Harper's Rules 1 & 2

Chapter 14: Harper

For some reason, when I drove around UCLA's campus on the final stretch of my and Dad's seven-hour drive from home in Santa Cruz, the topic of relationships popped into my head. The view out my window of students that unloaded their cars and equally proud but bittersweet sad Mom and Dad physical exchanges like hugs, shoulder squeezes, and back pats twisted a sense of discomfort into my stomach. My eyes took in the sight of obvious boyfriends and girlfriends that also unpacked together.

Couldn't possibly have anything to do with how I just had a roadside quickie with a cop who obviously wanted to, at the minimum, do that again.

And before any non-love story enthusiasts flipped into Judgey-McJudger mode on my ass, I was not a slut or a whore and, my roadside assistance from Officer Davis aside, a solicitor. I was just a healthy, young girl with an insanely high sex drive and a weakness for making sure it was satisfied.

No chance for a relationship with the poor sap. But I bet he'll never view the MIRANDA rights the same again.

Relationships never crossed my brain and once my radio flipped onto a love song that crooned out the musical equivalent of auditory sandpaper, the extended amount of mental solitude time this drive traveled me through memory shitlane inside my own headspace again. My unusually reflective moment could have also possibly been inspired by how 99.9999999999 percent of all songs I'd heard on the radio dealt with love - finding love, obsessing about love, dying love, losing love, etc. - until my ears bled.

Those songs must've percolated into my brain like stale coffee.

I learned a long time ago that relationships, as evidenced by my failed attempts with Ryan and whatever the fuck Jake was or wasn't, really weren't for me. Putting aside any psycho-babble, I fully acknowledged that I was shit with feelings from how Mom walked out on us. I wasn't angry at her for that, I couldn't blame her. Dad's attorney position left him in the office for long hours and some nights he even slept at the office.

Shocked was an understatement when Dad actually took a few days off work, drove down here, and made sure "I got to" UCLA like I wasn't almost twenty-two years old. I was beyond grateful for his action. While I knew I handled myself in any situation, since this was the first time I'd lived anywhere but with him, the unfamiliarity and solitude parts still made me a little nervous.

A million dollars says Dad's going to throw a party once he's back home though.

What I resented towards my mother was her choice to be a stay at home mom and the shitty job she did at it. She had nothing, no hobbies, no interests, no self worth, and I certainly wasn't the gifted child that deserved constant attention as I developed into the next freaking Einstein. Her world evolved around Dad, my basic care, cooking, and cleaning the house.

I had no idea why they'd even got married by the brief, cold exchanges I remembered but Mom had the right idea when she left. She could've done it a bit more discreetly, but then that wouldn't have been Mom.

Even now, despite how I associated feelings with attachment and attachment with disappointment, I admired how she left. She built up an affair with a man named Rhett over two years. Dad was never home and had no clue. I wasn't the most observant seven year old but Mom and David never hid their affection around me.

In hindsight, I fully grasped how fucked up a situation was where a mother literally fucked a man who wasn't her child's father while her elementary school daughter was in the next room over. I'd heard everything and wished there was a volume high enough on the television that drowned out the sounds of loud moans and slapped skin against skin.

Based on Mom's sloppiness, although eventually I wouldn't have kept her affair secret, she wanted to get caught. In the end, she lined up her financial and logistical ducks in a row, confronted Dad, basically told me nothing personal, took her shit, and left. She still sent cards for my birthday and Christmas and I burned each and every one of them without a single envelope opened. This gesture was kind of an odd ritual of detachment, more therapeutic than if I'd laid on a two-hundred dollar an hour sofa and confessed, "I miss my Mommy."