I found it

I found it.  I found exactly the car I want.

It’s a white 07 Malibu LS with less than 50k miles on it. It comes with a spare tire and snow tires and is in practically new off the lot condition. It sounds like a rich kid got it from his parents and hardly used it; which is perfect because it is meant for me. It is $8500, which would be right in my price range.

If I hadn’t loaned you all that money.
And maybe if you would stop smoking, and stop enabling yourself and your daughter, and looked at your life and changed what didn’t work, you wouldn’t have had to ask for it.
Or maybe if you weren’t cursed with a sickness that plagues you in your bed as I write and infects the mail you never check will medical bills, you wouldn’t have had to ask for it.
Perhaps if twenty years ago you avoided hooking up with a radical you would have finished college and you never would have had to ask for it. And there would be no one to ask.
Maybe if your parents had taken better care of you, or if you hadn’t been raped, or if your own mom wasn’t sick, you wouldn’t have the need for love and understanding that you were probably trying to fill.
But all that happened. And you asked for it. And I gave it to you.

And I wish I didn’t have to, though saying that I feel incredibly self absorbed.

But more than that I wish that you weren’t currently in bed with your confused and infatuated ex husband who is taking care of you in your feverish fits of waking hysteria.

And I wish that my sister would come home so that you wouldn’t feel the way that you do, although none of this is her fault. She doesn’t understand.

When you told me if I left you would die, I didn’t leave because I believed it.

I don’t know if you ever told my sister the same thing. I don’t know if she knows how delicate you are. I don’t know if it would make a difference.  I don't know if it would make her come back.

I’m confused what my role is here. I’m not old enough to tell you what’s best for you, or to tell you what to change. You want me to just go live my life. I did that for a while, but I was awakened rudely by the real version of my life, the version with you in it.

I can’t be happy until you are. And so I’m scared that I will always be short of satisfied and screaming in the night at a god I’m convinced is a demon.