An Assortment of Not-Rights

The weather was 18 degrees and the floor felt so chill to my face that it almost burned; my ears pressed against the wood that hummed from the washing machine tumbling in the basement. It was a muffled, encapsulating hum that overpowered the sounds that atmosphered the other ear.

Dian, Rishi, and Cass had been arguing for exactly 26 days now. I don’t know why they would choose now when they could have chosen any month in the last decade to impose the silent treatment, and to be honest, this is completely unprecedented and in the moment I felt my entire life sinking in the barren soil of melancholy from the actions of others. And it didn’t help that all the leaves had fallen and it’s that particular time of year where it doesn’t rain or snow or thunder or drip sunlight. Just awfully barren and cloudy – and in the suburbs, even more unremarkable and tortuous. 

I asked Rishi once, when my mother and I went to visit my Grandma who was living at his house for a few months- my mother was far too busy to take time for my Grandma, but all this seemed comedic given that our Grandma was far more athletic and full of life than anyone else in our family. Rishi and I had created a classification bracket for grandparents when we were little: are they a sitting grandparent, or a standing grandparent? And our Grandma was definitely a standing one. 

In the middle of lunch at his house, I had asked:
“Cass refuses to come by when you’re around. Did something happen?” Before he could respond, our Grandma chimed in, with absolutely no context of anything at all.
“Rishi, you can never keep a friend, really. Always so quiet and always staring into the distance, not listening. Tell me one friend you didn’t make angry-” 

And that really upset Rishi. He glared at me before taking his plate up to his room, and I was left bitter. 

Rishi, my cousin, was a sloppy tall boy and he was always irritable and always dreaming. Sometimes I feel me and him would be the same. He acts in the ways I wish I could but stop  myself before I do. I didn’t ask any questions after the incident. Cass didn’t seem to want to talk about it and started to get teary eyes whenever I even went in that direction, and Dian would just change the topic all together. Aileen and I assumed, at first, that this was all highly dramatized- Cass was always so sensitive and Rishi was easy to anger- but we weren’t too sure if they were overreacting.