Hidden Curves Ahead

Many of us have children in FirstLife. For some they are in college and others they are still in diapers. But they do hold us and remind us we exist in the physical as well as digital world.

Our children. No matter how old they become they remain 'our children'. Mine are back from college. This means, quite literally, a mess!

My son has learned how to do laundry. Just put everything in the machine, add detergent and let her rip. Changle...changle...chug......the machine's melancholy moan echoes though my apartment. Wash loads from a towel to the whole caboodle are summarily shaken and stirred.

Kitchen, bedroom and all around is littered with soda bottles, empty non-biodegradable snack food bags (nor is what was in them biodegradable) and half empty cups with tobacco chew saliva washing down the rim and pooling in the cold contents. A universe of liquids that should not combine.

And I wonder, as the dryer starts a horrific choir of rattling buttons, zippers and unknown pocket items, "Will he paint his first apartment this color?"

Is there a color called Vomit?

I empty the dryer and find a black lacy pair of panties entwined around his clothes.......and I imagine CSI doing an episode with the black light in his room.

Yes, the room he lives in between the semester and mandatory summer school looks like a scene cut from the movie 300. How is it possible to believe this is, "all cleaned up"? The only good thing I am sure of is he could never be broken if captured. His reply would be, "What orders?" The truth lost in his cavernous mind of sugared dreams.

The pantry fills with things that say, "Oh, eat me and gain all that weight back in just 7 days." And of course I take a bite and my hips start to expand. A refrigerator with items that don't seem to be perishable even in the digestive tract.

And the hordes of friends come by to drop crumbs and sauce on the carpet as they watch movies that are neither funny nor dramatic but they laugh.

Ah, he's gone to spend the next two days with a friend at the Lake. I begin to think of all those horror movies whose settings are on a lake and realize it's not from the depths of the lake or from the dark of the woods where fear emanates but from my son and his friend entering the cabin and I smile knowing it's neither my cabin nor am I there.