Lost Time

August2012 Fist Reflection

Dear Cassi,

       

Over the course of this month I’ve lost time. My life fell down lower than before and so low in fact that I thought there was hope and looked the other way when hope formed into misfortune. It started with so simple a thing. So simple but so difficult a thing happened, and it changed so much of my life.

       

I’m looking back now on the lost time and knowing I need to relive those moment but wishing they would go away or change somehow. Months have passed since August and here I finally look over my notes and am reliving the events of those days. I have some trouble believing that all this happened because of a toilet leaking.

       

I got a call at work and that is an oddity because of the hours of my labor, but I could have been pulling late hours into the morning. It was Pickles, “we need to have the bathroom remodeled soon,” and I had to think that my house was flooding. I still came home to address the situation calmly and learned that in the front wash room I had a porcelain bowl that was not long for this world. In addition the collar that mounts it to the floor was rusted so badly that the bolts had turned to nothing.

       

For all my life, Cassi, I have lived in a tomb that tried to stop time. When my mother was alive that was a different life. It was a life where time had stopped. Time stopped because my mother was never supposed to live passed my third birthday. I like to think that she hung on because she wanted to protect her children, but I think the truth is that she hung on because she knew nothing else.

       

Her house has her spirit. It holds together long after it should have and when a bit passes it passes so hard that it turns our life around. Just like my mother, she was barely alive and her death sent shockwaves that people still feel.

                                                           

Let’s help each other hold together, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal