Reflection (prompt: a dinosaur scientist, a police officer, stuck)

You call me on the phone, when I’m in the middle of talking with my mom. "I heard you were crying in the middle of the bar the other day, is everything okay?” Your silence is quiet, your line of questioning direct, and sincere. I don’t know what to say, because I have spent the entire day excavating the bones of our relationship, trying to piece together things that were placed incorrectly in the hopes of righting them and blowing off the dust. 

Of course I wasn’t expecting to hear from you, but in this case, it is completely wrong; it’s stuttering answers, trying to put together an argument as to why I would be crying, in a bar, in front of your friend, quietly, and without you. You weren’t supposed to know anything about it, and now that you do, I wonder about how you feel, what words I can say or avoid saying in order to keep you from employing further silence, further criticism of my emotions. 

You get irritated, say I’m not making sense, hang up. I take my mom off of hold, try to hold in the conversation we just had, fail and release it; it cracks out of me like thunder, or to maintain the metaphor, like an ancient bone finally cracks under the weight of the world on top of it. 

Do you take me seriously? As seriously as I take you? Do you lie awake at night and wonder about what would have happened differently, if you had only held in your propensity to be smothering, your desire to talk through things, the way tears fall out of you when you don’t want them, splatter down your face and dirty it without warning, the way I do? 

The other day, as I was driving down the highway, I noticed that a spiderweb had formed, pretty extensively, on the right side view mirror of my car. I wondered about the spider, when I returned to park in front of my house, if it would be able to find the web it had begun, and that had survived rain, the blowing wind on the highway, the rounds of birds on the power lines parallel to my house. Regardless, it didn’t matter, because on my way through a residential neighborhood, a car backed out too quickly and knocked the sideview mirror clean off the car. I considered calling the police, but that was only because I had never been in an accident before, and was not entirely sure the protocol in these situations. Instead, we exchanged insurance information, and I called my mom.