How I Love Myself

This is not about masturbation.

“When your cats come to my house, they think they’re at a stranger’s house,” My sister Trish tells me from her seat on my couch. Our places share a wall and have for four years.

“They do?” I consider what my cats are doing at her house that this statement might be based on. I can’t come up with anything.

“Yeah they don’t know it’s me.”

I look at my sister whose face and hands are as frequent to my cats as my own and say, “Hm.”

I could ask her what makes her think this is true, but I choose not to open up the conversation. I just accept it. They’re all participating in a role-playing game of ‘The Strangers Next Door’ and then conducting business as usual at home. I used to question her more about what data she has to support her theories, but lately I’ve found that accepting her version of reality makes life better. She is afflicted with a perma-smile, so why not have some of what she’s having.

Trish sucked her finger until she was nine years old and played Barbies until she was ten. She used her wet finger against my older sister and me,  extended her glistening raisin and slowly bobbed it in our direction, called it “the magic touch.”

The day in eighth grade when I first dusted eyeshadow on my lids, she observed it and accused, “You’ve changed.”

Now she puts makeup on bride’s faces for a living. Imagine a groom saying it to his bride as she approaches the altar with an expertly applied face on her face.

“You’ve changed,” and he storms off.

Both of my sisters are married. Jess even married twice. She’s the kind of person you want to wife. On the way home from a family dinner she told me she has full notebooks all over her house. Her daughter’s full of cartoons and stories. Jess’s full of budgets and math. I have notebooks full of thoughts and feelings. I’m scared to look at my bank balance, and she visits the thing every week. She writes straight into the belly of the bills beast. She opens her mail.

I want to tell the teenagers she talks math to in a classroom how lucky they are to have such a teacher.  She and her husband turned their salaries into a million dollar home. I just checked Zillow to make sure. I always think about that when people say, “Teachers don’t get paid enough.”

When I think of my sisters, which for me, feel like two posts my parents wrapped in a bow that I can swing from, I feel sorry for my daughter that I didn’t give her that kind of friend. When I tell her this, she’s incredulous.

“Why? I have your sisters too.”

My daughter, Karli and her cat, Azula in 2020 when all the daughters shaved their heads

I’m walking down the street on a wet day on the way to shop at thrift stores and eat soup. I carry a hot breve latte and take warm little sips that coat my mouth like butter. I had a fine conversation with my ex this morning. One of those ones that makes you think, “Yeah we can do this. We can really be friends.”

He has read all the things I’ve written, and he’s not killing me. He says he’s talked about it with his therapist.

I catch my reflection in a store window—a rainbow against the gray clouds and wet sidewalk with my bright red lipstick and primary color-blocked sweater woven of vivid squares. It’s the kind of look that has women smiling and telling me I’m cute as they pass me.

I think about my ex’s therapist.

What if she finds my website and reads what I wrote? I bet she would wish she had me as a patient instead of him.