Resurrection of the Dead

Posted on June 11, 2003 in Book of Days Frustration Humiliation Rage & Annoyance Silicon Valley

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about mistaken identity.

What I wrote today is a little flat. It bears more development, perhaps expansion into something else. I see many windows, places where I can develop my thoughts more. It ends abruptly. It’s worth investigating in my notebooks.

A and T inadvertently did the cruelest thing I think a person can do to a person without cutting or shooting them. They saw me as another person, T’s dead brother who’d killed himself I don’t know how many years before.

I didn’t catch on to this at first: they were always glad to see me, insisted that I hold their daughter, and even took pictures of us together. I had no idea that I represented a resurrection of the dead until one day or another when one of them let it slip. I blinked my eyes and thought “How curious!” I didn’t run away, which might have been my mistake.

Things escalated a few cups of tea at a time. Nearly every weekend, they wanted to be with us. I thought it might be because we were likeable and had finally found our people. Then T began to push advice at me, criticize my side of the marriage, make me feel bad about my depressions, etc. I discovered later that she’d been a social worker and that she’d been fired for argumentativeness and too much meddling in the lives of her clients. But she wasn’t playing social worker with me, she was playing angry sister. How could I kill myself was the overwhelming question and the thing that made it unfair was that I not did have it in mind (not by knives or pills or guns, at least). Though I was doing nothing but being myself, she saw her dead brother in what I said, the clothes I wore, the games I liked to play, and the way I bounced the baby. She put pressure on me to breed even though I was sick and still trying to recover from all the years of undiagnosed depression. She said weird things, jumped to conclusions that baffled me.

[And it ends here, to be pursued in notebooks until something forms from the bleeding mass.]

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: “Afterward I thought about….”