'Where'd it go?'

'Mama! MAMA!'

'Yes, sweetie...'

'I have to tell you something...about your butt. It is getting smaller. Do you think it is because you are so sad?' He pats my bottom. I miss your big butt.'

It's a strange thing to miss but I do miss my derrière. I miss the extra padding, I miss the curve of it. I mean, it's still there but it isn't the same. 

In one of my bookclubs, we are reading _Polysecure_, by Jessica Fern.  It's an interesting time to be reading about attachment patterns, how attachment links to feeling secure in relationships - not just romantic or sexual. It's an interesting time, because the book is forcing me to examine hyper-self reliance, one of my greatest attributes but also most intense weaknesses. To love and live in a state of acceleration and perpetual braking? That is intense, the layered deconstruction of self with a view being more with others. 

It's also weird to think what I was doing mid-morning EST twenty years ago, walking into the house from breakfast and a trip to the DMV with my mother.  We were chatting as we walked through the front door. Caught sight of the news; the first aircraft had crashed into the 1st of the twin towers. It's searingly, the mundanity of the morning against such ravenous confused hate. I still can't fully wrap my emotional mind around it, despite the abbreviated and haphazard training to intellectually examine such acts, from a remote distance, on a screen. 

In 2004-2005, I shared a with a woman who was on her first day of annual leave, driving south. She lost 73 workmates, many she was good friends with, not just water cooler acquaintances. When the bombings in London happened, I watched her cave in on herself. All I could was reach for her hand when she pulled her duvet over her head, sobbing silently. I sat on the floor of her room, reading to her, holding her hand, sometimes for hours. It was all I had to give. 

On Thursday, my father transferred to the skilled nursing ward at the Dayton VA, with a goal of gaining 5lbs so he can do is next round of chemo. He weighs 109lbs now, his skin waxy and tight over his bones.  He barely eats, though he tries, doesn't work with the physical therapy team, and ultimately it will be the geratic anorexia that kills him, the decreasing space for his aneurysm to exist making that 6.2 centimetres mass seem so much larger. 

He isn't allowed visitors without proper arrangment because they have live Covid cases on the ward.  He's pulled the duvet over his head but I can't sit by his bedside. The only comfort I can give is remote, representing and honouring who I am, the places and people I come from, which I will do tomorrow when I head up to my 3rd hometown of Buckatunna.  Strange days. Strange ways. Strange thoughts, have finished, these days.

But yeah, I really do miss my diminishing ass.