Thursday - Email from the Abyss
Mar. 30th, 2006 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermoreToday on my drive into work, I was thinking about an email in my inbox that I can't make up my mind whether to answer or not. It is from Patty's boyfriend, Bryan.
I wouldn't mind keeping in touch with Bryan. I don't miss Patty, but I do miss him. When Patty called me her sister, everyone knew that she just meant I was a good friend. When Bryan said it, they believed him because we look very much alike, at least as much as I can look like a 250 pound tattooed biker wannabe. I would email him if I trusted Patty not to read his messages, but Bryan and Patty both have trust issues and they read each other's email, letters and diaries looking for proof that the other one is up to no good. Because so much of their relationship is based on a mutual love of conflict, they are rarely disappointed.
Bryan is the father of Patty's 7-year-old daughter and her oldest son calls him Dad, even though the boy's real father is some guy named Roger that he has only seen a couple of times in his 11 years of life. Even when Bry and Patty aren't talking (which is often), he still keeps contact with the kids. Like Patty, he is seriously damaged goods. He has periods where he can hold a job and seem settled, only to go off the deep end into a period of self-destructiveness and psychosis. Still, he's fun when he's sane. In many ways he's far more functional than Patty is, even when he's not sane.
If anyone has the right to be a little screwed up, I guess it's Bryan. I think most people have a defining moment in their childhood that determines the course their life will take. Mine happened when I was 15, when my mother died of cancer. Bryan's defining moment happened when he was 4, the day that his father killed his mother and then himself.
Bry told he remembers that his mother had made up her mind to leave his father. She had spent all morning packing her bags and was loading them into the car when his father came home and confronted her. Bryan said he was standing in the front yard watching them argue. The car was between him and where they stood, so he didn't see his father pull out a handgun. He only heard a "pop" and saw his mother crumple to the ground. His father then walked into the house and turned the gun on himself. Bryan doesn't remember hearing that shot, only that someone grabbed him and whisked him away from the carnage.
"They told me I was in a neighbors' house when it happened," he told me once, "that there's no way I could have seen it, but I remember it. I was there. I don't care what they say."
Maybe they lied to him to try to make him forget what he had seen, or maybe the memory is false and his mind created it after hearing the facts. What matters is that the memory is real to him, and even if he didn't see his mother's murder the image of it is imprinted on his psyche as clear as if he did.
It was only the beginning of his decline. He had no relatives willing to take him in, so he became a ward of the state of Texas and went into foster care. His father may have loaded him down with psychological baggage, but the foster care system took that baggage and filled it with bricks. He told me he left foster care when he was 16, when the Texas Youth Commission became his legal guardian after he became a juvenile offender for shooting his foster father in the leg.
"I wasn't trying to kill him," he told me with a shrug, "I just wanted him to stop beating me."
He got out of the Juvenile System when he turned 18. He and his last foster father still talk, he tells me. They get along fine now. I guess the bullet drove the message home.
I'm tempted to email Bryan, but I'm afraid of opening a door that Patty could use to crawl back into my life. I'm fairly certain that he would be willing to be friends with me without Patty, since plenty of his friends can't stand her (something she has often complained to me about). But since I started out as Patty's friend, this creates a potential problem. At times when they were broken up in the past they actually argued over who got custody of my friendship, and it was decided that Patty did, based on the fact that she had known me longer.
I think, though, that I'm old enough to decide for myself gets custody of me. I might just email Bryan, or I might not. I have to think about it some more.
I wouldn't mind keeping in touch with Bryan. I don't miss Patty, but I do miss him. When Patty called me her sister, everyone knew that she just meant I was a good friend. When Bryan said it, they believed him because we look very much alike, at least as much as I can look like a 250 pound tattooed biker wannabe. I would email him if I trusted Patty not to read his messages, but Bryan and Patty both have trust issues and they read each other's email, letters and diaries looking for proof that the other one is up to no good. Because so much of their relationship is based on a mutual love of conflict, they are rarely disappointed.
Bryan is the father of Patty's 7-year-old daughter and her oldest son calls him Dad, even though the boy's real father is some guy named Roger that he has only seen a couple of times in his 11 years of life. Even when Bry and Patty aren't talking (which is often), he still keeps contact with the kids. Like Patty, he is seriously damaged goods. He has periods where he can hold a job and seem settled, only to go off the deep end into a period of self-destructiveness and psychosis. Still, he's fun when he's sane. In many ways he's far more functional than Patty is, even when he's not sane.
If anyone has the right to be a little screwed up, I guess it's Bryan. I think most people have a defining moment in their childhood that determines the course their life will take. Mine happened when I was 15, when my mother died of cancer. Bryan's defining moment happened when he was 4, the day that his father killed his mother and then himself.
Bry told he remembers that his mother had made up her mind to leave his father. She had spent all morning packing her bags and was loading them into the car when his father came home and confronted her. Bryan said he was standing in the front yard watching them argue. The car was between him and where they stood, so he didn't see his father pull out a handgun. He only heard a "pop" and saw his mother crumple to the ground. His father then walked into the house and turned the gun on himself. Bryan doesn't remember hearing that shot, only that someone grabbed him and whisked him away from the carnage.
"They told me I was in a neighbors' house when it happened," he told me once, "that there's no way I could have seen it, but I remember it. I was there. I don't care what they say."
Maybe they lied to him to try to make him forget what he had seen, or maybe the memory is false and his mind created it after hearing the facts. What matters is that the memory is real to him, and even if he didn't see his mother's murder the image of it is imprinted on his psyche as clear as if he did.
It was only the beginning of his decline. He had no relatives willing to take him in, so he became a ward of the state of Texas and went into foster care. His father may have loaded him down with psychological baggage, but the foster care system took that baggage and filled it with bricks. He told me he left foster care when he was 16, when the Texas Youth Commission became his legal guardian after he became a juvenile offender for shooting his foster father in the leg.
"I wasn't trying to kill him," he told me with a shrug, "I just wanted him to stop beating me."
He got out of the Juvenile System when he turned 18. He and his last foster father still talk, he tells me. They get along fine now. I guess the bullet drove the message home.
I'm tempted to email Bryan, but I'm afraid of opening a door that Patty could use to crawl back into my life. I'm fairly certain that he would be willing to be friends with me without Patty, since plenty of his friends can't stand her (something she has often complained to me about). But since I started out as Patty's friend, this creates a potential problem. At times when they were broken up in the past they actually argued over who got custody of my friendship, and it was decided that Patty did, based on the fact that she had known me longer.
I think, though, that I'm old enough to decide for myself gets custody of me. I might just email Bryan, or I might not. I have to think about it some more.
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 09:35 pm (UTC)Even though you are quite capable of being your own person, and having a friendly relationship with anyone you like. Figuring out how to let him in, and keep her out is going to be a challenge. You might consider "bumping into him" at a watering hole or something, rather than risking the email.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-31 09:41 pm (UTC)Hope you have a great weekend!
no subject
Date: 2006-03-31 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 11:17 pm (UTC)Bryan sounds like someone I'd get along with fabulously. ;D
no subject
Date: 2006-03-31 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-31 12:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-31 04:59 pm (UTC)I filed the email away. It's not worth the drama. I'm just feeling bittersweet about it all.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-31 05:03 pm (UTC)You may decide to write him back at a later time, too.