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does make me think extremely chewy thoughts about how fucking complicated this has to be for ilya. like obviously things with his father are SO fucking complex and layered and there's so much pain there, but also what emotional potential of being the only person he consistently remembers. even ilya's older brother gets forgotten, but when he's distressed, ilya is the one he calls? he ALWAYS seems to know ilya?????

it adds to the guilt also that he's the only one who can calm his father down or at least handle him when he's like this and yet he's the one on a whole different continent, but also what a twisted wreck of feelings it has to be to be the only one their father consistently remembers. like there HAS to be love in there, doesn't there? if i'm the one he remembers when he forgets everything else? i'm at least THAT important to him? i have to be, don't i? even if everything else is gone, i'm still in there. that HAS to mean something, doesn't it?

but still, sometimes, things surprise me. and i was surprised today. because today an old man approached me at the park. and he said, you know, im a pediatrician.

which is already a weird start to a conversation, because i didnt know that. and maybe i should have just rolled with it, but instead i went

wait. i dont know that. why did you think i knew that?

which didn't even put him slightly off balance.

cuz you're bald, he said, so confidently that i didnt even question it until the conversation was over. now. i was - i was over there, sitting -

and he gestured across the park to a giant pile of soft dirt that had an almost cartoonishly exaggerated ass print on it which derailed me for the second time. right? because whoever sat on that dirt, clearly, had an ass like two coconuts being fired out of a spanish cannon. whereas this man had an ass that could probably only be detected with powerful scientific instruments. i told him this in more succint terms by simply saying that was clearly not his buttprint.

now at this point we'd gotten derailed twice, and as unflappable as he'd been the first time, he was starting to get a little defensive. so he said perhaps someone with a large butt sat down after i got up, and i said why are you lying about where you were sitting, and he said why would i do that? and i said if i knew, i wouldnt be asking, and he said fine, i was driving by - and i said why didn't you just say you were driving by?!?!?!?! and he said because i didn't want you to think i was the kind of crazy person that would just stop his car to tell a stranger in a park that he, as a pediatrician, could tell that your parents REALLY cared about tummy time!

then he left. angrily. he actually stomped back to his car. i dont know when i started laughing but i didnt stop until i got home. my voice is still all scratchy right now. ive been in a little bit of a writing funk but i had to get this down while i could still remember it so perfectly.

As a child and as a teenager I felt as though being alive was like being strapped into an unstoppable train, and seeing on the tracks ahead of me many instances of intense and unbearable suffering that I had no choice but to pass through and experience.