the house is very still. it is early, true, but perhaps he has already left; he likes to head off before sunrise, when he has a long way to go.

the boy’s grandmother died yesterday. she was just short of 93, went into hospital for something to do with her leg, and never made it out again. the boy is driving some six hours south and west to go say goodbye.

except, i don’t think i should call him “the boy” anymore. i write about him less and less because i no longer know how to fit him into my stories; since january, he has been the man sleeping upstairs on the red couch, who’s off to work each morning by 7.30, who comes home and takes his turn making dinner, giving the kid a bath, and reading her bedtime stories if she lets him, who sits out on the balcony with his beer and his cigar before turning out the light.

me? i sit down here and blog. and i don’t feel a thing as i write this (which, in turn, makes me a little bit sad). earlier on, i’d occasionally feel like a nothing piece of shit. but eight months is a long time to get used to something, and the stuff that got said a few weeks ago — that uppercase moment — made it easier to just shut a part of myself off.

by coincidence, he had spent the last couple of days packing a selection of his things into boxes. the plan was that come the school holidays, he’d be down at his house in the country, fixing it up. this is the house he bought a couple of years ago, just like that, in a small brown town with one main street, where the bakery doesn’t even bake its bread daily and ships it in three days a week, these springy loaves wrapped in plastic. during school holidays, the goth kids hang out on the dusty sidewalk, and the main attraction is the largest grape vine in the southern hemisphere, around which a pub has been built.

— ah. a cough from upstairs. he is still here —

this house, in this town, is close to where his grandmother lived, and so he will be able to drop these boxed-up things off along the way, and take another load in october. it is good, in a way, this gradual emptying of feelings and things; instead of a sudden gash, it is slowly trickling down to nothing. (it is also crap, of course.)

the original plan, i guess, was that we would all move to the country and play happy families, and i don’t know… put down that eyebrow! yes, me in the dusty brown! it might have been possible? with a kinder, gentler boy? a less angry boy anyway.

but this is no longer a blame game. the recriminations, and expectations fallen short, the pointing of fingers — literally, sometimes — i don’t think of them so much anymore, though they are always there.

for the next six days, it’ll be just me and the kid. which is ok too, because she is always up for an adventure in good eating, and because we’ve had lots of practice: that summer he took off to go fix up his house, the six weeks he went walkabout in south america, those early days of parenthood when he’d spend friday nights at a friend’s place so he could drink in peace and get some sleep. the bitterness goes right to the core, kids, which is probably why i eat so much damn sugar.

bear with me, normal transmission will continue shortly. there is a picnic i need to write about.