Katie was always my anti-hero.

Katie was always my anti-hero. My protagonist, as I was the antagonist. She would harass me, I her, and all around would know and feel this. She pinched, I choked. She slapped, I held. I love her. She is the reason for so much of my life to be happiness.

Mom was always the anchor. Katie and I sailors, the House a ship, school a land we ferried to and from, and Mom was our anchor. We would come home from school, go our separate ways (Katie off to wherever she wanted, usually a friend’s, while I stayed and talked with Tina, rather often, or went to the computer.), we would wait for Mom, and have dinner, watch TV, and go to sleep. Mom obtained for us a life we would not have seen had she not given to us what she did: Knowledge, foresight, responsibility, morals, all of these were left to stay, boiling on our minds, only to sink in later and to stick to the bottom of our awareness. She knew. Somehow, she knew we would be upstanding citizens. Yes, potheads, artists, designers, writers. She knew. She gave those to us, not through addition, but through augmentation. She saw us acquire as we did, and handed us an open hand with enough insight to allow us to roam, freely, upon the plain.. to fill the land with thought, with buildings, trees, plants, companions. She knew. Gone, now, is who I was: The stubborn child, being hauled away, shouting, “I WILL SUE YOU!” to the daycare personnel; the obnoxious beast, whose only means of fun was harping on others; the anxious, often excitable and, yet, reluctant child, whose temper flared as would a mercury thermometer on an open flame; the shy, the terribly shy. I am still those, yet I am traveled. I am carried, onward, as though a step away and a step toward those, and myself. Mom knows a discussion about her would eventually lead to goings-on in regards to myself. She allows me to be selfish, to be self-centered, self-aware, self-unconscious. She is as an addition now, an augmentation of thought, a conscience whose identity is fully known, recognized, yet understood as being completely free of any bonds of limits placed; she may be emotional, running her eyes as her thoughts, leaking over her hands, or she may be flared, raised, intolerant of those who do not understand as she does, yet she loves them so. She is Mary, Mother, Guidance of Self from Tormented/Anger/Unruly toward Seclusion/Personal/Disciplined in bulldog’s way.. not outright, but fully delved to what need be done/what we need to have done. She deserves more.
And will have so.