“I tell you what,” she said, clutching her keys. She poured her half-drunk cup of redbush tea into the sink, and swooshed it with a jet of hot tap water.
“Are you going to tell me I’m lucky I don’t have the drama of a family of my own?” I asked.
“No,” said my sister. “Just be thankful... for what you do have.”
She swung a handbag over her shoulder, jangled her keys into a cardigan pocket and swept out of the front door, on her way to deal with the latest family drama. Silence flooded back as the door clicked shut.
The latest family drama. I have them, they’re just different. And they all involve me, and typically, only me. Like the day I left my towel in the gym. Or the time that ripping the pesky Midweek Chronicle out of the letterbox almost took my hand off. Or perhaps today, when I tried to text someone to tell them that my kitchen is too small, and autocorrect made me send the message: ‘My kitchen is Tony.’
Small dramas compared to the things my sister has to deal with as she drives heroically through the night - but dramas nonetheless.
A colleague of mine had a long chat with me today about how to talk to people so that they’ll be friends with him. I felt his frustration, but I tried my best to help him see how to respond to the situation, and deftly use small talk to his advantage. It struck me halfway through how odd a thing it was that he had asked me that - me, sitting alone in the café, doodling away like Professor Antisocial.
Then later, with someone else, I found myself feeling the pain they’d gone through as they told me about something that had happened years ago. The ripples were still cascading into the present, and clearly it still affects everything, like an upstream toxic leak.
These aren’t my dramas, but I do feel them. I won’t take them, but neither could I sit across a table, shrug my shoulders and change the subject.
My sister is right about one thing: I can drive home in peace, and not have to travel for miles to sort out someone else’s problems. I live in perpetual quiet, where the clock ticks, the radiator creaks, and next door’s TV is muffled by the wall.
And I’m rather grateful that I can talk to myself in the middle of the night as I pour fresh milk into a cold glass, and know that no-one at all is within earshot.
Well, apart from Tony of course.
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