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And full disclosure, when I looked around at my house, at the nice clothes on my back and the brand-new car parked in the driveway that belonged to me, I was, at the very least, grateful for it.
That isn’t to say there wasn’t a downside to it, though. Like not having a mother, for one.Not really.She was gone so often it didn’t count for much of anything, but even when she was here, she was more like a friend to me, or an older sister. No discussion was off the table for us. She’d tell me every dirty detail of her most recent conquests and craziest escapades, and then she’d take me shopping, buy me the fanciest dinner in town, fill my pockets with cash, and be off again.
So it’s only obvious to say it was lonely sometimes, too.
And I worried about her. A lot. Probably more than she ever worried about me. Because somehow, she’d gotten lucky enough to have a daughter that lived by a set of her own rules, but who cared enough about her future to play inside the lines that mattered.
Because for some of us, we looked at our parents and thought,I want to grow up to be just like them.But for the rest of us, we looked at our parents and demanded of ourselves to be anything but.
Obviously, I fell into the second group.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mother. She was fun, and fearless, and unapologetic. But she was lonely, too, I think. In a different way. The down to your soul kind of way.
She hid it well, though. So well, in fact, that I never really saw it. It was just a feeling I got sometimes—that she was hiding things, even from herself. So many things that she couldn’t possibly recognize what most of them were anymore, all hidden behind shopping bags, expensive cars, and a loud personality.
It was why I was the way that I was. Open. Honest. (When I wanted to be.) Not many shits given. I liked to grab life by the balls and whisper in its ear the things I wanted—expected, really—and watch them unfold.
On the flip side, I also recognized that she was the reason I tended to hold other things in. Why I could sometimes be reserved, too; why I held a skewed view of love and vulnerability.
I’d grown up pretty young, and I was forced to see life and the world for what it was early on, too, through the eyes of my mother. I wasn’t mad at her for it, because the world could be an ugly place, and now I was better equipped for it.
But somewhere along the way my view mashed with hers, settled into my own, and looked something like this: The world worked in your favor if you held what you wanted in view and refused to look any other way. Love,true love,was nearly impossible to come by, and it would ruin you in the process, so why even bother? And life… life was short. So we might as well be true to ourselves and our desires and get on with it.
(It wasn’t the prettiest of belief systems, I knew, but it worked for me.)
To round it all out with a more positive twist, though, my mother was also the reason I became obsessed with movies. I loved them—the good, the bad, the ugly, the scary, old and new, I loved them all. My first and most frequent babysitter.
Anything to do with movies, and I was there. One-hundred percent. Which is how I ended up with a job at the movie theater—where I was now, currently wasting away my seven-hour shift. Free tickets, popcorn, and screening movies the night before they came out, and I was pretty much living the dream. Sort of. Like, the dream, minus angry customers, the sweeping up of other people’s messes, and cleaning the never-ending grease pit of the popcorn machine. But all that aside:the dream.
Something I hadn’t told a soul? I wanted to be a screenwriter someday; Iplannedto be a screenwriter someday. The problem was, I didn’t know shit about screenwriting. But that’s what college was for, right? I’d figure it out then.
“Incoming.”
“Huh?” I responded, having completely lost sense of all reality. I was pulled out of my head and found Jax’s face in my periphery. I turned toward him. “What?”
“I said ‘incoming.’” He smiled. “Evening rush.”
I looked up at the lobby as it started to fill with people. “Damn.”
He laughed. “Quit daydreaming and make some popcorn.”
“No.” I threw him a nice hand gesture and did what he asked despite my refusal since, technically, he was my supervisor. But he also happened to be one of my closest friends. Who also… happened to be Neil’s older cousin. Barely. Through marriage, or something like that. But that was a story for another time.
Opening the kernel drawer, I grabbed the scooper, filled it up, topped it with a spoonful of popcorn salt, and tossed it into the popper, closing the lid and pressing the button on the oil dispenser. And done.
I took my place in front of my register and witnessed the next two hours fly by. That was the fun in working at the movie theater. When a rush came through, two hours felt like two minutes. You just got swept up in the storm and came out on the other side in a land of soda-sticky countertops, trash-filled bins, and popcorneverywhere. But, outside of the rush, two minutes also felt like two hours. So it evened itself back out somehow.
We got to work on cleaning up our concession stand disaster.
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Jax said, sweeping up a mound of popcorn as I started wiping down counters. “The customer who comes in here and goes, ‘Yeah, I’ll take a large popcorn, butter on the bottom, butter in the middle, extra butter on top, nachos, ice cream, three of every candy in this case, and aDietCoke, please.’” He scoffed. “Diet?Diet? What is the point?!Just go with the regular Coke, man. You already jogged three miles into junk food town, just take the last step, dude. It’s like driving to an amusement park, buying your tickets, and then standing outside the gates and watching the rides like, ‘nah, I’m cool right here.’”
“Some people just like Diet Coke, Jax,” I deadpanned. I didn’t let him see that I was biting back my laughter.
“No, they don’t.” He shook his head, eyes wide. “NobodylikesDiet Coke. Unless they’re Satan’s spawn and enjoy a bit of light suffering.”
I laughed outright this time. “You’ve lost it.”
“Officially,” Hailey threw in. Yet another employee who was working in concessions tonight. (She was alright.)