I churn on with my little, uh, side hustle, helping the professor move. It hit a small wall today, but that’s boring, and it will begin again tomorrow.

She’s the only person left in my current life who qualifies even remotely as a ‘friend’, and she’s moving away. I have my inamorata. I have my family. But after this my slate of friendship is wiped clean again.

The other day I showed up at her place with everything I needed to make coffee for myself, on her old mess of a stove.

She took it as a bit of a slight, maybe. She started to fuss about not having coffee for me, or food, or anything but jug water out of a plastic cup.

I said to her, look.

If you think about it, this is the third time in a long summer that I’ve helped someone I care about move.

There was the Mom-n-Sis. There was the wife. And now there’s you, ladyfriend.

This repeated experience has taught me a few things, my dear. The most important of which is:

If I expect anyone ever to consistently care about my projects, my priorities, my beliefs, my needs of the moment right down to caffiene, even half as much as I do myself …

That expectation is only going to lead to disappointment.

So to the best of my limited ability, I’ve stopped expecting, and to the side of that, I try and try again to quit bitching about it, because in the end I have no right to expect that kind of intensity or focus of caring–people, and even the people who tell me they love me, are dealing with their own shit, be it good or bad, and devoting themselves to trying to figure out what my needs are (in the absence of me ever talking about them, to boot), is … unrealistic at best. Call it narcissistic, at worst.

Hence, on day two, I’m hauling my own coffee into your house.

She was briefly thoughtful about that, and she said, I see what you mean.

You mean when they’re in the middle of moving and all.

I didn’t say anything.

I made some noises designed to signal that I was done talking about it.

I was thinking: No. Not just when they’re moving.

All the time. Every waking moment of this wide open space of a life.

***

I know people care, and even sometimes love for real, in my direction.

No one is ever going to care all that much.

The secret wish that they would is my problem, and a significant component of the Mark of Cain that I bear as firstborn.

My father let that problem consume him.

He wanted his needs to be not just lovingly met, but to be anticipated.

And when he didn’t get that wish fulfilled, he lashed out, often violently.

He believed that having a crowd of people around him, a woman and some children in particular (since his mother, his first choice, had long given up on him) to attend to his many emotional and physical needs was not only a necessity, but his right.

He was a selfish fuckin’ douche, and all I’m doing here is describing the mechanics of that douchery.

***

It exists in me too.

I keep a watch out for it and I pounce on the first vile shoots of the weed when I see them starting to grow out of my brain or flesh or mouth.

At worst, I come here, and Spill my guts about what I really want, and what I really need, or what I at least crave irrationally.

Expecting nothing to come of it.

Satisfied enough, when that singular expectation manifests as I imagined it.

Every day above ground is a good day, fleetingly rare and precious.