An old excerpt from my pen and paper journal...(part 1)

I think the days went like this. A__ woke up to the alarm at 7:01, not a minute earlier, not later. Ideally, she would wake at 6:50, but the sight of the number 6 was too much for her so early in the morning. She settled on 7:01.

A quick shower, the attack on her hair in the bathroom that left a loose rug of hair, perceptibly deep, on the floor was followed by a regimented breakfast : one piece of toast with peanut butter, always smoothy, never crunchy, and one glass of milk. When I had two slices of toast, she sneered at me, angered by the wastefulness. Two pieces of toast were too many. We needed to economize.

I slept through it all. She busied herself and I slept, happy to finally hear the click of the front door. I slept soundly, waking later and later and the year progressed.

My M.A. thesis was underway, stored on my hard drive, backed up on several floppies. I carried one copy in my back pack at all times. I had a recent print out. I hadn't looked at the file for days. But, I did use the computer.

My courses had ended in the spring and I looked forward to a summer of finishing my thesis. As the weeks passed, I got out of bed later and later. At first, I woke at 9:00, then 9:30, then 10:00. After a while, I would wake and see 11:35 on my clock radio. I could have slept even longer.

I'd get out a bed, shower, shake my head at the thick matting of hair on the floor. I'd never seen anything like it. And, she blamed some of it on me. I knew my hair was more rigidly attached to my head than that. I suspected that she would be bald in a few years.

After breakfast of two or even three pieces of toast and crunchy peanut butter, I headed for the den and fired up the computer. Soon, the Tetris blocks, the colour of deep almost dirty yellow, fell from the top of the screen. I placed them perfectly in rows, rewarded buy that small computer bleep - a sound that made me feel like an expert - and a slowly increasing score.

Soon, I entered the zone of Tetris perfection. The top twenty scores were all mine. I was so good, I had to start losing when I reached the high score. Otherwise, the counter went back to zero. I remember screaming with joy when I lost, just in time to record my score before the game would have put me back to the beginning.

to be continued...

Read part 2

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