I should have left before the ants arrived

 fiction

How do we change? The answer to that question may be too broad, but I still want to know. What can induce change in how we deal with each other? What does it take? How long does it take? Does it take forever or onto death? Does cognitive science have any gimmicks that might work? Are we all stuck in the same record groove?

Last year, around this time, and I wish it were back then rather than now,  I thought it still didn’t feel like the right time. Now it is too late. I could have, should have, left when the timing was right. Back then, I could have packed my bags and left them in the basement ready to jump out to another space far away from here. Now there is just the one bag right out in the open by the front door. I did not put it there. Elaine did.

It was just two months ago that Elaine once again kept me company in my hospital room. Between chitty chatty talk, did you know and what if conversations, and when you leave, and you watch it will be ok discussions, we played scrabble, gin and waited. More tests and then down time and clock watching, wondering when results would be there. Each time the news would hit with a bang that echoed ,and I couldn’t get the words in my head to go away. It was too late for me to leave her.

Elaine nags, and she thinks I don’t listen. She is pissed at me once again.  She didn’t have time to swallow or even stop chewing her turkey club as she grumbles in my direction. I hear her just fine, always do, and what she has to say often pisses me off. It’s not her screechy voice but what she has to say that  feels like a swarm of gnats around my head on what could have been a sleepy summer morning. (Is present the tense you want in this paragraph?)

I heard the familiar shouting from downstairs. She must have been in the powder room because some of the high notes were muffled, or maybe she was putting on lipstick. “You did it again. You forgot to clean the food out of the kitchen sink. You think it is funny, but I know it is about being hostile, and you know it. If you load the dishwasher then you have to remember to clean the sink, and you never do. I keep telling you that food in the sink collects ants, lots of them. You say you hear me and you never listen. But I can tell you this.  The ants get their party invite and march in and down and all over the place, and when I come back from the hospital and open the back door all of them, every fuckin one of them, will be waiting to greet me, laughing and clapping their antennae. I’m not kidding; you can’t leave food around, no crumbs, no bits of tuna, or Oreo cookies that you bring upstairs into the bedroom figuring I don’t see them hidden under your shirt. I’ll tell you this; it is the ants that can kick me out of the house. You just have to listen and we have to get going. It’s time.”

Change and experience