betternow

🔊 Listen – Intro🔊 Listen – Main Reading🎵 Soundtrack to this piece I’m in a post-caring state, when it comes to my mum. I don’t have much more to say about it. Although, I did feel that old anger bubbling back up again, when I was talking things through with my Granny and sister, sending…

It’s easy to see emotional manipulation as clever — or, more exactly, to see it as requiring some high degree of intelligence.  I don’t think so. It’s obvious when you know enough about it. Manipulative people are all the same, they follow the same set of rules, and once you know one, you know another. …

A pivotal milestone occurred today. My mum hasn’t reached out to me after I reached out to her ex-partner, to offer my support, and indirectly accuse my mother of being abusive. I have heard nothing from her. Today, I realised how weird that is. That’s not normal behaviour, to be part of something like that…

Among the entries of the main journal, “another”, every so often there’s a snapshot of normal life, seen happening to other people. At 1900 (7), KJ, my younger brother by a year (making him 16), comes on the computer to chat, read up stuff about WWE, and play various games. He comes off anywhere between…

I analysed some of my own writing in another side journal, which features a poem that’s a lot more direct than the fragments of boy. In its analysis, it incidentally gives a very straightforward account of what my feelings were at the time, albeit an incomplete one: /talkingclock/cushion/ edit: I just remembered how I would…

I mentioned obtuse side journals. The most illuminating is the earliest incarnation of “boy”. Later it became more straightforward, but boy’s first entries contained the most emotionally dense words I have ever written. They’re also the most honest, the closest possible approximations to my raw feelings. It looks like I deleted the original posts, but…

I didn’t think it would be this hard, but the more I think on it, the more this starts to feel like an opus. The task: Write about how my mum was. I’ve started this project before, in another side-journal, albeit with a different motivation. My prior intent was to catalogue a few lingering fragments…