Age Regression Meditation
The neighbors yell. Or, at least she yells, and the kids yell, the dad doesn’t really yell. Today it was because he says “okay” instead of saying how he really feels. “That word has no meaning. You don’t ever express emotion to me.” She pauses then, to put one of the kids in a time out. Two minutes, nose to the wall.
Five minutes pass, she continues to tell her husband that he is an emotionless piece of shit.
My roommate and I sit close to the door that separates us from them. Occasionally, we interject with little noises of disapproval or concern. “Okay is nothing. Why don’t you feel anything?” On the word feel, her voice raises a few registers and cracks. Both of us agree this will not help her win the argument. Sometimes, her husband speaks, but never loud enough for us to hear.
We assume this probably makes her even more angry. We assume that she is probably a bitch. We wonder if she knows or cares that we can hear them. We consider knocking on the door, asking them.
The noise really carries. We can hear her start to cry. We are glad we aren’t mothers or married or people who yell.
“This is how people used to pass time, before the internet.”
She is yelling again.
“I hate this. My mother never yelled.”
“Mine did. She yells a lot, actually.”
“That would scare me.”
“My dad doesn’t yell though.”
“Mine does.”
“Yeah. There has to be one.”
We feel sort of kind of like we are kids again. Young like when we met. Sixth grade, or maybe before that. We talk about that one time, when everyone got drunk in her bedroom and walked around downtown until one of the girls started to vomit. I took her home and snuck her past the parents. Called her brother. Held her hair.
On New Year’s Eve I grabbed that same girl by the shoulder and pointed at my best friend slumped over in the snow and said, “Do you mind watching her while I go look for Trevor?”
Trevor was freestyle rapping in the basement. Someone punched four holes in the wall and stole someone’s mother’s pearls. The host got up on the table and told us that her Jewish Mother was going to be angry, furious, and everyone get the fuck out of her house. We left. Window open in my car so my best friend could vomit, if she needed.
Driving down the hill we saw someone side swipe a Volvo. I pulled over and got out. “Dude.” He reversed into another car, then pulled forward again to scrape the side of someone’s truck. I got back in the car. I drove us to Trevor’s mom’s house. I told them both I had to work early, and drove home. Back then I was trying to be straight edge. The only boy who really liked me, the one wrote me two ambient lo-fi songs, told me that was cool. He warned me not to hit some other kid’s Juul. He told me in rehab, he saw satan and everything was different after that. I said that made sense, but we didn’t talk much after that.
“Do you remember that?”
My roommate says yes. She says did you know that one guy fucked a fourteen year old in the swim shack at that private lake and got caught and found god and he builds houses now? Did you know the principal’s son, the wheelchair bound one, used to hide in the locker room and watch when girls changed and I don’t know, maybe he touched one or something but that’s the reason why his dad got fired?
“Damn,” I said, “No, I didn’t know that.”
I don’t really get how people stay up on gossip, when they aren’t living in the walls of it to listen. I don’t really know if it makes me better or worse not to have known. Probably neither, except that one time, that one guy at the baseball field, that one fourth of July, started saying how he loved that I didn’t ever know he had a daughter. “You’re just so cool for that,”
That kid lives in Utah, I think. I heard in ninth grade he tried heroin one time. Him and the kid who robbed the glass shop. I don’t know why you’d rob a glass shop. I don’t know what a glass shop even is. Just that once that same kid told me during world history that if he wanted to, he could rape me. And I said “Guess it’s good you don’t want to.” And he said “Yeah, I guess so too.”
Kinda like what that white supremacist kid who rode the bus with me said, back when we lived way far out of town. Except that one time, it was storming. Raining really, really hard. And the nice boy, the blonde one, who I shared headphones with sometimes, said “You can’t walk home like this,” and he called his sister and she picked us up and I thought we’d fall in love after that but we didn’t. He moved. Something bad happened, I found out years later, and instead he started bodybuilding in south Florida.
I told my parents that and they were kinda sorta bummed. He was so nice. He was so nice to you. “I think he’s probably still nice.”
I don’t really know, though. My roommate says that kid’s mormon best friend is getting married. His sister is married already, too. My brother dated her. She ate dinner with us once. I remember thinking it was sort of strange.
“A lot of kids found god,” my roommate says. “Makes sense.” I said.
The other half didn’t, except they make resin pyramids and pretend as though they did. “So odd,” I say when she shows me photos of them. “Yeah.”
“They’re all still there, too,”
And I said didn’t they have a whole theory about the electromagnetic field above our town and how the world was gonna end but they’d all save it? She said they don’t believe that anymore. Now they all rock climb.
My brother texts me that a girl from our school became a cop and he saw her in town, he said “you look familiar,” and she said she recognized him ‘cause of me. Normally it’s the other way around.