Live from the flipside

I’m coming to you loud and clear from a new macbook — commodity fetishism — at my mother and Michael’s house in Evanston. It’s the last day of my gap year: I have orientation tomorrow, and class starts the next week. My mother, according to Michael, has early onset dementia. I think this is bullshit.

When I was a child, I took swim lessons. This was in 2001 or so. We still lived in Switzerland, my father, mother, and me. They were still married. My mother was going through her first round of breast cancer. The treatment was a lumpectomy and radiation. After a round of radiation, she fell asleep waiting to pick me up from a swimming lesson.

I was wearing a blue brief-style swim suit. I got out of the pool wet and cold and walked to the locker room. I didn’t know where my mother was (this is a reconstruction from memory) and didn’t have anything to change into. I think I got a towel from the pool; I remember, vaguely, there being one, but that might have been from another lesson, before or after.

After time (and how long was it? Probably half an hour, I’d guess. But what’s time to a four year old?) I began to have to go to the bathroom. I defecated in my shorts. My mother arrived to pick me up from the lesson, late because she had fallen asleep after radiation (my father was working somewhere) and I had shit myself.