Distractions

It’s hard, harder than I thought it would be. And I forgot how this is so tiring, not just being depressed, but the stoically trying to keep things moving forward, to not let the pain in my life spill over into everyone else’s.

I didn’t start crying until I wasn’t looking at a screen. I was mowing the lawn, riding the mower westward from the back of the yard towards the driveway. Mowing, for some reason, has always been a time to ruminate and reflect. And as soon as I wasn’t distracted by a screen, the pain surfaced and the tears started.

I’ve been masterfully distracting myself with Diablo Immortal. A fully featured MMO on my tablet and my phone. Quite possibly the best endgame design I’ve seen. I played it non-stop through June, and only took a break to take a deep dive into Minecraft for a week.

The boys got a book on building large scale dragon sculptures and it was decided that we had to build the Komodo dragon. The instructions were a two page spread in this book, consisting of about six pictures with accompanying boxes of vague text showing the build in different stages. Now, we’re doing this on our Realms world, which is survival, so first we had to go clear out a large spot near the abandoned village, and then we had to mine a lot of stone. A lot of stone.

I really got into the build. I studied the pictures, made copies of them and marked them up, trying to figure out how many blocks over, how many blocks up. There were no actual numbers given in the instructions, just, “build two legs like this,” but the text didn’t quite match the pictures. The text said start from the back and work forward, while the pictures showed a build that started in the front and worked backward. As the dragon got bigger and bigger I had to make dirt scaffolding to reach different areas. I kept falling off and hurting myself until my younger kid showed me that if you crouch while you’re on a ledge, you won’t fall off.

It took me about two days to build the dragon. It totally took my mind off the fact that my father was coming to visit over the Fourth. Once the dragon was built, I threw myself into a road building project, clearing a path from our main base to the new village I had found in the north. Along the way, I stopped and built a new house over the mine shaft that leads down to the wild Nether portal we found, the one we always return through, no matter which portal we use to enter the Nether.

The new house used a new design, something I’d seen on Reddit a little earlier, where the first floor walls were recessed from the supports, which gave the outside more definition. My building designs mostly use timber supports and crossbeams with stone walls, built in a modular pattern. This house ended up being three stories, with a nice wrap around view on the third floor that allows you to watch the sun as it sets over the bay.

But once the road and the house were built, my interest in Minecraft started to wane. The boys had moved on to other games. I traded with the villagers in the northern village, but then didn’t really have a goal to work towards, and so drifted back to Diablo.

Memory is a funny thing, and it’s strange where it will lead you. I’ve always mowed the lawn. It was my job when I was a kid. I don’t know how old I was when they started having me do it, maybe sixth grade, I think. We were still in my childhood house. They got an electric mower so I wouldn’t have to play with an engine, though later we got a gas powered one. When we lived in Iowa City, I mowed the lawn. And now here.

The push mower was already pretty contemplative, but last summer the widow next door sold me her husband’s riding mower as part of her cleaning out their old things, getting ready to move to a smaller place. I had been resistant to getting a rider because our yard has a lot of trees and landscaping, but she offered me a fantastic deal and I took it. So now I have my little acre of land, and my little tractor to go with it.

I started crying because I need to call my mom, talk to my mom, and as I’m riding the mower, I can just feel the sadness rising up within me. I don’t know what to do with emotions, they’re always too much, and the painful ones, what do you do, other than cry, feel sad, feel torn in two. I’m losing my mother. She may already be gone, I don’t know, like I said, I have to call her, but the last time I talked to her, she sounded different. I know now that she was medicated, anti-psychotics prescribed against incidents in the night, but at the time, it just seemed to be a sign that things were slipping further.

We’re down to just phone calls, she and I. She can’t email anymore. She has a little flip phone. It has the same phone number that we had when I was a kid. She doesn’t use voicemail. She often forgets to turn her phone on. But at least I’m not blocked any more. At least when I do try to call her, it rings, and rings and rings until it finally tells me that the customer I am trying to reach is not available.

My mother has always been a private person. Something that I find myself doing since I started crying on the lawn mower is writing her eulogy in my head. I feel bad that I don’t know her better, but she kept people at arm’s length. I know she hated funerals, a humorous aside that I plan to drop at the service. And she would reply that I know about her all that I need to know, that I know her, I lived with her, was in a family with her, was raised by her, and these are all true, and that person is still there on the other end of the phone, talking and responding in familiar ways, but the conversations have become increasingly one-sided. My phone skills are already horrible. Having to drive the conversation by talking about my self, my life, my wife and kids, my job, house and cats is so hard when what I really want to talk about is her, she’s the whole reason I’m calling, but any question about her, about her life, is deflected, bounced back as a null signal, everything’s fine, she’s good, nothing’s going on.

And so I’m sad. And I’m an autistic with alexithymia, which means that I don’t know how to do sad. My emotional regulation is stunted and confused. So I distract myself with games, with whatever is on this screen in my hand. And when I’m finally not looking at the screen, when I’m riding on the mower on a beautiful summer day beneath green trees and blue sky, the sadness rises up unbidden and unstoppable. I need to call my mom.