why do you want to know?” “Honestly? Just curious.” I knew next to nothing about Amy’s past, and that imbalance was becoming increasingly irritating to me. “May I ask you a question first?”   “Sure.” The Amazon took a deep breath and sat back down on the couch. She looked like she was bracing herself for something.  “Did Amy convince you to run away?” I was so surprised I snorted laughter. Amy? The Little most at peace with her status as a full-grown infant? The broken girl that saw nothing wrong with our status?  “Of course not!” “Did she try to stop you?” The bit of mirth I’d built up vanished. This felt like a witness interrogation. I didn’t know what she’d told Helena and I didn’t want her to get in trouble because she hadn’t done enough by Amazon standards to prevent my escape.  A question felt better than a direct answer. “Why…would…she…?”     I did not like the answer I got. ******************************************************************************************************* Amy’s nursery was just as clean as the rest of the house. Her chaos was relegated solely to the living room. This room with its dark purple paint and furniture with dark brown wooden finish felt cozy and calming. It was hard to imagine Amy living here, even with her literally sitting in the crib. “You came back on your own?!” I demanded.  My voice was barely louder than a whisper, but it was so intense I might as well have been screaming. It was me who begged to talk to Amy in private, but I didn’t trust that her monitor was fully deactivated, or that Helena wasn’t pressing her ear to the door. Amy was sitting up in her crib, her back against the headboard, her head inclined and looking down at the thick comforter on top of the mattress. It was her who decided to stay in her crib. “Not exactly. I got a police ride.” “You know what I mean, Amy!”  My hands were on my hips and my foot was tapping erratically. I was wearing footie pajamas with posture like an old housewife who’d just caught her husband drunk and cheating. I didn’t care that I looked objectively ridiculous, I was pissed and this was the only way for me to express that anger without screaming or hitting something.  “You came back, willingly.” Amy didn’t stir. “Yeah. I did.” What might have been shame flashed over her features.  “You were out! You got away!  And you gave yourself up!” “Yeah.”   “Why?”  “I don’t wanna talk about it.” “Why? The fuck? Not?” “You wouldn’t understand.” “Try me.” She laid down and rolled over so that she was facing me. “When I dream, I’m a baby. Like, I’m me. But I’m like this.” “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.” “When I think about going to work, I’m thinking of my daycare. And when I think about going home, it’s here. And when I think about friends, it’s you and the people at Little Voices, and Jessinnia.” I nodded, hoping for more. “Yeah. I get it.” “And when I think about who I am, the voice in my brain says ‘Amy Madra’, not my old name.  I wasn’t escaping. I was trying to get back to a life that wasn’t mine!”  Her voice was just as quiet, but just as intense as mine. We were as quiet as we’d ever been and shouting each other down at the same time. “Who I was before my Maturosis kicked in doesn’t matter so I left it behind.” Hearing her spout Amazonian propaganda made my stomach turn.  “So you got out too late? Beouf just broke you and so you came back like a good Little doll? Or was it more like you had a good thing going and didn’t want to risk a downgrade in ‘parent’?” Amy looked genuinely offended. She rolled away so that her back was to me.  “That sounds like your hangup, dude. Not mine.” “Then why’d you come back?” In the heat of the moment I decided I didn’t actually care about that. “No. Why’d you tell on me? Were you afraid I’d beat your record?” Amy whipped her head around. She sat back up but scooted herself as far away as she could from me. Tears had started to form and run down her cheeks.  “Afraid you’d-?  Dude! I don’t care about that! I saved your life, you idiot.”  “You didn’t know that,” I countered.  “You just-” “CLARK!” her voice blasted me back a step. “STOP IT! JUST STOP! WHATEVER YOU’RE GOING TO SAY, DON’T!”  I was so surprised that I completely forgot where my budding rant had been going.  So I stopped.   So did she. We froze. I looked over my shoulder and saw Helena pensively staring from a cracked open door.  “I’m sorry your old house is gone,” Amy’s voice plummeted back down to a whisper. “That sucks, I guess. You’re my friend and I love you, but you’re acting like a jerk.” I turned into a snarling gargoyle.  “I’m sorry you snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. I’m sorry that your Mommy had to tell me and ruin your mystique. For a second I thought you understood where I was coming from.” “Dude, you don’t even know where you’re coming from.” ********************************************************************************************* Amy and I sat in our highchairs not talking to one another. Helena was browning ground meat in one pan and scrambling eggs in another.  “Hello? Janet?” Helena spoke into her cell phone, cradling it on her shoulder.  “No, Clark’s fine. Nobody’s hurt. Just…remember how we said we should do dinner tonight? Raincheck? I think the kids are a little fussy and need some space after this.” “Great,” Amy muttered. “Another dah-tay ruined!” I flipped her the bird and then she remembered that we were still fighting.  

It is...unfortunately common, though less so these days at least...to have people come in here and drive-by stuff like this. I always wonder what compels them to do it. Nothing made you come into this forum. Nothing made you have to engage in this way. What did they expect would happen? They'd drop their truth bomb and everyone would go "Oh, right! Yeah! Why didn't I see that before? I thought one way for years, but after your one forum post full of inflammatory language and vague examples, I've seen the light! I'm a changed person forever!" Imagine the world where this comment was "Hey, everyone. Here's a less rosy example of how this can go, and I want to make sure I warn everyone about the far less fun outcomes of how it can go." Can even transition into the "is there something wrong with wanting this to begin with" towards the end if you want, and it might even land. But posts like this...yeah. I stand by the "imagining they're speaking truth to power while yelling at the mirror" metaphor.

I was engaging in a private thought experiment, and I thought I'd open it up to the group; as a person who wears diapers, I don't see the insides of a lot of public washrooms, and I generally don't miss the ambiance of, say, the men's room at the Petro-Canada by the highway. However, I don't, as a habit, use my diaper for #2, although I know some of you here do, either by choice, or because you have no choice, so this question may not pertain quite as well to your circumstances. But for those of us who generally don't partake of that, my question is: if you were presented with an urgent necessity to drop a load, while out of the house, and the closest available washroom was nasty, which would you rather deal with - using the nasty bathroom, or, using your diaper, and then having to deal with that? 

One word comes to mind reading this, NO. I feel your pain and I realize your decision to fold is the right decision for you. As @Little Sherri always says, at least your not going to be living in a van somewhere but knowing myself, if my eldest tried this I would tell her to stay home. My own personality precludes me from knuckling under to extortion which is exactly what this is. Good luck and I'm so looking forward to your after action report. Hugs, Freta